Are you building your business to sell or to last?
The answer makes a huge difference to what you do before you leave – even if in the end you sell it.
And if the answer’s ‘Neither‘?
Then your business dies with you.
There’s no right answer.
It just helps to be clear.
I’m facing a really interesting challenge at the moment.
Over many years I’ve developed a methodology, notation and software for capturing a Customer Experience Score in a way that suits people rather than machines. My notation is very simple. There aren’t many rules, and even those are only casually enforced.
This is because it’s all about making it easy for ordinary mortals. Whether that’s a business owner wanting to capture their desired customer experience or one of their colleagues wanting to learn what’s needed to deliver that experience. My aim is to make the software easy to learn and easy to use, and above all flexible so that the people using it can start scrappy, and build up to whatever level of detail works for them.
My challenge now is that some of those humans want to generate something more formal from their Score, something that needs clear rules to produce an output.
It’s interesting because it’s showing me how fuzzy (and sometimes inconsistent) my logic is. This is fine for humans, because humans are perfectly capable of interpreting fuzziness, and in any case I want to leave plenty of room for interpretation. It’s not so fine for software.
One approach would be to make the tool more rigorous, more constrained, more precise. In other words, to make it more machine-like. But that would mean adding levels of detail that would soon become excruciating for any ordinary mortal.
No, my work is all about liberating humans to be human, so I have to find another way, and I think it’s this: If humans are good with fuzziness and nuance, and machines are not, let the machine ignore all that and concentrate on the essentials.
For stupid machines, the answer might just be to keep it simple.
I’m pretty sure you’ll recognise what type of plane this is.
“It’s a Spitfire!” I hear you yell.
Of course it is.
But not the one that R. J. Mitchell is famous for. The Spitfire picture here is a Mark XVI, a variant of an earlier variant, the Mark IX.
You see, Mitchell created the Spitfire Promise of Value – a fast, high-performing plane that is easy to fly.
After Mitchell’s premature death in 1937, his colleagues continued to improve and build on Mitchell’s original design, to produce better Spitfires, adapted to different tasks, eventually creating 24 different Marks. All still fast, high-performing and easy to fly, and each one clearly recognisable as a Spitfire to small boys everywhere, despite their differences.
That’s what happens when you decide to become a Disappearing Boss. You may disappear, but your vision won’t.
In fact it might just get bigger.
There’s a talent war going on.
Companies are spending a fortune searching for that perfect new recruit – you know, the one with 10 years experience of a 3-year old industry; who can bring fresh eyes to your business plus an intimate knowledge of how you do things; who will ‘go the extra mile’ for a bit less pay than the last person in that role, and none of the perks.
What if instead of looking for unicorns, you gave everyone in your business the responsibility and autonomy they crave, a Customer Experience Score to follow and a share of the profits they make?
You’d probably find there’s more than enough talent in your business already.
It’s just that you’re wasting it.
You’re probably familiar with the decision-makig matrix from Stephen Covey’s ‘7 habits of highly effective people’:
Davidjcmorris, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The problem is that this diagram doesn’t tell you what to do when everything is urgent, which is how things tend to be by the time we humans get round to dealing with them.
The answer is I think, to start dealing with all of them, focusing first on the things that will either have most impact, or will enable you to still be around to deal wth the other urgent things.
A story in today’s Science X Newsletter illustrates this perfectly.
Methane is 30 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but only hangs around in the atmosphere for about 10 years. So by reducing our methane emissions quickly (especially if we use captured methane to replace new fossil fuels along the way), we can have a big and rapid impact on global warming, while our strategies for dealing with CO2 are taking longer to have an effect.
Like so much else with the climate crisis, we already have solutions to hand, we just need to pick them up and use them.
What do you do when everything is urgent?
Take a deep breath.
Remind yourself that it’s not too late.
Then get started.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
When the idea for Crossrail was first floated years ago, I thought nothing of it. Abbey Wood station is 3 miles away. Too far to walk, and not a pleasant walk either. So I forgot about it.
Until TFL created a new bus route that took in the new station.
The thing that makes the new Elizabeth Line work for people like me isn’t the big, expensive part – the Crossrail system, it’s the bus that connects us to it. And that, plus all the other new bus routes created to serve the Elizabeth Line is what makes the expensive part worth all the investment.
Knowing where your business system ends matters.
Tempted to cut a ‘peripheral’ service for your customers?
Be careful. It may actually be the enabler for your core business.
On Saturday we tried out the Elizabeth Line to Paddington. Just to see what it is like.
Brilliant!
A bus from the end of our road, 30 minutes to Paddington.
On the way home we kept thinking of new places that would now be easy to reach, and some old places that would be even easier to reach.
This new line has opened new possibilities to many.
Can your business do that?
PS the clouds in the picture are actually piles of dust on the roof of the exit. Looking beautiful from this angle against the blue sky. Once you were out, you could see it was just dust. Magical though.
There’s another bit of feedback we should be using to improve our businesses – our side-effects.
Side effects are not necessarily intentional, but they are real.
They’re not necessarily negative either.
If as business owners, we truly want to ‘make the world a better place’, our improvement process must include getting feedback on our side-effects, then acting to minimise the damaging ones and maximise the enriching.
Otherwise we’re just not really viable.
Because one day, the negatives come back to bite us.
One of my favourite stories from business school was this one:
A sheet steel manufacturer was looking to sell their steel at a premium.
They looked carefully at who their customers were, and the process they went through to get their job done.
Their main customers were white goods manufacturers. Now, steel doesn’t come out of the mill white, so these customers needed a paint shop where they sprayed the shaped steel casings of their products white. There’s a reason they’re called ‘white goods’. Offering other colours would mean adding another paint shop or creating an expensive change-over process for your single paint shop.
The steel manufacturer worked out that by adding a small cost to their own production process, they could save their customers a large cost and enable them to offer their goods at a premium. It’s easier to paint sheet steel when it’s flat, at the end of your production process. So that’s what the steel manufacturer did.
“Buy steel from us and you can have any colour you like. And de-commoditise your products to boot”.
You don’t have to ask your clients intrusive questions about their finances to measure – or at least estimate – the value you create for them. You just have to understand something about how their business works.
Some things to think about:
Measuring how much value you create for clients isn’t easy. It is possible.
If you put your mind to understanding your clients first.
Finding out how people feel about how you do what you do is a bit harder to do than working out costs, because you can’t automate clients.
But if you stick to the idea of making it part of the process, you increase your chances of getting good feedback when you need it.
Remember those events you’re interested in? When a prospect makes an enquiry; when a prospect becomes a client; when you welcome a client onboard, when the particular promise you made to this client has been kept.
You probably already send an email in response to those events, possibly even several emails along the way. Why not include a simple satisfaction survey as appropriate?
The important thing here is to keep it really simple – no typing required, just clicks, and no taking the client off to some tedious questionnaire.
Keep the format to a prompt on a dimension that matters to them followed by a simple ‘It’s all good’/’It’s not good’, plus an option to explain if moved to do so. If people have strong feelings about how you do what you do, they will want to share them. It’s good customer care to enable that. Even better, an option to have someone call them to find out more. Keep the number of prompts down to 2 or 3 if you can.
One more thing. ‘People’ doesn’t have to just mean clients. Your team are people, your suppliers are people, your neighbours are people. Some of your shareholders are people. Finding out how they feel about how you do what you do might prompt some really interesting improvements.
A little bit of Discipline makes Caring possible.