The choices your team make when presented with the need for a decision, are determined by the options they have … Read More “How to enable good choices for your team – part 1”
We all make choices. Every day, every hour, possibly even every minute. And to many of us freedom is the … Read More “Why controlling your options is better than controlling your choices”
Delegation is about much more than handing over decision making powers. It’s about being able to trust that those powers … Read More “What delegation really means and how to make it happen”
What do you do for the people you serve? I’m sure you know, somewhere deep in your heart. You have … Read More “How to take a break from your business 4: spell out your promise of value”
I first tried answering these questions from Bernadette Jiwa about 4 years ago, just before I published my first book, … Read More “Why this? Why you? Why now?”
One of my favourite times of day, is that part where you’re not asleep any more (or not yet), but … Read More “Dozing”
What a business does, is what it needs to do to fulfill its the primary activity of making and keeping … Read More “A business is what a business does – part 2”
Performance = Potential – Interference. Sometimes. for example in sportspeople, which is where this formula comes from, the interference is … Read More “Performance”
If you’re lucky, you start your business with someone else, or maybe even as a trio.
Two heads, three heads are better than one.
Being a co-Boss helps you share the hard work of getting going, gives you a sounding board for ideas, and brings additional valuable resources to the business – whether that’s talents, time or even money.
But good things do come to an end, often perfectly amicably. People grow, their circumstances change, their talents call them to new things.
That’s fine, if people need to move on, they need to move on.
The problem lies with what they take with them, locked inside their heads, no longer accessible to the business they’ve left.
Perhaps they were the operations person, who just made everything work. Perhaps they were the sales wizard, effortlessly charming clients aboard. Or the finance pilot, keeping a firm hand on the money tiller. Or perhaps they were the ideas person, driving the forward movement of the business.
Obviously, if you’d known this was going to happen, you’d have found a way to pull all that accumulated know-how out of their heads before they went. But if not, how do you reconstruct that missing part?
The good news is that although what your co-Boss knew is still inside their head, it’s actually also inside the heads of everyone else in the business, and, crucially, inside the heads of your clients.
It may not be written down, but it is there, and can be re-constructed into an explicit Promise of Value, along with the Customer Experience Score that follows from that, turning buried knowledge into a practical, usable, evolvable asset.
Only, once you’ve dug it up, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with everyone in the business. Then share the work of living it so everyone can become your co-Boss.
Because many heads are always better than one.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Even if a Boss has already disappeared.
“10 times is easier than 2 times” by Dan Sullivan and Dr Benjamin Hardy is by no means a how-to book, but it is a very useful book.
I’ve heard of the basic premise before – that radical change is paradoxically easier than incremental change, because it makes you think completely outside the box about how you might get there. For me, that intersects nicely with Category Pirates thinking, where you stop competing with everyone else in a particular category, and create a completely new one for yourself.
What was new for me was the idea of applying this thinking repeatedly in your life and in your business. And not just you. Your team too. Which reminded me of Derek Sivers’ story of recruiting his own replacement for a job, before he announced his intention to leave.
This might seem a long way from my idea of a Customer Experience Score. A well-documented and well-rehearsed ‘what we do round here’.
It isn’t.
Creating the Customer Experience Score for your business unlocks the first 10x, because it reminds you what your business is here to do; it forces you to think about Roles (which goes even further than ‘who not how’), and it makes you think completely differently about how you manage it.
It enables you to Disappear as a Boss. It makes you create a self-managing business.
Once you’ve done that, it’s easier to 10x through rapid growth (say 40%) per year, or by creating 10 instances of the business (by franchising, for example).
And now you have a Customer Experience Score written down it becomes easier to 10x again.
All you have to do, is ask at every Group Practice: ‘How do we make this 10x better?‘
The Score will show you what to change and how. Which makes doing the change even easier.
Discipline really does make Daring possible.
The hard part is daring in the first place.
