CEO’s Corner: Best advice I’ve ever discovered

One of the most asked questions to me is “Do you have any advice to a new business owner?” – my typical advice was always “Be a Pesimist.  In business, you should always assume that things will go wrong – it’s the only way to prepare yourself for when they do.”

But I was wrong.  That’s the second best peice of advice.  Lately, I’ve been working on a new RIA development project that will revolutionize how small businesses operate, and a core aspect of this application has made me review the reasons that my own businesses have succeeded or failed; and more specifically, where they’ve failed, what was the cause of this?

I realized that the main reason I failed was because of a lack of business automation.  I realized the second reason I failed was because I didn’t preapare for the first reason – I didn’t develop what I like to call ‘workflows’.

Each resource (whether it be a pencil, a client or an employee) that enters a business has a specific flow it should always follow.  These flows are completely mapable and are typically predictable.

There are many different ways to refer to an element’s workflow, such as a life cycle.

As a good business practice, every object and/or resource of a business should be given a life cycle.  Every action taken through the business should be given a workflow.  There are many reasons for this, and I will go into these in detail.

Workflows and life cycles are the building blocks for process and business automation.  In these times, business automation is becoming more and more prevalent as it helps allow less people to do more work in the same amount of time.  As a fresh CEO, you are going to be absolutely overwhelmed with your responsibilities.  Establishing workflows can help you avoid that overwhelming sense of utter doom every time you sit down to do your books.

And, lets face it – you’re the CEO.  You like things being done your way, and as a small business owner, they always get done your way, because frankly, you’re the one who’s doing it.  But what happens when you hire a new employee to take over some of these responsibilities?  Do you think they will complete the tasks the way that you expect, right off the bat?

If you establish these workflows now, before you hire employees, you can figure out what works and what doesn’t work.  You can determine what needs to be done every time, and what doesn’t – and you can make sure that you are consistent as a business unit.

Training Time is reduced as you’ll know every step of every task.  Most of the tasks that I do I just do without thinking – an employee may not have the same intuition.  Humans love repetition – it allows them to get good at what they do, and keeping tasks consistent allows employees to become proficient.

Control and Decision Making is left to management.  Your employees just have to follow your instructions instead of trying to generate their own flows, meaning critical decisions stay within the control of the business owner and management teams.

Consistency is guaranteed (to a point), as long as the flows are followed through.

Productivity is increased dramatically.

A key point of Business Automation is determining which work flows can be automated. (taken over by a computer instead of a person)  This can reduce your overall amount of work while increasing productivity.

The need of constant supervision decreases over time.  As your staff become more proficient in repeating the tasks required of them, they will require less supervision.  If you do not have established workflows, typically there must be a manager present at all time to manage every aspect of production.

And as for products, physical resources and supplies, start thinking about their flows as well – a pencil, for example, goes from ‘ordered’ to ‘in inventory’ to ‘removed from inventory’ to ‘consumed’.

If you start monitoring these items now, you’ll be able to track the lifespan of these items, and by doing routine research you’ll be able to predict your expenses.  If you know that a pencil lasts around 13 days, you know you’ll need to buy one for every 13 days.

Remember that one flow may have multiple branches – a pencil can also be stolen, broken, etc. so you should try to map out every possibility.  It’s your job to be prepared, after all!

(Don’t have a headache yet?  Wait until you start realizing that some flows directly interact and depend on eachother, like an employee and a disciplinary action flow!)

Ultimately, you need to remember that employees really don’t want to think for themselves.  They expect you to think for them – and in order to grow, you’ll need to hire them.  So make their lives (and your life) easier, and start mapping out all of your workflows es and lifecycles!

Technology is Power

I have always wondered what the impact of having automated technology, like automated lead management, schedule management, account management and payroll would do to a budding company.

Every enterprise level business has automated business tools.  They have CRMs for customer management, ERPs for enterprise accounting management, HRMS for human resource management, project management gateways for…  Well, you get the drift.

What would happen if we give the power of these tools to small and medium businesses?  What would happen if you gave the average small office organization the power to do more…  For less?

I have been doing some research lately on this subject and I’ve heard three general excuses on why people don’t operate a CRM:

• Cost is too high.  This is a multi-faceted issue…  Cost is not necessarily price – it includes:
  • System downtime
  • Training time – too steep of a learning curve
  • Implementation costs
  • Licensing fees
  • IT support costs
• Our current system works fine.
• We only have one person that deals with that.  No one else needs to know that information.  (This is typically the CEO talking about him or herself)

Unfortunately, these companies desperately need to hire someone in operations.

There are four rules about employees that we must remember:

1. Employees won’t always know what to do,
2. Employees won’t always do what they’re supposed to do, and…
3. Ultimately, they will quit. (or retire!)

The goal of every business should be to create a residual income, so why create a dependency on the owner or CEO?  Any good owner would want to move onto his next venture – and establishing the infinite loop is very important to the sustainability of your company.

For these CEOs that create a dependency on themselves, how do you enforce that your employees are following through with your requirements and tasks, and more importantly, that your customers are being handled properly if you’re, lets say, on a business trip to another country?

It would be great if you could check on the status of your business – your clients – your projects – and your employees from any computer, anywhere in the world, wouldn’t it?

Enter the Business Management System…  <more to come>

Call Center Dreams

I’m working on a conceptual call center management application based on my call center experience.  I’ve used all of the applications, and I’m very aware of the flaws of the call center world.  There are so many things we can do to improve the flow, yet none of them are done.  This is extremely prevalent in outsourced call centers and typically, cannot be solved by the client, but there are still things that can be done to improve flow.

First of all, they should start using web technologies, not remote desktop.  The majority of call centers I’ve worked at use remote desktop to access our call center apps.  There are MANY problems with this from a user interface perspective:

• Some systems will run at full speed, some will run quite slowly – if at all sometimes!  (as they are remote desktop and rely on the network)
• There’s no integration between the applications.
• Some call center positions that I’ve had have required us to open a total of 14 different applications (!) before we even started working!
• Adding more features or adding another workflow typically means adding another program.  (Or 5…)

Employees hate the fact that they have to start work 15 minutes before they get paid to get these systems up.  IT hates having a thousand programs and systems to support, and training makes new agents cry.

Why in the hell do we still have these problems?  I mean, really.  With the advent of RIAs, these applications should be easily built into a single front-end – even if they have 25 back-ends.  What’s more is they can be completely and entirely web-based – no more need to open 14 different programs and windows.

When does simplicity go too far?

One thing that always gives me a headache is the question of, “Are we going too far?”

Simplicity is excellent – Photoshop increases photographers’ efficiency by 10s of 100s of folds.  This is excellent, of course, to the photographer, because it enhances their ability to do their job.  This becomes a problem, however, because with the advent of 10 megapixel cameras, SLR technology and amazing do-it-yourself kiosks, the tasks that the non-technological professional photographer does to enhance the quality of their photos is self-destructive.  We can now duplicate effects that would take hours upon hours to do as a traditional professional photographer in a matter of seconds.

The problem with the simplification of software is the ignorance we gain by using it.  We lose respect for these who spend hours upon hours perfecting their trade, because we can duplicate what they do in mere seconds compared to what takes them hours, sometimes days to do.

I guess that ignorance is bliss, right?