Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Customer Experience OurScore

Sellers beware
April 13, 2023

Sellers beware

When my mother sold her architect-designed corner-plot bungalow, the buyers told her they were aiming to set up their son in it.  They quibbled over everything, nibbled away at the asking price until in the end, she sold for much less than she’d hoped.

Then they knocked it down and built 3 new executive homes on the plot.

There are many reasons why a trade buyer would want your business.

If you care about what happens to it, to your staff and to your clients after you’ve exited, it’s worth knowing what those reasons could be, because buyers are not necessarily going to tell you:

  • They want your client list, but not your staff, offices or name.
  • They want your brand, but not the effort that goes into maintaining it.
  • They want your market share, to add to theirs, so they look good to potential investors or buyers, but not your staff, or your products and services.
  • They want to take you out as a competitor.
  • They want your business as part of a portfolio.
  • They want to run it themselves as a going concern.

Whatever the reason, they’ll usually want you to stay on as a consultant, and the final price will be dependent on performance during the transition.  And all too often that transition destroys value, while you have to watch it happen.

Just as it’s easier to protect the value of your house by making sure it’s in tip-top condition with everything working like clockwork, it’s easier to protect your business’s value if you’ve systemised it.  Even easier if you’ve also documented that system in a Customer Experience Score.

Doing so also opens up other exit opportunities:

  • Pass it on to family, who already know it runs profitably without you.
  • Sell it to your employees, who already know how to run it profitably without you.
  • Sell it to one or more of your fans, who already know that your team can run it profitably without you.
  • Sell it to a like-minded entrepreneur, who wants to see your legacy carry on.
  • License it to any one of the above, on condition that is run the way you’ve designed it to run, in return for a percentage of the profits.

Build your unique promise of value into the way your business works before you sell, that way you’ll get to realise it all and leave a legacy other will recognise as yours.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Rigidity is the wrong tool for dealing with uncertainty
April 5, 2023

Rigidity is the wrong tool for dealing with uncertainty

When  your business is faced with uncertainty, rigidity is the wrong tool to use.   That’s why big corporations fail in the face of change.

The challenge for a purpose-driven, legacy-focused, customer-centred small business is to be open to unknown futures without losing its identity.   To keep their edges fluid and their core firm.

Fortunately, that’s relatively easy to do, because human beings are very good at dealing with uncertainty – especially the uncertainty that comes from dealing with other human beings.

All you need to do is to build the firm core:

First you define a high-level, comprehensive Promise of Value that is specific and distinctive, yet open-ended:

  • Define the people you serve in terms of psychographics, not demographics.
  • Define how you serve them in terms of their deeper needs, not passing wants.
  • Define how you achieve that in terms of values and behaviours, not external measures.

Package that Promise of Value into concrete products and services:

  • Identify the demographic(s) most likely to contain enough people of the right psychographic.
  • Understand what matters to them right now.
  • Identify what dis-ables the motivated.
  • Design a package that addresses what these people need right now.

Use that Promise of Value to drive the design of a Customer Experience Score for sharing and delivering on your Promise that:

  • Embodies your distinctive values and behaviours.
  • Can be played by any competent musician.
  • Enables each musician to bring their own experience and personality to their performance.
  • Allows them to create a new interpretation of your Promise when they encounter the new and unexpected.

Make sure you gather feedback:

  • From the Score as it is being played.
  • From the people you seek to serve and the people who work with you.
  • From your regulator if you have one, and your industry.
  • From the impact you makes on the people and planet around you.

Enable every player in your team to discover the combination of roles that ensures their best performances:

  • Make sure everyone can play the whole Score.
  • Give them regular R&D time, in the company of fellow players, to tweak or re-design the Score, in response to feedback, learning each other’s strengths as they go.

Once you have this in place, you can safely trust your people (and the people to come) to dance with uncertainty.  You can make every one of them a Boss, and leave the future of your business safe in their hands.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

Worth the effort
March 10, 2023

Worth the effort

What makes all the effort of writing down and sharing your Customer Experience Score worth it?

Simply that you get more of what you really want:

  • Agency – your business has become your ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – you’ve learned and mastered the skill of designing a business to deliver a unique promise.  You’ve taught others how to use it.
  • Autonomy – you’ve given your business the autonomy it needs to continue without you, so your dent can last much longer than you.
  • Purpose – you’ve designed your entire business around what you are here to do for the people you serve.
  • Community – you’ve created a community of ‘people like us’ – your team, your clients and everyone involved with your business – bonded together by shared values.
    • Status – You’re no longer the only Boss, but everyone knows you are the foundation of your business.

And so does everyone around you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Big step
March 8, 2023

Big step

Repeat your Baby Step and Next Step until your entire Customer Experience Score has been written down and can be played as well as or better than you by everyone and anyone in your team.

This will take time, but the payoff is huge.

Your team will be happier and more engaged with the business.   Supported by a clear framework for the least that should happen, they can dare to delight more.  It will feel more like their business.

Your clients will notice the difference.

You’ll be able to disappear when you need to and grow the business further.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Next step
March 6, 2023

Next step

The more people who know how to do what up to now only you could do, the better.

So, once you’ve got your first section of Score written down, get the person who helped you to teach everyone else how to play it too.

Then, once everyone is familiar with it, get them to take turns performing it for real.

Collect their suggestions for improvement.   After  week or so, discuss them with your team, and apply only those that enhance your Promise of Value for the people your business serves.

That might mean automating some piece of drudgery that enables the team to spend more time with clients.   It might mean un-automating something to make a client/team experience more human for both of them.

Repeat until you have a section of your Customer Experience Score that truly lives up to your Promise and that anyone can run as well as or better than you.

You don’t have to do this alone.

Once your team are running the business alongside you, it’s time for them to own it alongside you too.

Discipline makes Daring and Longevity possible.

Ask me how.

Baby step
March 3, 2023

Baby step

What’s the smallest step you could take to get started on your Customer Experience Score?

Try this:

  • Choose a job you shouldn’t be doing.
  • Find someone to help you – ideally the person you wish to delegate the job to.*
  • You tell them what needs to happen to complete the job, they write it down.
  • They have a go at doing it, following their notes.
  • You observe, and where it goes wrong, between you, you modify the instructions to get the outcomes you want.
    • You clarify what really happens  (not what you think happens).
    • They suggest ways to make it easy for them to do.
  • They write up the improved version.
  • Save the latest version where everyone can get at it.

Repeat until you have a section of your Customer Experience Score that can be run reliably by anyone who needs to.

*If you plan to outsource the job to another business, get a friend/fellow business owner to help you do this, then hand over the finished Score as part of your specification for the supplier.

Tips:

  • Assume competence.
  • Start with the (usually positive) 80% case.  You can capture major exceptions later.
  • Think ‘Get Outcome’ – what’s true at the end of the process that wasn’t true before?  So it’s easy to tell when you’ve succeeded (or not).
  • Start at the very beginning and carry on right to the end.  You’re trying to capture a transformation that is meaningful to your client and therefore your business.
  • The quicker you test it, the quicker you can improve it.
  • If it feels like you’re trying to fit too much in, you probably are.
  • It’s a prompt, not a novel.
  • Practice makes perfect.
  • Remember, it’s about the process not the people.

And for the visually minded:

 

Even a little bit of Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Start here
March 2, 2023

Start here

Years ago, after a holiday in the North East, where we saw the Great North Run kick off, I decided I wanted to join in.   I’ve never been a runner, and had no clue how to begin training or where to even start.

After a bit of searching I found a handy spreadsheet online (yes it was that long ago), that would take me from 0 to 5k in about 12 weeks.

The first step was to go out, run for 30 seconds, walk for 90 seconds, run for 30 seconds, walk for 90 seconds – and repeat till 20 minutes was up.

Gradually, the proportion of running to walking stepped up, until by the end we were running for the full 20 minutes, and eventually, for forty minutes.  I could run 5k without stopping.

If contemplating 40 minutes of non-stop running when I couldn’t run a step was daunting, imagine the thought of getting everything about your Ideal Customer Experience written down as a score.  Paralysing.

Luckily, you can just get going with with a tiny part of it.   Here are some ideas of where you could begin:

  • With something really simple, almost ‘trivial’, like how you open for business each working day, and how you close.  You’ll be amazed what a difference a clear, shared routine makes for everyone.
  • With the most painful part of your Customer Experience.  Where you get most questions from clients or team members, where you have to intervene most often to put things right.
  • With the easiest part of your Customer Experience.  Where writing it down will enable you to delegate the process to others quickly, so you get the headspace to think about the more painful parts.

Like learning to run, it gets easier as you practice, especially if you have a coach alongside you correcting your stance and your style.

But the most important thing is to start.   Here.  Now.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Handmade
March 1, 2023

Handmade

The Forth Bridge was built by hand.  Because of its cantilever design and the restrictions of the site, it had to be constructed from relatively small components, each weighing no more than a ton.  So the structure was created from a patchwork of steel plates riveted together, by hand, by teams of men and boys from the shipyards.  That meant it took 7 years to complete.

It’s been standing for 133.

When we contemplate building something bigger than ourselves, we often get overwhelmed by the difficulties of the job and the effort it will take.  And so we miss out on the big payoff.

Imagine your business still standing after more than a century.

It could if you engineered it that way.

Ask me how.

 

Transforming knowledge into know-how
February 27, 2023

Transforming knowledge into know-how

“Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your ideas, and now you’ve expressed them.

But you know this isn’t true. You know that putting your ideas into words changed them.

And not just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.” Paul Graham

This is why composing your Customer Experience Score matters, and why it works.

You aren’t simply transferring your ideal Customer Experience onto paper, you’re (re-)defining it. And then sharing it.   And what you create can be further refined and honed – re-designed if necessary if it doesn’t work or when circumstances change.

That thing you currently carry around in your head can become a tool you and all the people you employ can use to make your business 100 times better than it is now.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Avoiding infection
February 22, 2023

Avoiding infection

I spotted this from Michele Zanini (co-author of ‘Humanocracy’) back in 2021:

“Our research suggests that the longest-lasting competitive advantages come from innovation in management systems and practices, not from business or operating model innovation.  So diligently pursuing management innovation pays off handsomely.” 

It’s still worth thinking about.

Especially if you’re a small business that hasn’t yet been infected with old-style management structures.

What if you could grow your business without adding overhead?

And take as much time away from it as you wished?

A different way of managing makes it possible.

Ask me how.