on my Manifesto for Small Business Growth and Productivity is this:

Design your business, or it will be designed for you.

In the very early stages of your business you hand-craft everything – fumbling and stumbling and feeling your way to a customer experience that delights and an infrastructure around that that works. Mainly because in those early stages you’re doing it all.

But if you want to scale further without killing either yourself of the things that make your business special, then as soon as you have the customer experience worked out (and you’ll know because people will start recommending you), you need to stop fumbling and feeling and start designing.

Ask yourself:

How can I make it super easy for customers to do what they need to do?

How can I make it super easy for them to tell their friends? To share the love? To tell you when there is more you could offer them?

How can I make it super easy for a team member to over-deliver on our Promise? To share our Promise? To tell me what works well and what doesn’t? To share their ideas for improving? To do the improvements?

How can I make it super easy for me and my team to find out everything we need to know about how well our business is going, without having to interfere in the important work of sharing and keeping the Promise?

The only way to do all these things is by design. That means working out how you want it to work before you get anyone or anything else to do it for you. Otherwise that other person or piece of software or AI bot will do it their way, not yours.

And then it’s no longer your business.

You can do this bit by bit of course.

You can use off-the-shelf software, of course.

Just make sure it’s truly supporting your way of doing things, rather than forcing you to change. Or use it to see what’s possible and then throw it away before building your own version. Bespoke is much cheaper than you think, and far better value in the long run.

And it’s Discipline that makes Daring possible.