Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 45 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

August 4, 2022

How much value you create

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:

If you save them money, how much? What does that add up to over time?
If you save them time, how much? What was that time costing them before you? What does it cost them now?
If you save them effort, how much? What was that costing them before you? What does it cost them now?
If you enable them to get more from the same level of resources, how much? How much does that add up to over time?
Does any of this enable them to sell more, or to sell at a higher price? How much more? How much higher? That’s part of the value you add too.

Measuring how much value you create for clients isn’t easy. It is possible.

If you put your mind to understanding your clients first.

August 3, 2022

How people feel about how you do it

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.

August 2, 2022

What it costs you to do

An entire industry has grown out of working out what it costs a business to do the things it does. Along with a panoply of tools and techniques. When I was studying at London Business School, I loved it.

It turns out that there is a simple measure that’s good enough for most cases.

Time. Or more accurately, duration.

If you know how many clients you deal with, how long it takes for each client to go through your Share and Keep Promise process, and what your total operating costs are over that time period, then you know what it costs you to do what you do for each client you serve.

If you don’t like the answer you can drill down into Share Promise or Keep Promise to find out where things could work better. And so on.

So how do you measure duration?

By logging events that are of interest and adding up the time that’s elapsed between them.

I’m sure you already note these events: 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 may even collect them automatically – they’re in your CRM, or your accounting system, they might even be in your workflow management system. String them together for each client and you’ve got some extremely useful data. Combine this with some other equally simple metrics and you’ve got the kind of process feedback you can use to grow your business efficienty and sustainably if that’s what you want.

A little bit of Discipline makes a lot of Daring possible.

August 1, 2022

Improvement

Improving how you make and keep your promises starts with feedback.

You don’t need to start with the whole thing – just the bit you are currently uneasy about. So, if you’re attracting plenty of business right now, you can skip Share Promise and concentrate on Keep Promise. Or if you’re confident you can Keep promise efficiently and effectively, but want to reach more clients, start with Share Promise. If you’re looking to move into new markets, start with Package Promise.

Wherever you start, there are only really 3 things you need to measure:

what it costs you to do
how people feel about how you do it
and ideally, how much value you create for your client as a result

And if you can measure these as a side-effect of doing the job, so much the better.

That way you don’t even have to be there.

July 29, 2022

Do what’s obvious

My friend Kevin Steinlechner gave me a brilliant piece of advice this morning:

“Do the obvious thing.“

We’re so easily seduced by the novel, the arcane, the difficult thing. The thing that will impress everyone around us, and make them think we’re a genius.

But we can often have more impact by simply acting on the obvious.

Like talking to the people we wish to serve.

Like giving your team the ability and autonomy to Share and Keep your Promise on your behalf.

Like paying people enough to actually live on.

Like banning single-use plastics.

Like insulating homes.

Like leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

These things are so obvious, why haven’t we already done them?

July 28, 2022

A thought…

What is it exactly that the people you serve are trying to achieve? What’s the job they are trying to get done? (Hint: it’s not ‘buy your product or service’).

How do they go about getting that job done? What’s the process they follow to achieve it? What difficulties do they encounter in that process? How can you remove those difficulties for them? How can you make the process simpler/easier/cheaper/safer/more effective?

What if you organised your business around these things, instead of around your own job to be done? (Hint: that’s probably ‘sell my products/services’)

Just a thought.

July 27, 2022

Why try to be a unicorn when you can be a zebra?

Last week, someone sent me a link to this article from Harvard Business Review:

“Lessons from Germany’s mid-sized giants”

If you’re interested in what makes small businesses successful, it’s well worth a read.

Ignore the points made at the end – that’s just wishful thinking on the part of management consultants. These companies don’t need outside interference, or to look more like their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. They’ve been working well this way for decades and are likely to continue.

For me, it’s an encouraging article, that shows that given the right environment it is possible to be a global business and operate humanely at home and abroad.

Why try to be a unicorn when you can be a zebra?

I’d like to think there are many such businesses hidden away here in the UK too. I’m unlikely to find out of course, because if there are, they won’t be looking at social media.

July 26, 2022

Reality TV

Since, as usual at this time of year, there’s been nothing on TV, we’ve been catching up on ‘Connections’ with James Burke. A fascinating ‘alternative view of change’ first broadcast in 1978.

Watch it here, at Internet Archive while you can.

What the series shows is that change (or as some like to call it ‘progess’) is not linear at all.

Discoveries are sometimes made on purpose, but almost as often they are made by accident, as a side effect of looking for something else, or as a failed experiment, or by someone coming at it from a different perspective. Often they were ignored completely, until enough of them were in place for others to put them together and create something new.

And as we know from the history of steam power, gunpowder and moveable type printing, if the social conditions weren’t conducive, they were often simply abandoned or used for pure amusement for centuries.

Serendipity, obliquity and culture play such an important part, that it’s almost impossible to predict where future change will come from.

What we can do is keep ourselves aware of the bigger systems, cultural and scientific, which are the drivers and sources of change – ecology, physics, capitalism, politics, the carbon cycle. That way, we can at least have an idea of where the impacts of change might be felt, and decide if we want it or not.

That means learning about how our world works. It takes effort, and often a bit of digging to find the material – which in itself tells us something about the system we currently live in.

‘Connections’ is the kind of reality tv we used to make. The kind I’d like to see more of.

July 25, 2022

That Question

What question do you get asked over and over again about your product or service?

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

What could your people do with the time they spend answering it?

July 22, 2022

My weird habit

I have a weird habit.

If I’m in a loo where the toilet roll holder is empty, and there are toilet rolls around to refill it. I refill it.

It doesn’t matter whose loo it is. A client’s, a friend’s, a department store’s, a pub’s. I’m sat there anyway, the job needs doing, so I do it.

Imagine, if everyone did this, how much more comfortable office life would be?

A small example of what happens when responsible autonomy is paired with direct and immediate feedback.

Now imagine what your business could be like if you took this approach everywhere.