Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Responsible Autonomy

How to do big business with a tiny company
November 22, 2022

How to do big business with a tiny company

I loved this post from Jason Fried on company size.   In a nutshell, his company (37Signals) serves about the same number of clients as others in this space, at about a tenth of the workforce.

How can he do that?

Here are some ideas.

First, build a product and service that makes your users so awesome they tell all their friends and colleagues about it.  Then make it easy for them to tell their friends and colleagues.   Do this and you can ditch the marketing department.

Second, let your people manage themselves.   After all, they are able, enthusiastic humans who revel in taking responsibility.  Self-managed doesn’t mean unsupported though.  Like an orchestra, give your players a Score so they know what they are trying to achieve, a Conductor to give immediate feedback on their performance and Rehearsal Time to improve and innovate.   Do this and you can ditch the managers.

Next, get rid of ‘admin’.   Admin is simply about getting the right resources into the right place at the right time.  Build it in to what you do for clients, automate the boring bits that become drudgery for humans and you’ve made it a side effect of doing the job.   Do this and you can ditch the admin department.

Fourth, enable every player in your team to deliver the whole end-to-end service.  In essence make them a one-person instance of your business.   Do this, and every new person you add is a profit centre.

Finally, share the benefit of this new superproductive business with everyone in it.  Reward must follow responsibility.  Ownership must be real.  Do this and you’ve created a sustainable legacy to be proud of.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Why running a business is hard, and how to make it easier
November 15, 2022

Why running a business is hard, and how to make it easier

The people you want to serve – the clients you’d like to have – don’t know what you know.  They don’t believe what you believe. They look at the world through different eyes, a different experience and with a different mindset.

That’s what makes marketing hard.   Especially if you are offering something different from the norm.

It’s the same for the people you work with.   They don’t know what you know.  They don’t believe what you believe.   They bring their own experience and mindset to the way they see the world.

That’s what makes running a business – serving clients through other people – hard.

The difference is that the people you work have to do what you tell them, don’t they?  After all, you’re paying them.  They need a job.

Except that all too often what actually happens is that you spend more time on watching over them than on the business.  Micro-managing.   Because your unique definition of ‘customer experience‘ is entirely in your head.  Which is frustrating for everyone, and constraining for the business.

So you delegate the micro-management to someone else.  Who doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t necessarily believe what you believe.  Who sees the world through different eyes, with a different mindset.   Who tells your people what to do, based on what’s in their head.    Sure it takes a load off your back, but will your unique customer experience survive the change?

I believe there is a better way.   Which is to document the customer experience in your head and make it available for everyone in the business to follow.

Not ‘what to do‘, but ‘what has to happen‘.

Not ‘how to do it‘, but ‘how it needs to feel for the client‘.

Not just ‘this is how we do things round here’ but also ‘this is what we believe‘.

So that you are not just handing over the ‘donkey work’, but also the emotional labour of delivering the business’s unique customer experience – the part that really matters to the client, the part they pay extra for, the part they refer their friends to.

Then work out and document how that customer experience is maintained, how you make sure that everyone who works with you knows what you know and believes most of what you believe, so that you know you can trust them to use their own history and mindset to make that customer experience even better, in line with the beliefs you all share.

It’s quite a job to get all this in place*.  But once you have it running and growing your business gets easier and easier.  Because everyone working the business is standing in for you.  Everyone’s a boss.

And not a manager in sight.

 

*That’s what I do.  Talk to me.

Human Feedback 2 – complaints
November 9, 2022

Human Feedback 2 – complaints

It may not feel like it, but when a customer complains about your service, they are demonstrating that they care.

If they feel let down, it’s because they feel they have a human relationship with you.   One they value highly enough to fight for.  What you do in response can make or break that relationship.   So you want be doing it on purpose.

That means it pays to make handling complaints part of your Customer Experience Score.

Obviously you can’t predict exactly what might go wrong for a customer, so this is not about predetermining specific solutions to specific problems.  Instead it’s a higher-level process that can be applied to any situation.

The process starts by acknowledging the person’s emotions as well as the facts.  However unreasonable it may be for the person in front of you to feel what they feel, they still feel it.   And while they are feeling, they can’t be thinking.   What they need first is to be seen or heard as a human being, to have their anger/distress/disappointment recognised as valid responses to being let down.

This doesn’t mean coming out with the bland ‘I’m sorry you feel that way‘ kind of statement – the kind that’s usually followed by a ‘but’ – ‘but we don’t do refunds‘.   I mean genuine sympathy – ‘Gosh yes, I would be hopping mad too!‘, ‘Blimey that must have been sooo frustrating.‘ – the kind of sympathy that enables the complainer to recover enough equanimity to move on.   Once you have achieved that, you can acknowledge the facts of what’s happened, without admitting liability.

The next stage is to find out what will make the complainer happy again.   What will repair, or even strengthen your relationship with them.   You need to be able to offer a solution that is right for both of you.   That means collaboration between you.   That starts by asking them ‘What could we do to make this right for you?‘, then continuing to explore what they would feel is reasonable, without committing to anything at this stage.   Bear in mind knock-on effects of the service failure – perhaps something else was damaged as a result, or they had to take time off work to come and see you.   Also bear in mind what is affordable for you.   It’s worth understanding the lifetime value of a customer, as well as the value of this particular transaction.

By the end of this stage, you have a pretty good idea of what would restore your customer’s faith in the relationship.

Now top it.   Offer a solution that will exceed their expectations, without breaking the bank.   This often involves addressing the collateral damage – for example if a pan breaks in normal use, you’d expect to replace it, if in breaking the contents spoilt a tablecloth, you could offer to replace that too.  If they travelled out of their way by public transport to make a complaint, you could send them home in a cab.   It’s this kind of thing that tips a complainer into an advocate for your business.   Remember, they are complaining because they care.

Finally, deliver on the promise, without hesitation.

This process only works when the people running it fully understand the profit margins and lifetime values for your business.

Make sure they know it, and you can let them be creative in coming up with solutions, no matter what the complaint.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Dividends
November 8, 2022

Dividends

My interest in documenting how things should work came from my years in software development.   To me, it always seemed sensible to work out what you wanted your software to do before you built it, or bought it.

And even more sensible that it should reflect the way you do business rather than an average of hundreds of other firms.

Writing a customer Experience Score before you commission software has other benefits too.

It gets everyone thinking about change – ‘how we really want it to work’ rather than simply ‘how we do it now’.

It gets everyone thinking a level up from the day-to-day, about what has to happen when rather than how it happens.

But most of all it gives everyone, including you, the chance to reframe your business from a management hierarchy to an easily replicable system for making and keeping promises.

And the benefits keep coming after you’re done.   Once you can demonstrate that your unique system for making and keeping promises works consistently, people will ask you to do more of it for them.  And you will find it easy to scale up on delivery.

Like many a human enterprise, the hard work is all up front, but worth it for the dividends flying in later, almost effortlessly.

And isn’t that just what it means to be an entrepreneur?

Who is it for?
November 4, 2022

Who is it for?

Bonfire night in Lewes is a sight to behold.  But in my view, the most interesting thing about it is how it has resisted commercialisation.

Unlike Halloween, which has become yet another excuse to produce and consume yet more pointless stuff, Bonfire in Lewes is about Lewes and Bonfire.    It commemorates local martyrs by raising money locally and spending it locally.  Lewesians young and old get involved all year round raising money, creating displays and effigies, finally, celebrating the day itself with marches, music and spectacular fireworks.

No concessions are made to tourists or spectators.  It always takes place on November the 5th, unless that falls on a Sunday.  There are no safety barriers, no interpretation boards, barely any interaction beyond the collection bucket.    It’s not for them.

Bonfire in Lewes is for Lewes.  It’s not about production or consumption.  It’s about something much bigger than that.

It’s about culture.  It’s about continually recreating Lewes as a radical, self-aware and connected community with a mind of its own.  A place and culture where Tom Paine would still feel comfortable.

