by JimRaffel on January 2, 2012
Planning works. A year ago, I shared The 2011 Plan and last week I shared the success story of that plan when I wrote “How to make what you write come true.” Finding a planning method that works for you is, unfortunately, not so easy. I’ve settled on a method that combines Chris Brogan’s three words method and the visual thinking approach of Sketchnotes, which results in the drawing included with this post.
The 2012 Plan dissected
Growth – One of last year’s words was “customers” and it turned out to be the key word. We learned two important pieces of information about our customers in 2011: Who they are and where to find them online. Armed with that knowledge and the other two words in this year’s plan, significant growth of the ventures I am involved in is achievable.
Automate – Late last year, I had an “ah-ha” moment related to automation. A task worth doing manually is worth automating. If it’s not, then stop doing the task entirely. Your business is not truly systemized until most – if not all – of the business processes are automated. It takes more time to delegate and train those to whom you are delegating if the process is not automated. Automated tasks have a much higher probability of being done correctly.
Teams – It’s one thing to hire people to help you. It’s quite another to empower them to manage the team without you. This year, progress must happen without my involvement. Handing over business processes that have been automated is one way to ensure this outcome. While I can and sometimes will be a player on the teams I help create, I don’t intend to ever be the coach.
Back to growth
The strategy that came out of this planning exercise is: More and more of my time must be dedicated to tasks focused on long-term enterprise growth. Some might call this sales. I’ll be out searching for the relationships that allow us to partner our technology and knowhow with new audiences in 2012.
Here’s to an awesome 2012. Lets’ do this!
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by JimRaffel on June 15, 2011
The other day a commercial came on TV for a furniture-moving device. It was basically a simple machines (a lever and fulcrum) combined to make it easy to pick up the end of a piece of heavy furniture. Then, you could slip a plastic disk under the feet of the furniture and easily slide it across the room. While I have no idea if the device actually works, I was impressed with the back-to-basics simplicity of the idea.
What’s Simple in your Business or Industry?
Is there an area of your industry that others have made overly complex? Is it an area where a return to basics is actually a business or product opportunity? An example you say? Well how about 37signals’ Basecamp for project management. It’s really just organized to-do lists and attached conversation threads. No PERT and Gantt charts to understand. But you know what? It helps millions of people get more done each and every day.
More examples you say? Southwest Airlines’ no assigned seating. Just get the folks on the plane fast, and fly them where they are going for cheap. How about a cell phone with almost no physical buttons that basically prompts the use through anything they need to do? You know, the iPhone. It’s not a device you normally think of as simple, but that’s a big part of why they sell so many. It’s a very easy-to-use device.
In my own business, we’ve stripped a bunch of features out of our ProofPass.com product for a private label version of the service. It got me to wondering if we sometimes don’t over-complicate what could be simple. I first heard KISS – no not the rock band, but instead the Keep It Simple Stupid – principle in sales training decades ago.
In the context I learned about Keep It Simple Stupid, we were instructed to never confuse customers with too many choices. For example, if showing customers mattresses, we might have had 20 to pick from. You ended up being way more successful by showing them three and calling them, “good,” “better” and “best.” All this of course occurred after figuring out their approximate budget.
So, what are the ways you are going to Keep It Simple Stupid?
Photo Credit
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