for small business growth and productivity would be:
As soon as you have worked out how to attract and delight customers, write down how it works.
Not as a set of instructions to be followed in excruciating detail, but as a guide to help everyone (including the customer) to know where they are in their journey and what to expect next.
Not as a dump of disconnected ‘procedures’, but as a coherent framework that tells the story of how you share and keep your promises to clients.
Like a musical score for your business, that tells people what to play but not how.
That way you create context and meaning for anyone that has to use it. And that means it will be easier to get other people to help you attract and delight more customers, whether you outsource or employ.
Which means you will be able to grow your business with less friction, less overhead and more profit.
Because if the ‘management’ is embodied in the score, you don’t need to hire managers to mediate between you and your team.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Have you written down how you attract clients so that someone else could do it?
Have you written down how you delight them so that someone else could do it?
No?