No wonder the authorities want to ban it.

Your business has a culture too.   Who is it for?   And what are you doing to continually recreate it, on purpose?

Delegating care
November 1, 2022

Delegating care

Long, long ago, a young hominid female let her mother look after her baby while she went off and hunted, opening the evolutionary pathway to homo sapiens.

The ability to trust other people with our precious babies is literally what makes us human.  The result is big brains, grandmothers and a propensity to collaborate.

Delegating the care for your Customer Experience should come naturally.

So what’s holding you back?

Imposter syndrome
October 28, 2022

Imposter syndrome

If you ever feel like an imposter, check out Jára Cimrman.

If he could, you can.

Everything we achieve is made up in our heads first.  That’s part of what makes us human.

Keeping it personal
October 25, 2022

Keeping it personal

When you’re a one-man band it has to be personal.  Conventional wisdom has it that you can’t keep it that way if you plan to seriously scale.  It’s almost a definition of ‘corporate’ that ‘I’ becomes ‘they’.

I believe that this loss of the personal is part of what puts many micro-business owners off growth, not the ‘lack of ambition’ ascribed to them, by government reports.

Conventional wisdom is not wrong – as the business founders insert layers of hierarchy and function between themselves and their customers, the relationship between business and customer can often feel impersonal, transactional.   A brand, no matter how great, isn’t a person.

What’s wrong is the assumption that introducing functions and hierarchies is the only way to scale.

What if, at that point where 10-ish people work with you, you decided to make them all ‘the boss’- each one of them capable and authorised to deliver on your promises the way you do?

What if, instead of splitting the customer experience into separate functions, you kept it intact from end to end and made each and every person in the business responsible for delivering it to their clients?

What if, instead of introducing layers of management to distract your team from your customers, you gave them a Customer Experience Score to follow and let them manage themselves?  With responsbility for the consequences of course.

You’d scale your business and keep it personal.  It’s just that the person your clients deal wouldn’t have to be you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Intrigued?  Ask me how.

Why it’s good to have people on trains
October 21, 2022

Why it’s good to have people on trains

My Great Western Railway train to Penzance was delayed by half an hour.  Someone had been taken ill on a train in front of us.   The tannoy kept us informed, and let us know that we would be able to claim compensation via the train operator’s website.

So far, so standard.

But here’s the difference a real-life, flesh and blood human made:

Knowing that some of the passengers would have missed their connection to Newquay, the train manager asked them to identify themselves as he walked through the train, so he could arrange alternative transport.  Having worked out what their actual needs were, a bus was arranged to pick most of them up from St Austell, while for one person, a taxi was booked to get them to Newquay airport in time to make their plane.  All at no extra cost.

Because the train manager saw their job as getting people to their desired destination as near on time as possible, not merely to carry them from A to B.

How very different from ‘rebel’ brand Virgin, who will happily chuck passengers off a train well short of their destination, to avoid the costs of further delays down the line, leaving them to scramble onwards as best they can.

I’ve supported the rail strikes since the beginning.   I support them even more enthusistically now.   Even though my Penzance trip was a day later than booked because of them.

These people aren’t just fighting for their jobs, they’re fighting for the kind of service I for one want to receive.  A human one.

Scaling
October 20, 2022

Scaling

If you’re a micro business looking to serve more people well, consider this before you add the next person to your team:

Are you trying to make your music louder or more complex?

Getting louder is simple.  Just let each new person follow the score you play from, alongside you.   On a different instrument maybe, to give richness to the sound.  Or give them a copy of your score so they can play elsewhere or in a different timezone.   It’ll still be your music, still a personal experience for customers, only nearer to them.

Once you’ve mastered louder, making your music more complex gets easier too.  Write a new score for the new thing you want to offer, teach new or existing people to play it, and put them wherever you want, to harmonise or contrast with your existing musicians.  Better still, make sure every player is able to play every variation, in case they need to.   So you can make your complex music louder.

It’s hard to do both at once without confusing your musicians and your audience.

So if in doubt, I’d start with louder.

Discipline makes Daring possible.