Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 30 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

April 26, 2023

Adjusting the system 2 – Automation

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

Another relatively straightforward adaptation is to automate a part of your Customer Experience Score.

This could be an entire Activity, or it might be something that makes up a small part of lots of Activities.

You could for example automate your Enrol Prospect Activity, so that people can sign up online. Or some of your Show Up Activities – for example, placing ads or posting to social media or even commenting on other people’s posts. Or your entire Keep Promise Activity, if it is relatively simple.

Having your Customer Experience Score written down makes it easier to spot where automating an oft-repeated task that is part of many larger Activities would make sense.

For example, emails.

If your business involves lots of regular communication with clients – to request information or notify them of actions taken or remind them of actions they need to take, it makes sense to automate the sending of these emails. Especially if you want the emails received to be consistent in tone and language.

This is the kind of task that people hate doing, and so take shortcuts with, because it doesn’t feel essential to the rest of the process. It’s also the kind of task that happens at the beginning of a lot of important Activities, giving plenty of opportunity for silly copy and paste errors that will make your client feel a little less valued and a little more wary about how well you’re Keeping your Promise for them.

It’s also the kind of task that’s easy to automate well. You can create templates, written by a human to a human, then use software to schedule, personalise and send them to clients. Done well, this saves time and embarassment for you and your team, without feeling robotic for your clients.

Whichever part of your Score you consider automating, here are some questions to ask yourself:

For a human being, is this drudgery? Repetitive, mechanical, requiring a level of attention that’s difficult to maintain?
Is this something that people do better than machines or software? Does it involve interaction with other humans, making it unpredictable, and requiring empathy? Or does it involve the application of creativity, experience, judgement, wisdom?
Will this lead to our clients doing more of the work themselves? Is that what they want? How many will we lose as a result? How many could we attract? Could it be an option rather than a replacement for the way we do it now?
Will it be worth it? How much capacity will this free up for us to spend on being more human or offering more valuable services? Will that save us more money than it costs to automate?

And above all, this one:

Is this consistent with my Promise of Value?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

April 25, 2023

Unicorns

For investors, a unicorn is a business that is capable of becoming a monopoly, a monopsony or something close to either. Think Google, Amazon, the ‘big four’ supermarkets – the ‘big four’ anything.

Companies like these control so much of the market that they can pretty much set their own prices and guarantee high profits for a long period.

Monopolies, monopsonies and oligopolies are very good for investors and top managers.

They are very bad for free markets, innovation and consumers.

Why then would we want our governments to spend money nurturing them?

I’d rather they spent it nurturing zebras instead.

April 24, 2023

Adjusting the system 1 – Props

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

One of the simplest adaptations can be to add, remove, repurpose or refine a Prop – a thing a team member needs to play a Role.

It might be as simple as adding a new set of teaspoons to your kitchen area; adding a footrest to a workstation or replacing computers and laptops.

Props aren’t just physical either. You might refine an online form you use to capture information or upgrade software, or replace that software with something new, that supports your Customer Experience Score better, or more cheaply.

And like any good theatre, or film production company, you’ll recycle and re-purpose Props – that old computer may no longer cope with the demands made on it, but perhaps it can become a backup location for important data, or perform some less onerous task, or be cannibalised to contribute to a new machine.

Thinking about everything you use in your business as a Prop – there to support your people in delivering the customer experience – means you can be more considered in how you choose what to buy, and how you use it.

Remember to be considered in how you dispose of it too. You never know, your cast-offs could become essential Props for someone else.

April 21, 2023

Employee Ownership

You already know you want your employees to own your business.

How about getting them to run it too?

That would enable them to really take ownership.

And if you enable them to do that before you hand it over, you get to go, or stay, as and when you please.

It only takes a year.

Ask me how.

April 20, 2023

Extrapolating consequences

A few questions to ask about feedback of all kinds:

What’s causing it?
Have we seen it before?
Is it a trend?
What happens if we do nothing?
Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
What are the consequences of that?
1. What happens if we do nothing?
2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
3. What are the consequences of that?
  1. What happens if we do nothing?
  2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
  3. What are the consequences of that?
    1. What happens if we do nothing?
    2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
    3. What are the consequences of that?
      1. What happens if we do nothing? – you get the picture. Repeat until you are are confident to stop.

Hint: Most of us stop too soon.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

April 19, 2023

What do you do with all that feedback?

Well, you can ignore it, and carry on working according to your existing assertions about how the system works.

Or you can examine it, and decide whether your existing assertions remain valid (or maybe valid enough for now).

Or you can examine it, and decide whether you need to change those assertions, and how you work within the system.

