Growing your small business from you, to a few and then a few more people can feel like riding a tiger. Unpredictable, challenging, dangerous even.
New customers, new employees, new ideas, new ways of doing things that don’t match the customer experience you carefully crafted on your own. Trying to match increased costs with an increase in income. It can feel like everything just gets wilder.
The answer isn’t to cage the tiger, or to beat her into submission.
Instead, make sure she shares the values you value, tell her what you want her to do to make and keep your promises, give her a safe enclosure to roam in, and let her get on with it.
Get off her back.
Because she’s not actually a tiger.
She’s a team of people like you, who want to do the best they can, like you, in a space that gives them agency, mastery, autonomy, purpose and a feeling of community, like you.
Is it just me, or is anyone else worried/annoyed/infuriated by the rise of ‘Clubcard Prices’, ‘Nectar Prices’ and the like?
I keep a pretty good track of prices in my head, and from what I could see, ‘Clubcard Prices’ weren’t lower than the usual prices elsewhere. It was simply an opportunity to put ‘normal’ prices up, by quite a percentage.
Harmless enough, until every other member of the supermarket cartel joins in of course.
To me it feels very much like ‘Give us your loyalty, or you’ll pay extra for everything’.
Since when has blackmail been an acceptable business model?
One of the things that seems to make innovation easier for the companies in “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is what Vaughn Tan describes as ‘modular roles’.
It’s not clear exactly what this means, but I think its something like this: my job title might be ‘chef’, but I can do things that might seem to fall outside that description, and even within it I can specialise.
Team members discover their own and each others preferred roles within a given innovation through practice. There’s no sense of treading on anyone’s toes or ‘that’s not what I was hired for’.
Like acting, any role can be stepped into simply by taking up the mask and putting it on. There will be stars and understudies but in essence anyone competent to play a role can play it. And by watching others play, a newcomer can learn enough about a role to take it up as a kind of apprentice too, because everyone is practicing, all the time.
In The Disappearing Boss, I use a similar idea. A Role is a part played in a performance by a person. It’s defined by what the Role does during the performance, and the parts of the customer experience they are responsible for delivering.
Here’s an example from one of my clients. Its the definition of the Ship’s Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op:
It covers what the Ship does as part of a Voyage, what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.
What it doesn’t specify is how exactly the person playing the Role does that, nor the skills and comptencies needed. They are taken for granted, and they may well be different for different Ships. What matters is that responsibilities are delivered.
As Vaughn Tan has discovered, the great thing about using Roles rather than job descriptions is that they allow great flexibility in resourcing. One person can play many Roles. A given Role can be played by many people. Once defined, a Role can easily be handed off to someone outside the business, and replicated to increase capacity.
At the same time, focusing on the ‘what’ of a Role, rather than the ‘how’, leaves things to certain extent open, allowing every actor to bring their own personality to the performance and enabling them to respond to the unknown with the kind of creativity, flair and inspiration, that keeps your customer experience memorable. Worth coming back for again and again.
Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.
Another relatively straightforward adaptation is to automate a part of your Customer Experience Score.
This could be an entire Activity, or it might be something that makes up a small part of lots of Activities.
You could for example automate your Enrol Prospect Activity, so that people can sign up online. Or some of your Show Up Activities – for example, placing ads or posting to social media or even commenting on other people’s posts. Or your entire Keep Promise Activity, if it is relatively simple.
Having your Customer Experience Score written down makes it easier to spot where automating an oft-repeated task that is part of many larger Activities would make sense.
For example, emails.
If your business involves lots of regular communication with clients – to request information or notify them of actions taken or remind them of actions they need to take, it makes sense to automate the sending of these emails. Especially if you want the emails received to be consistent in tone and language.
This is the kind of task that people hate doing, and so take shortcuts with, because it doesn’t feel essential to the rest of the process. It’s also the kind of task that happens at the beginning of a lot of important Activities, giving plenty of opportunity for silly copy and paste errors that will make your client feel a little less valued and a little more wary about how well you’re Keeping your Promise for them.
