A long time ago in a business far far away I was working on a project that required a knowledge of how the business operated. As you’d expect, I interviewed the business owner asking her to describe her business to me, “Walk me through how everything works.” I said.
A business story
After about 20 minutes of her describing how she gets her clients, sells them a solution and then buys the solution I understood that she was operating a brokerage model. She knew her business model well and was making money. To grow, she wanted to build and own the system in the middle, the software infrastructure that ran the show. She was using a humdrum of various other tools like spreadsheets and multiple third party software apps, emailing, downloading, importing and exporting spreadsheets.
My next question was “How does that middle piece of the system work? Walk me through that.” That stumped her. She had no idea how the middle part worked. She knew parts of the information, the inputs and outputs of each of the nodes but she did not have a clear picture in her head of how the data went on a journey and produced a result. The middle was a black box to her.
The only thing I could do was to offer to find out myself, so I asked her for the keys. I spent the next week logging in and out of various systems, tracing codes and ID’s through spreadsheets, sketching diagrams until bingo! I had a clear A-Z of how her system worked, end to end.
I drew a simple diagram of the system on paper with some boxes and lines with arrows, nothing special. I walked her through all the parts of her system, the parts she knew and the unknowns in between them. I could see her eyes criss-crossing the diagram absorbing the system. After the 5 minutes it took to explain, she sat back open mouthed with a look on her face that I can only describe as serene, and said “Wow, I’ve never seen my business like that before.”
Blind spots.
I had mixed emotions about the result, I was pleased that she gained a valuable insight into her business, but I also realised in that moment that she was unlikely to succeed in her growth plans. Why did I think that? A business owner must know their business inside out, there can’t be anyone else who understands it better than them. It took me a few days to understand her complete system so why didn’t she? It was not that complex. This is not a cheap criticism of her or her business, business owners are warriors, and I’ve great respect for everyone who gets up every day and makes their dreams a reality.
So why didn’t she know her business? The best answer I’ve come across as to why this happens is that as a business owner you begin working in your business and never transition to the part where you’re working on their business.
Revolutionising starts here.
Whether you decide to stay small or go large it is fundamental that you understand your system. This is not a complicated thing, a lot of very large international consultancies would have you believe that it is, but I guarantee you it’s not.
Why must?you do this? You must do this because a blind spot in your business will kill you. Kill your business anyway and that could possibly trigger adverse health effects for you as the owner, and we don’t want that. Don’t panic. You know how you eat an Elephant*? One bite at a time.
*Please don’t kill any Elephants to test this out.
Bright spots, shining a light.
As the owner you must dedicate some time to working on your business. Here’s a place to begin. Get a dedicated notebook and sketch or list the parts of the business, 1 tiny part at a time. It doesn’t have to be Picasso you’re not looking for any awards. Personally I’d avoid software for this, I’ve found paper works best.
Here’s an example of 1 question you can ask yourself: How and where do my customers leave reviews and what do they say?
Just knowing that eliminates a blind spot. You only need to identify blind spots at this stage, you don’t need to take action to change them.
Do this slowly but routinely, pick a day spend a couple of hours in a café away from the business only focused on this task, remember 1 bite at a time.
It won’t take you long to compile a birds-eye view of your business. This will empower you. Once you have walked through your business on paper you’ll be able to form a mental model of your business. You’ll understand it in a way you probably didn’t before. The benefits of that are that you’ll be able to see risks within the business and you’ll also be able to see friction points.
Friction points in the model.
Friction points are things in your business that don’t run smoothly. Often they need only small adjustments to run better, but if you’re not aware of them you can’t fix them. “Trifles” Sherlock Holmes called them, he says that all of these trifles put together are always the key to solving the case. Within these small friction point improvements you’ll find that the adjustments you make will act as minor lubrications having a major effect on overall system, making it run smoother, deliver better experience for you, your customers, your staff and your bank balance.
I’ve done this process many times, the resulting list of friction points I wrote on my whiteboard. I titled the list with a clever title I’d seen somewhere, 100 things to do 1% better. Once I’d identified these things the process of improving them, working on my business was actually very enjoyable and fulfilling.
Leave a Reply