Scaleability – Page 22 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 21, 2022

Slow reading

I read a lot, and I read fast. But sometimes it’s nice to ‘slow down’, by reading something longer – a sequence of books that encompass individual stories as part of a larger whole.

It could be non-fiction, like Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of’ series, or crime fiction such as the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, or Reginald Hill’s Dalziel & Pascoe novels. Or it could even be children’s fiction, like Harry Potter or this series from Susan Cooper.

Whatever it is, there’s something very satisfying about working through individual books, adding to the bigger picture as you go, seeing the main characters grow, enjoying the references back to earlier stories or characters, or seeing the same story told from a different perspective, or simply noticing how the author’s writing style develops. It feels more rounded, more rich, more true to life than a simple jog from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happy ever after’.

Perhaps I enjoy them because in these works the authors create an entire tapestry, not just a single thread. An ecosystem, rather than a single process. An ecosystem that can generate many different stories, not just the ones that happen to have been told.

There’s nothing wrong with telling a simple tale, or with building an ecosystem. You just need to know which one you’re aiming for.

Much like a business then.

January 17, 2022

Chains

Here’s Peter Drucker talking about management chains, way back in 1954:

“Every additional level makes the attainment of common direction and mutual understanding more difficult. Every additional level distorts objectives and misdirects attention. Every link in the chain sets up additional stresses and creates one more source of inertia, friction and slack. Above all, especially in the big business, every additional level adds to the difficulty of developing tomorrow’s managers, both by adding to the time it takes to come up from the bottom and by making specialists rather than managers out of the men moving up the chain.”

There’s a good chance that these observations reflect your reasons for setting up on your own – so you could focus on the customer rather than your boss(es), and so you could have complete autonomy over how you serve those customers.

But as you grow your own business from just you to more than a few, how do you stop yourself replicating the structures you found so constricting?

Simple.

Make everyone a manager – not of other people, but of the process every business runs – making and keeping promises to the people it serves:

When everyone’s a boss, there’s no need for chains of any kind.

Thanks to Michele Zanini for the prompt.

January 14, 2022

Take back control

One of the things that puts business owners off growing, is the fear of losing control. They’ve handcrafted a customer experience that works well. They have built up a clientele that loves what they do and the way that they do it. They are concerned about diluting that.

The answer, as every composer knows, is to take the music that is in your head, and write it down, so that others can play it. Put the control into a score, not a person.

That way, your customer experience lives on through others, not in spite of them.

At first, you will have to conduct this music yourself. But after a while, your people won’t even need that. With a good score, they can conduct themselves.

And that removes the real limit to growth – you.

December 16, 2021

Bullshit Jobs

This week, I’ve mostly been re-reading this book by David Graeber, published what seems like a lifetime ago in 2018.

In 2015, YouGov published a poll, showing that when asked whether their job “makes a meaningful contribution to the world?” 37% of respondents said ‘no’, and 13% of people said they didn’t know. That’s a terrible waste of human potential.

Until recently many of those 37% or 13% will have been furloughed, while many of the other 50% weren’t – their jobs (care workers, nurses, shop workers, bus-drivers etc) were simply too ‘key’ to allow that, or they were self-employed.

I wonder whether furlough gave some of the 37% time to re-think what they wanted from work? Is that what’s behind ‘The Great Resignation”?

What seems to be fairly clear from my re-reading of this book, is where most of those ‘bullshit jobs’ are. They’re in corporates, or privatised government agencies.

Where they aren’t is in small businesses.

One more reason why I believe bigger small businesses are the future.

December 6, 2021

Cultivating culture

Growing a culture is easy. You just leave an agar dish open to the air. The culture you get is a matter of what falls into your dish.

For a business, it’s the same. As soon as you add people to your business, you get a culture. As new people join, they pick up the norms, the narratives, and the identities of the people already there. The result of whatever’s fallen into your dish.

But with a framework that attracts the right things into your dish, that’s easy to grow on and around, it’s possible to grow a culture you’ve designed rather than one that happens by chance. Even if you’ve already got the wrong culture already in place.

What would your business culture look like if you designed it?

December 3, 2021

It’s me they want

It’s a trap many founders of service businesses fall into. You start off as the technician, doing everything, and at first you love it.

Then you grow your client base, and with it a team to help you serve them. Yet it seems, no matter how much you reassure them that your team is capable, no matter how much extra you charge them for the privilege, clients insist that you are the one that looks after them. Or, they insist that it’s a particular member of your team that looks after them. You get overloaded, and your team lose out on the chance to grow.

