I’ve been watching an old documentary series ‘The Mayfair Set’ on BBC iplayer.
It’s uncanny seeing things that happened during your childhood, and realising what was really going on.
They called it ‘creative destruction’ but it was simply asset stripping.
Of course it’s all happened many times before, and it’s happening again. Only now we call it private equity.
One thing’s for sure, capitalism it ain’t.
Just ask Adam Smith.
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.
My internet was down all day yesterday. I felt so cut off! Disabled even.
As if the only alternative to doing stuff online was to do nothing.
Which is ridiculous.
I’m just out of practice in the real world.
I need to get out more.
Maybe we all do.
Who fancies a coffee?
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.
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?
“It’ll be ten minutes”, said the despatcher.
30 minutes later I call the cab office: “It’s been half an hour and I’m still waiting.”
“They’re in XXX gardens, and will be with you in 5 minutes.”
“Well if they aren’t I’m walking instead.”
“I can assure you they’ll be there in 5 minutes.”
9 minutes later the driver calls: “I’m 2 minutes away.”
“Sorry, you’re too late, I’ve started walking”.
I’d have been happier if the cab firm had said it was going to be forty minutes at the start. Then I could have made my decision to walk instead immediately. What irked me was the breaking of a promise made. The feeling of being lied to. As a result the driver missed out on a fare and wasted a journey.
“Should’ve got an Uber“, you say.
Maybe.
The way Uber solves this problem for the customer is to have a surplus of cabs available in the area. That means drivers are systematically under-employed. Which might mean it’s harder to earn a decent living. I’m not sure I want promises kept to me at the expense of the people doing the work.
Which is why in the end, I prefer travelling under my own steam.
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.
I’m back. After 5 days of walking, 4 days of talking, and 2 days of chilling and walking. In places where the lanes are narrow, the sea is everywhere and it’s often impossible to get a signal. A short holiday in a remote location, followed by a conference in an even more remote location.
What have I learned?
That gathering ‘the news’ intermittently via intermittent access to twitter is good enough.
That gathering people together to share how they’re changing a system far bigger than themselves is amazing. When everyone realises they are actually doing it, the changes just get bigger. And more people join in.
That the sound of the sea is a good thing to fall asleep to.
It’s great to be back.
Decades ago, my older brothers were given the job of breaking up concrete in the back garden so my dad could lay a new patio.
They did a morning’s work, had lunch and started again in the afternoon. After an hour or so, my mum thought “They’ve been at it a while, I better see if they need a cup of tea.”
Then walked into the breakfast room to find nothing but a cassette player running.
They’d carefully recorded themselves in the morning so they could bunk off in the afternoon.
Corporate Rebels shared a Bloomberg article today:
“More than two years after remote work and hybrid jobs became widespread, there’s still a stark divide over how it’s going: About 85% of managers worry they can’t tell if employees are getting enough done, while 87% of workers say their productivity is just fine.”
With this admonition from Microsoft: “Don’t Spy on Employees to Ensure They’re Working,“
This is the 21st century for goodness sake.
Have we not learned to measure results rather than “activity”?
I can’t help thinking it’s management that needs an overhaul.
Hint: If you’re a micro-business employer I can help you with that.
On the whole, I’m a pretty laid-back person.
But you know what really makes me angry?
Seeing amazing micro businesses die when their owner disappears. Whether that’s because they’ve sold up, gone off to do something else, or simply wound down and died.
All that innovation, all that care, all that value, wiped out. Wasted.
Unnecessarily.
It makes me really angry. And I’m on a mission to do something about it.
Because all it takes to avoid that waste is a decision to ‘disappear’ from your business earlier, on purpose, replacing yourself with a flexible, supportive framework that enables others to be ‘a boss’ instead of you.
The irony is that by doing this in plenty of time, you’ll start to enjoy running your business again. You might even want to grow it. But you won’t have to be there.
Help me on my mission.
If you know an amazing micro-business that deserves to last longer than it’s owner, tell me about them, put them in touch.
We need these amazing businesses to be around for longer.
They’re what makes our commercial life worth living.