Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Autonomous Enterprise

Reviews
November 21, 2019

Reviews

Ideas for doing things better can come from anywhere.   A question asked by a prospect or client, a suggestion from one of your team, a report from an external adviser or regulator.

A few of these will be so obviously the right thing to do, you can adopt them immediately.  Most will benefit from some review time.

Why?  Because its easy to get bogged down in small changes that add complexity and dilute your Promise, without actually adding real value.

“We’ll get this prospect if we add X to our offer.”  Really?   Is X consistent with our Promise?  Is this a prospect we really want?

“This client is asking for Y.  The customer is always right.”   Really?   Is Y consistent with our Promise?  Will it add enough value to more of our clients?  Does it allow us to protect or increase our prices?

“We should try this Z way of doing things, everyone else is.”  Really?  Is Z consistent with our Promise?  How does it affect the process downstream?  Does it improve how we deliver our Promise?

An easily updated and shared wish list with regular, frequent reviews is a sensible way to handle suggestions for improvement.

If everyone is crystal-clear on your Promise, you’ll quickly agree on those you should implement straight away, those you should reject, and those that need more reflection.   And everyone will learn to make better suggestions.

 

FAClues
November 20, 2019

FAClues

What question does your business get asked over and over again?

What could you do to save people having to ask it?

Diagnosis
November 18, 2019

Diagnosis

If you want to improve anything, you have to know how well it is already working.   That of course means measurement.

We tend to think that this means measuring output.   But that isn’t enough.

Measuring the total profit in my business tells me whether or not I’m doing well, it doesn’t tell me where to look for the the source of my success or failure.

What’s also needed is a measurement of flow.   How fast, or how slowly, do prospects and clients travel through my business?   Are there any leaks?   Are there blockages?

It so happens that the simplest way to measure this for a business is time spent working on a process.   So the better defined your processes are, the more diagnostic the measurement can be.

The good news is that you can start at Share Promise and Keep Promise, and learn downwards from there.

Selling
November 8, 2019

Selling

Many of us hate the idea of selling.   Our stereotype of a salesperson is someone who is pushy, manipulative, only interested in us for the duration of the transaction, and only motivated by their commission.   Naturally, we shy away from the idea of being like that.

The answer is to forget selling, and focus on the person who you wish to serve.

The final step in sharing your Promise is to enroll your prospect on the journey they want to take with you.   Unlike a sale, enrollment offers the possibility of duration, of being the start of a relationship, of learning from each other, of creating a bond that lasts longer than the work you do together.

Your job in this step is to make absolutely sure that you understand what your prospect wants and needs, to show how traveling with you will get them there; how you mitigate the risk for them, and how that is worth the investment you’re asking them to make.  And if you’ve been able to do that, to make the sign-up process as smooth as possible.

Then the hard part starts.   Keeping your Promise.

Experience
November 7, 2019

Experience

The first time a client buys from you is for both of you, a journey into the unknown.

They hesitate between desire and fear.   Between the desire to get to where they want to be and the fear that you might not get them there.   Or that you might.

You hesitate between the desire for the chance to prove what you can do for them, and the fear that you will actually have to do it.

A good way to overcome the hesitation is to take a test drive together.   Show how you will look after them on the journey, demonstrate the value you will deliver, let them see what it feels like to be travelling with you beside them.  Help them to experience your promise first hand.

If you can take them a little nearer to their goal, there’s a good chance they’ll ask you to complete the journey with them.  If not, at least you’ll know now that you aren’t the right travelling companion for them.

Evaluation
November 6, 2019

Evaluation

Showing up in the right places makes it more likely that the people you want to serve will find you when they need you.   But it isn’t enough to simply find you.

They need to be sure that you are right for them; that what you do will give them what they want, that you will keep the promise you are making.  So they will want to evaluate before they take things further.

For you, that means providing the kind of information and evidence they need, and crucially, that they can research themselves – your website, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, third-party ratings, official records.

Of course it has to be true.   It has to be consistent with your Promise and who you are,  and it has to be consistent across all channels.

The good news (for me at least) is that the first stage of qualification is simply ‘Do I like you?‘.   And that means you can share much more of your own personality, values, and beliefs that you might think – more than you might initially feel comfortable with.

Because you don’t just want to attract the people who will like working with you, you want to attract people who will love working with you.  And you want to put off  the ones who won’t.

The easier you make it for the right people to work out that you are for them, the easier it will be for the wrong people to work out that you are not.

That makes everyone’s life easier.   Especially yours.

 

Purpose
October 28, 2019

Purpose

If there is one thing that human beings like better than making their own individual dent in the universe, it’s being part of something that promises to make an even bigger dent.

We crave purpose and meaning in our lives, and if we don’t get it from work, we look elsewhere for it.

‘Work’ becomes merely the means of achieving some of our ‘hygiene factors’ – a roof over our heads, food on the table – the things that enable us to pursue our purpose elsewhere.  In which case, ‘work’ probably doesn’t get our full attention, or our best energy.

One response is to starve people into spending more and more time ‘in work’, in order to simply acquire the basics.    That’s how you end up with a productivity paradox.

Much better, for everyone, to offer work with purpose.

The Ideal Client
October 24, 2019

The Ideal Client

There is a better way to find out who really is your ideal client.

Simply ask the question from a different perspective:

Who am I ideal for?

That way it’s easier to focus on what they want, not what you want.

All models are wrong
October 17, 2019

All models are wrong

Walmart is a planned economy the size of Sweden.   It isn’t a republic or a democracy.  It’s a complex, strictly controlled, bureaucratic hierarchy, with the Walton family at the top.

That isn’t what most small business owners want, so for them, hierarchy isn’t such a useful model.

One alternative is to think of a business as a system – “a group of interacting or interrelated entities that form a unified whole.”

And since “the system is what the system does”, it also helps to define what a business system is meant to do.

For most business owners I know, that is to make and keep a promise to customers, employees and community, and in the process make enough money to keep doing it well.

This model of a business is wrong.  But it might be more useful for you.

It doesn’t have to be like this.
October 16, 2019

It doesn’t have to be like this.

We are told all the time (in words and deeds) that ‘there is no alternative’ to the way our current global economic model works.  Communism was a disaster, anarchy would be chaos, revolution would be tragic.

And yet as families, villages, schools, clubs, friends – as ordinary people we happily operate all those alternative models, all the time, without even thinking about it.  We even do it inside the ultimate capitalist entity, a business.  In fact, capitalism depends on us operating like this.

As David Graeber points out: “we’re all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.”

We’ve worked like this for at least forty thousand years, getting on for two hundred thousand years.   Which begs the question.   Which model is the exception?