This can be more difficult than it looks, because you need to be conscious of your assertions, and of how you currently work.

Fortunately, if you have your Promise of Value clearly defined and articulated, and a working Customer Experience Score in play, you’ll know both well enough to be able to extrapolate the consequences of what you see in the feedback, and see where things need to be redesigned.

Discipline makes evolution possible too.

Ask me how.

April 18, 2023

The others

I’ve been reading this book over the weekend, and I have found it absolutely shocking.

Not for any of the revelations around the females of various species, but for the fact that it’s taken about 100 years since Darwin for anyone to actually start looking at them! Even longer for findings to be taken seriously.

Only 56 years ago, Desmond Morris could opine that the reason women have breasts is because men missed the ‘fleshy hemispheres’ of their bottoms once they switched to face-to-face sex. And this is science.

Your prospects don’t know what you know, they don’t necessarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.

Your team don’t know what you know, they don’t necesarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.

And so do you.

Most of us are not scientists, we don’t have time to run meticulous experiments, but we could radically improve our understanding of each other by regularly asking 1 simple question:

What is it be like to be them?

Followed up by a bit of finding out.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

April 17, 2023

Services

One of our case studies at London Business School, involved a company that supplied rags to industry. Rags – textiles at the absolute end of their useful life might seem to be the ultimate commodity. Almost worthless. How could a business supplying them ever hope to create unmissable value for it’s customers?

Simple.

By surrounding that commodity product with deep layers of service.

By getting under the skin of it’s clients; understanding where and how they used the rags and what the problems could be. Then making sure they more than met every rags need in the way they sold, delivered, collected and disposed of them for the client.

By maintaining that intimacy with their clients through the people they interacted with – the people who delivered and collected, so that every new need could be anticipated and added to the service.

In those days, adding service meant adding people, because people are the only way to create value for other people.

That’s still true, even if nowadays your first thought would be to build an online platform.

Technology doesn’t create new value overall, it can only make it cheaper for a particular business to deliver its service – until another particular business catches up or overtakes, or undercuts (Ever wondered why hand car washes have replaced the automated ones? Cheap (slave) labour, makes machinery unprofitable).

So if the key to profitability is service, and service means adding people to deal with people, maybe we have an answer to the climate crisis?

Stop making things, use what we already have (e.g. enough clothing for 3 times the global population), and pay people well to support other people – regenerating our environment; housing; education; health; repair and recycling; art; music, entertainment… the list is endless.

We wouldn’t be short of work, and we might well be happier.

After all, this is how we did things for most of our existence on this planet.

One day we might realise we don’t even need money to make this work.

April 14, 2023

Getting ahead

Of course, if you embed your unique promise of value into the way your business works well before you decide to exit, you get all the benefits of exit, without actually having to do it.

You can even continue to grow your business at the same time.

Applied at the right time, Discipline really does make Daring possible.

Ask me how.

April 13, 2023

Sellers beware

When my mother sold her architect-designed corner-plot bungalow, the buyers told her they were aiming to set up their son in it. They quibbled over everything, nibbled away at the asking price until in the end, she sold for much less than she’d hoped.

Then they knocked it down and built 3 new executive homes on the plot.

There are many reasons why a trade buyer would want your business.

If you care about what happens to it, to your staff and to your clients after you’ve exited, it’s worth knowing what those reasons could be, because buyers are not necessarily going to tell you:

They want your client list, but not your staff, offices or name.
They want your brand, but not the effort that goes into maintaining it.
They want your market share, to add to theirs, so they look good to potential investors or buyers, but not your staff, or your products and services.
They want to take you out as a competitor.
They want your business as part of a portfolio.
They want to run it themselves as a going concern.

Whatever the reason, they’ll usually want you to stay on as a consultant, and the final price will be dependent on performance during the transition. And all too often that transition destroys value, while you have to watch it happen.

Just as it’s easier to protect the value of your house by making sure it’s in tip-top condition with everything working like clockwork, it’s easier to protect your business’s value if you’ve systemised it. Even easier if you’ve also documented that system in a Customer Experience Score.

Doing so also opens up other exit opportunities:

Pass it on to family, who already know it runs profitably without you.
Sell it to your employees, who already know how to run it profitably without you.
Sell it to one or more of your fans, who already know that your team can run it profitably without you.
Sell it to a like-minded entrepreneur, who wants to see your legacy carry on.
License it to any one of the above, on condition that is run the way you’ve designed it to run, in return for a percentage of the profits.

Build your unique promise of value into the way your business works before you sell, that way you’ll get to realise it all and leave a legacy other will recognise as yours.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.