Well, you can ignore it, and carry on working according to your existing assertions about how the system works.
Or you can examine it, and decide whether your existing assertions remain valid (or maybe valid enough for now).
Or you can examine it, and decide whether you need to change those assertions, and how you work within the system.
This can be more difficult than it looks, because you need to be conscious of your assertions, and of how you currently work.
Fortunately, if you have your Promise of Value clearly defined and articulated, and a working Customer Experience Score in play, you’ll know both well enough to be able to extrapolate the consequences of what you see in the feedback, and see where things need to be redesigned.
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.
Big businesses (or perhaps just their shareholders) crave nothing more than the certainty of increasing profits. That’s what capitalism means.
To that end, they put a hard boundary around their businesses, turning them into closed systems, where everything is rigidly controlled, organised to maximise profit and nothing else.
The trouble is that a closed system cannot learn. So when the life around that business changes (as it certainly will) the only way for a closed-system business to deliver the certainty it promises to shareholders is first, to eat itself, generating ‘shareholder value’ by shrivelling it’s own organs, or selling them; or, worse, to seek to impose control onto its surroundings, turning them as rigid and sterile as itself.
Good businesses, the ones that get to stay big and profitable without financial or geopolitical engineering, are those that put a border around themselves instead.
Borders are permeable. They allow new ideas in, act as an early warning system for change, create a safe space for experimentation. They turn a closed system into an open one, yet retain enough control to allow a business to choose which changes they adopt, on purpose.
The best businesses add a twist to this.
They create themselves as an open system for making and keeping promises – not to shareholders, but to their customers. Profits become a side-effect of the system’s purpose. And ironically, become more certain.
They stick to their promise, always learning from their customers and their team what the world outside wants, and re-package their promise to meet that demand, adjusting the way the share and keep it along the way.
Great businesses constantly balance order with openness to get the best of both worlds, a business that can thrive forever, whatever the circumstances.
Throughout our time on earth, far more often than we realise, people have self-consciously created societies defined not according to some positive criteria, but by negatives. Not who they wanted to be, but who they didn’t.
Protestants defined themselves by the beliefs they rejected.
Pirates organised their own ships in direct contradiction to the way things worked in the navy.
My friend Carl French created The Endless Bookcase to be everything a traditional publisher isn’t.
Sometimes it’s easier to describe what you’re not than what you are.
It has the added advantage that it allows you to envisage possibilities that are truly new.
I’m never ashamed of reading fiction, and I read a lot of it, usually multiple times – everything from detective stories, myths and legends, 18th-century epistolary novels to sci-fi and historical romances, with children’s fiction and classics along the way.
Fiction teaches me at least as much, if not more than non-fiction.
I put myself in another’s shoes, see things from multiple perspectives, hear the same things said in a plethora of different ways, experience new and different worlds I’d never encounter in real life.
Non-fiction is great, I love the new information and ideas it gives me, the different ways of interpreting how the world works.
But it’s fiction that gets me practicing the empathy and imagination I need to apply my information and ideas wisely and humanely. Almost withour realising it, because I’m having so much fun.
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.
Nowadays we seem to use the Athenian word ‘democracy’ to describe something more like a Roman republic.
In the Roman system, a few ‘responsible’ (and very wealthy) men decided what was good for everyone.
The mass of men (plebs) were eventually represented, but they never got to vote or join in, even though they and their families did all the work. There was a view that plebs didn’t even need to know the laws by which they were governed.
As usual, women, children and slaves didn’t count at all.
Sound familiar?
You probably left one of these to create your own fair, agile and democratic utopia.
Take care you don’t unconsciously reproduce the republic as you scale.
For an Athenian man who didn’t want to be an idiot, the answer was to put yourself forward for public office. Appointment was by sortition – a lottery.
The Athenians built lottery machines like this kleroterion to ensure selection was random, because a) they believed all men were equally capable of making decisions with others, and b) they valued the diversity of perspective that diversity of occupation, status, and income would bring.
They also knew that the best way to preserve the Athenian Promise of Value, was to ensure maximum active participation in maintaining it.
Of course they left some people out – women and slaves didn’t count as citizens. But the mechanism was fair and very explicit and could easily have accommodated this kind of social change, given time.
We small businesses (and modern states) can learn from the Athenians, without making their mistakes. If everyone in our business believes in the same Promise of Value and knows how to Share it, Keep it and Improve it like a ‘Boss’, from their own and others’ perspectives, we can trust each and every one of them to do the right thing for the people we serve.
That doesn’t just lighten the load for us. It improves the experience for our clients and our teams. And most importantly of all, it keeps our businesses truly alive, thriving and able to adapt to whatever new perspectives come next.
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.