It’s also the kind of task that’s easy to automate well. You can create templates, written by a human to a human, then use software to schedule, personalise and send them to clients. Done well, this saves time and embarassment for you and your team, without feeling robotic for your clients.
Whichever part of your Score you consider automating, here are some questions to ask yourself:
For a human being, is this drudgery? Repetitive, mechanical, requiring a level of attention that’s difficult to maintain?
Is this something that people do better than machines or software? Does it involve interaction with other humans, making it unpredictable, and requiring empathy? Or does it involve the application of creativity, experience, judgement, wisdom?
Will this lead to our clients doing more of the work themselves? Is that what they want? How many will we lose as a result? How many could we attract? Could it be an option rather than a replacement for the way we do it now?
Will it be worth it? How much capacity will this free up for us to spend on being more human or offering more valuable services? Will that save us more money than it costs to automate?
I’ve been reading this book over the weekend, and I have found it absolutely shocking.
Not for any of the revelations around the females of various species, but for the fact that it’s taken about 100 years since Darwin for anyone to actually start looking at them! Even longer for findings to be taken seriously.
Only 56 years ago, Desmond Morris could opine that the reason women have breasts is because men missed the ‘fleshy hemispheres’ of their bottoms once they switched to face-to-face sex. And this is science.
Your prospects don’t know what you know, they don’t necessarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.
Your team don’t know what you know, they don’t necesarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.
And so do you.
Most of us are not scientists, we don’t have time to run meticulous experiments, but we could radically improve our understanding of each other by regularly asking 1 simple question:
One of our case studies at London Business School, involved a company that supplied rags to industry. Rags – textiles at the absolute end of their useful life might seem to be the ultimate commodity. Almost worthless. How could a business supplying them ever hope to create unmissable value for it’s customers?
Simple.
By surrounding that commodity product with deep layers of service.
By getting under the skin of it’s clients; understanding where and how they used the rags and what the problems could be. Then making sure they more than met every rags need in the way they sold, delivered, collected and disposed of them for the client.
By maintaining that intimacy with their clients through the people they interacted with – the people who delivered and collected, so that every new need could be anticipated and added to the service.
In those days, adding service meant adding people, because people are the only way to create value for other people.
That’s still true, even if nowadays your first thought would be to build an online platform.
Technology doesn’t create new value overall, it can only make it cheaper for a particular business to deliver its service – until another particular business catches up or overtakes, or undercuts (Ever wondered why hand car washes have replaced the automated ones? Cheap (slave) labour, makes machinery unprofitable).
So if the key to profitability is service, and service means adding people to deal with people, maybe we have an answer to the climate crisis?
Stop making things, use what we already have (e.g. enough clothing for 3 times the global population), and pay people well to support other people – regenerating our environment; housing; education; health; repair and recycling; art; music, entertainment… the list is endless.
We wouldn’t be short of work, and we might well be happier.
After all, this is how we did things for most of our existence on this planet.
One day we might realise we don’t even need money to make this work.
In looking for an injection of money capital that would break their employee-owned business model, John Lewis Partnership is in danger of squandering a far more precious form of capital – the goodwill invested by partners and customers over decades.
Goodwill that other department stores and supermarkets just don’t have.
Goodwill that could help them out right now, if they had the courage to ask.
Once you decide to be like every other player in the market, there’s no reason to for anyone to invest in you rather than anyone else for the long term. And every incentive to join in a short-lived asset-strip.
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.
If what everyone really wants is something like this:
Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.
Then your impact on people is about how much you help or hinder them in their quest to achieve it.
Do you enable people to earn enough to rise above meeting basic needs? Do you free their time to focus on finding and following their purpose? Do you help them to master skills and capabilities that will increase their agency and autonomy? Do you help them connect to a community that values them?
How could you measure these things?
A good place to start might be to look at what changes when it works. What are the symptoms of that change? How few of them could you measure to tell you the effect your business has had?
Of course you’ll want to measure these things for your clients.
Remember to measure them for your team and yourself too. You’re all involved.
