The Boss of You

In the ten years Emira and I have been run­ning our busi­ness together, we’ve devel­oped a high level of ESP. We often joke that we are inter­change­able, i.e. if you talk to one of us, we can pretty well chan­nel what the other might say in response. How­ever, there are also plenty of things we del­e­gate to one another almost entirely, so for instance I have done very lit­tle sales work in the course of those ten years, while Emira has done very lit­tle design work.

With Emira’s due date fast approach­ing, we have been doing some very hard think­ing on how to trans­fer knowl­edge between us so that as I move into the sales role in the com­pany (and while Emira is out of the office for a few months), I have all the resources I need to per­form a job that is mostly new to me. It’s sort of like train­ing for any other job, and it’s taught us a lot about how we might also del­e­gate work to our staff, both now and in future.

This is what a lot of peo­ple describe as “sys­tem­atiz­ing”. And in The E-Myth, Michael Ger­ber frames the same con­cept as a step­ping stone on the road to fran­chis­ing — which is def­i­nitely not our goal, but the idea still stands. And the idea is this: smart entre­pre­neurs avoid hav­ing their busi­ness rely on knowl­edge held by a sin­gle per­son, and instead cre­ate sys­tems for get­ting things done well, that can be repli­cated con­sis­tently by any­one with the appro­pri­ate skillset and training.

We’ve been doing a lot of this at Raised Eye­brow — and in fact, on many fronts we’ve always sys­tem­atized things, whether it’s cre­at­ing check­lists for our pro­gram­mers to use when they’re build­ing web­sites, devel­op­ing ques­tion­naires to use in our design work­shops with clients, or set­ting up tem­plates for doc­u­ments rang­ing from esti­mates to wire­frames and sign-off con­tracts. But of late we’ve been delv­ing into areas where we’ve never thought much about sys­tem­atiz­ing before: we’re look­ing for the sys­tems in our sales processes and our ser­vice offer­ings, to make it eas­ier and more effi­cient for some­one (i.e. me) with­out a lot of sales train­ing to walk our prospec­tive clients through the process of deter­min­ing the size and scope of their project, and pro­vid­ing them with a detailed and accu­rate esti­mate for the work required. This has been an eye-opening process for us, to say the least — and one of the insights we’ve had is that we’re not the only ones ben­e­fit­ing from it. Since we started talk­ing about our ser­vices in terms of “pack­ages,” for exam­ple, we’ve found that our clients are lov­ing it too. It helps them under­stand bet­ter the range of options that we offer, and where their project fits — and as a result, we’re get­ting bet­ter at keep­ing projects within scope (and there­fore within bud­get), and I sus­pect we will also see an upswing in client sat­is­fac­tion since when expec­ta­tions are clearly defined, they are much more eas­ily met (and ide­ally, exceeded).

I’m really excited to see where this sys­tem­atiz­ing process takes us. Obvi­ously there’s a cer­tain amount of self-interest here, in that I’m a lit­tle ner­vous about step­ping into the sales role and I’m really happy to have these new tools avail­able to me; but I’m also very con­scious that the invest­ment we’re mak­ing now has real long-term poten­tial, because once the sys­tems are in place, and we’ve doc­u­mented our processes, we’ll be much bet­ter posi­tioned to stream­line and improve them in future — as well as to move some of the work onto our employ­ees’ plates and free up our time for busi­ness devel­op­ment and other good things.

I’d love to hear your sto­ries on this sub­ject — are there sys­tems you’ve devel­oped (or hope to develop) that are mak­ing your busi­ness life bet­ter? Share them in the com­ments, or shoot ‘em my way on Twit­ter.