The answer is to make sure a new client or a new project starts with one of your team, not you. Perhaps random, perhaps thoughtfully matched to each others’ working styles. That means making sure everyone knows how to make and keep your business promise as well as or better than you, from start to finish. And that means articulating what that experience looks like.

There’s nothing wrong with being relationship-based – I’m all for connection between people – but the deepest relationship you want to forge is one between the client and your business, where the client’s experience will be consistently outstanding, no matter who delivers it. Not identical, consistent.

The more you enable your team to stand up and say “I am Spartacus!“, the more clients you’ll be able to delight, without killing yourself or your team in the process.

November 30, 2021

Reconciliation

You run a business with a partner. One of you hates not knowing what’s going to happen, the other loves that. One favours planning, the other seeing what happens. This is a source of much tension.

How could you reconcile these opposites to get the best of both worlds?

Simple.

Give yourself a safety net. A floor below which things cannot go. Or as Mr Nassim Taleb would have it, protect yourself against the downside.

Design repeatable processes that ensure ‘the least that should happen’. The planner will be much more comfortable with possibility when you’ve ruled out the worst. You can both be open to the upside.

When you find it, move the net up, and repeat.

This doesn’t only work for partners, it can help everyone who works with you to reconcile their individual appetites for risk.

November 29, 2021

I knew that would happen

“I knew that would happen.”

If you knew, why didn’t you do something to prevent it?

Probably because while you knew it was possible or even likely, you hoped it wouldn’t happen.

It would be much better to have a process that deals not only with the 80% of cases where nothing untoward happens, but also with the 20% of cases that don’t work like that. Or even better, one that pre-empts their occurrence.

Let’s say you’re a coffee roaster. You sell beans to lots of small independent coffee shops. It bugs you that they never plan their orders properly, often ringing up to ask for an urgent delivery at a timescale that’s impossible for you to make money on. You’ve made things clear – ‘Order before 6pm for next-day delivery’ – but still they ring at 8pm for an urgent delivery by 8am the next day. What should be exceptional is turning into the norm.

How could you pre-empt this?

You could accept that’s how they work, and find a way to deliver coffee overnight as your default. That might involve putting prices up of course, which might annoy the more forward-thinking of your customers.

You could make them order more each time, so they never run out. That would cost them more of course, and might end up in a stockpile they don’t want to carry.

You could put re-order prompts in or on your packaging, or give them the means to prompt themselves – stickers, or ‘re-order now’ cards.

You could recognise that the people using the coffee may not be the people ordering it, and make it easy for them to start an order – with a QR code on a bag, for instance – that gets confirmed with the person responsible before it’s sent out.

You could find ways to prompt them to re-order, based on how they work. That would involve asking them how they work (or even observing them as a mystery shopper?). That would cost you more up -front, but might make for a closer relationship. There probably aren’t that many different ways to run a coffee-shop, so you would quickly identify most cases. Then you could offer ordering options to new clients, knowing you have a process for dealing with them smoothly

There isn’t a right answer here, except that whenever you say “I knew that would happen”, realise that what you’ve identified isn’t just a pain for you. It’s an opportunity to cement your relationships and differentate yourself from your competitors, just by making your client’s life easier.

November 26, 2021

Stories we tell ourselves

If you knew the stories your family, friends, colleagues, employees and clients are telling themselves you’d be astonished.

The stories we tell ourselves aren’t true. They often don’t help. We keep them to ourselves, but they leak out in our actions, and so how others see us.

What’s the story your business tells itself? Does it help?

If not, share it with your team, and see how you can change it. Your customers and your profits will see the difference.

November 22, 2021

Indispensable

It feels nice to be wanted. To be the fount of all knowledge . To be the one everyone turns to when they have a question. To be deferred to in all day-to-day decision-making. To be the person every client or prospect enquiry is referred to.

But beware. Making yourself indispensable is the passive form of being a control freak. An indispensable boss may not actively seek to control what others do, and how they do it, but somehow nothing much happens without being run past them first. The approach is different, but the result is the same.

It isn’t productive. It isn’t very liberating for the people with day-to-day decisions to make. It can easily become a trap for you. And it soon becomes a constraint on the growth of your business.

The solution is to enable people to answer their own questions, make their own decisions. Not from scratch, but with all the benefit of what you already know. As a Customer Experience Composer, not the boss.

Write them a score. Let them rehearse their part before they have to perform in front of a live audience. Get everyone together for regular practice at playing together. Review the score. Adjust if necessary.

Free your team to bring more of themselves to the job, free yourself up to deal with everything that isn’t day-to-day, free your business up to fly.

The music in your head is the start, not the end. Get it out there.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability