Today I will mostly be standing in line.
I’m joining the Queue for Climate and Nature, organised by Business Declares and Business Stand Up.
I’m not brave enough to glue myself to a road, or throw baked beans at a painting, but I can queue quietly and amicably with hundreds of other business people like me, to sign a book.
A thousand people whispering at once can make quite a bit of noise.
Maybe I’ll see you there?
“There were boisterously spiced empanadas, tamely flavoured empanadas, tightly crimped and crisp empanadas and loosely folded, sloppy empanadas. The standardised recipe couldn’t overrule the uniqueness of each cook, their personality, and experiences, which they inevitably infused into their cooking.”*
This is why you should never be afraid to produce an OurScore for your customer experience. Like a musical score, it looks prescriptive, but each and every performance of it will be unique.
This is also why you should never automate more than the admin parts of it. Only humans can humanise an experience.
Here are 10 positive reasons why you might want to disappear from your business:
– You want to spend more time with your family.
– You want to start a family.
– You want to write a book.
– You want to go into politics.
– You want to start another business.
– You want to follow a passion.
– You want to start a charity.
– You want to take a sabbatical.
– You want to retire.
– You want to sell your business.
And here are 3 very positive reasons why you should do it before you need to:
– You want your business to make a bigger impact now. Serve more customers, better, support more people working in it, and make that work more meaningful and fulfilling for them.
– You want your business to become an asset, not a job. The source of your pension, an income for your family, an income stream for your next venture. To sell it for more money.
– You want your business to take on a life of its own. To become your legacy, continuing to make an impact long after you’ve gone.
Bonus:
– You still get to do whatever you want to do.
– You can still enjoy working in your business if you want to.
A modest amount of Discipline when you’re a team of 3 to 5 people, makes all this Daring possible. More quickly than you think.
Ask me how.
I am not a monster.
I’m a gap.
The gap between what you, Founder, have in your mind’s eye, and what you Team, have in yours.
Between you, you fill that gap with a monster. With your assumptions and presumptions, your takings for granted and second-guessings of motivation.
You make everyone owls when they want to be flowers.
You make everyone Hydes when they want to be Jekylls.
You make fog where there should be clarity and purpose.
You make mediocrity where there should be excellence.
You make a straitjacket where there should be a springboard.
You build a pin-factory where there should be an orchestra.
You make noise where there should be be music.
You focus on me when you should be focusing on the people and the world, you serve.
You, Founder, you, Team, between you, you make me a monster.
But you can unmake me.
All you have to do is share with each other.
Founder, share your system for making and keeping promises with the team. Team, share your ideas for doing it better with the Founder.
Everyone, share the work of doing it. Not just the concrete tasks, but the emotional labour, the feelings. Not just the technicalities, but the customer experience, the bit that wows..
Make everyone a Boss, and watch your floor become a springboard, owned by everyone. With enough give to support different people, enough resistance to help them really take off. Watch that pin-factory morph into an orchestra, delivering customer-delighting performances that have people coming back for more.
That thing you all call ‘The Boss’.
It’s not a monster.
It’s just a gap.
When you close it, ‘the Boss’ will disappear.
And everyone will be free.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
‘The Boss’ is a monster.
It makes us Hyde when we want to be Jekyll.
It makes us owls when we want to be flowers.
It makes us angry and resentful when we want to please.
It makes us defensive when we want to improve.
It makes us sullen when we want to co-operate.
It makes us passive when we want to be proactive.
It makes us jobsworth’s when we want to take responsibility.
It makes us dot i’s and cross t’s when we want to be making a dent in the world. A dent that matters.
We can’t ignore ‘The Boss’. We spend all day watching it, second-guessing how it feels, how it will react, covering our backs by passing jobs up. It feels like we care more about ‘The Boss’ than we do about our clients.
It’s everything we hate about being employees – the workflows, the time-sheets, the endless check-ins, the inability to fix things we know are wrong, never getting to see the big picture – everything that gets in the way of doing a great job. Everything that stops us focussing on what really matters – the client.
No wonder we can’t wait to get away of an evening.
‘The Boss’ is a monster.
We know exactly who it is. And we don’t care who knows it.
It’s not a monster.
It’s just a gap.
When you close it, ‘The Boss’ will disappear.
And everyone will be free.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
‘The Boss’ is a monster!
It makes me Hyde when I want to be Jekyll.
It makes me owl when I want to be flowers.
It makes me angry and distrustful, when I want to inspire.
It makes me nit-pick when I want to mentor.
It makes me micro-manage when I want to delegate.
It makes me control when I want to lead.
It makes me focus on the day-to-day when I want to make dent in the universe. A dent that matters.
I can’t ignore ‘The Boss’. I spend my evenings and weekends wrestling with it. It won’t let me leave. I can’t go on holiday – not properly. My body may be on the beach but my head is wondering what the monster’s up to while I’m away. I’m often on the phone or laptop, checking in.
‘The Boss’ is everything I hated about working for someone else – the workflows, the time-sheets, the pointless meetings – everything that got in the way of doing a great job. Everything that stopped us focussing on what really matters – the client.
Everything I swore I’d never become.
‘The Boss’ is a monster.
Shhh.
Sometimes I think it’s my team.
It’s not a monster.
Its just a gap.
When you close it, ‘The Boss’ will disappear.
And everyone will be free.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
If you’re lucky, you start your business with someone else, or maybe even as a trio.
Two heads, three heads are better than one.
Being a co-Boss helps you share the hard work of getting going, gives you a sounding board for ideas, and brings additional valuable resources to the business – whether that’s talents, time or even money.
But good things do come to an end, often perfectly amicably. People grow, their circumstances change, their talents call them to new things.
That’s fine, if people need to move on, they need to move on.
The problem lies with what they take with them, locked inside their heads, no longer accessible to the business they’ve left.
Perhaps they were the operations person, who just made everything work. Perhaps they were the sales wizard, effortlessly charming clients aboard. Or the finance pilot, keeping a firm hand on the money tiller. Or perhaps they were the ideas person, driving the forward movement of the business.
Obviously, if you’d known this was going to happen, you’d have found a way to pull all that accumulated know-how out of their heads before they went. But if not, how do you reconstruct that missing part?
The good news is that although what your co-Boss knew is still inside their head, it’s actually also inside the heads of everyone else in the business, and, crucially, inside the heads of your clients.
It may not be written down, but it is there, and can be re-constructed into an explicit Promise of Value, along with the Customer Experience Score that follows from that, turning buried knowledge into a practical, usable, evolvable asset.
Only, once you’ve dug it up, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with everyone in the business. Then share the work of living it so everyone can become your co-Boss.
Because many heads are always better than one.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Even if a Boss has already disappeared.
If you want maximise your chances of selling your house, you have to de-clutter and tidy it up. Obviously. It pays to make sure it’s in good repair too.
But in order to make it as attractive as possible to as wide a range of buyers as possible, you may well have to re-decorate and re-style it too.
To show off its potential.
To take the ‘you-ness’ out of it.
To make it look like you’ve already left.
The advice for selling a business is similar. De-clutter, tidy-up, make sure it’s profitable, show it has growth potential, take you out of it. Make it look like you’ve already left. Go corporate.
But what if it’s you that makes your business amazing? What if that’s what keeps your clientele coming back? What if that’s what drives the recurring revenue?
My advice?
By all means take you out of the business, but keep the ‘you-ness’ in.
Go further, embed your ‘you-ness’ into the business so firmly that only like-minded people would want to buy it. They’d love it so much they’d pay extra for the ‘you-ness’, because for them it’s also ‘me-ness’.
Become a Disappearing Boss. Build the ‘you-ness’ (actually the ‘we-ness’) into the fabric of the business, into the way it works, so that it can never ‘go corporate’. Not even as it grows.
Go even further, don’t sell at all. Let it instead. To people who love it the way it is and can see how to take that unique potential forward as your legacy and theirs. Who will want to keep it in good condition, and even replicate its success in other locations.
By then, you’ll have those people in your business already. They will have helped you build it.
Discipline makes Daring possible
This weekend’s lesson from “Braiding Sweetgrass” was a lovely one for me.
4 rules for conservation:
That last one is the kicker. Sometimes the universe knows what you really need better than you, and tells you so. If you have to wrest what you think you need from the earth, break branches to pull it from the tree, if it feels like dragging blood out of a stone, whoever you’re asking isn’t ready to give themselves yet.
The only thing to do in that case, is to think about what you need, not what you want. Better still, think about what that being you’re asking to give really needs.
Then come back and try again.
Discipline makes Daring possible
Being a lynchpin in someone else’s business is a good career strategy.
If you are the someone else whose business it is, you might want to think about whether it’s a good business strategy.
A Customer Experience Score isn’t just for capturing your expertise, although that’s where it usually starts.
It can get you up from over that barrel too, by capturing others’ expertise.
Then you can make everyone a lynchpin in your business for the right reason.
Because of what they do, and how, rather than what they know.
Discipline makes Daring possible.