I’ve worked in professional services firms, corporates, and now at LONDINIUM Espresso
One thing i’ve learnt is that while you can work around the clock on occasions to deliver on critical events it is not sustainable. Sounds obvious enough, but there’s an awful lot of us who press on regardless and keep working insane hours
I’m as guilty of it as anyone. I work well under pressure, indeed I produce my best work under pressure, and conversely my productivity is abysmal when there is no deadline looming
However any gains from sustained extreme hours are wiped out by a drop in productivity to the point where output for a 16 hour day can fall below what would be achieved in a laser focused period of time like 4 hours when you are well rested and fit
My objective going forward is to work fewer hours at a much higher level of intensity, and allocate the freed up time to regular exercise and activities completely disconnected from LONDINIUM
The result will be a better customer experience
Sustained extreme hours (which i would define as greater than 12 working hours per day in perpetuity) are not a badge of honour, they are the mark of a person not in control of their workload, which will manifest itself as a decline in the quality of their output the longer the behaviour continues. I’m going to make a concerted effort to change
It also means identifying activities in the business that are distractions and considering how they may be better executed, for example with automation, or completely eliminated if possible. Take a look at your own day and ruthlessly consider what might be completely eliminated
For example, I identified that offering a Royal Mail delivery service was consuming far too much of my time. The trouble was I was convinced that if I ceased offering it that we would lose customers. However the pain it was causing was such that I decided to give it a go and see what happened. If the sky caved in we could always reinstate it
Guess what? There was no discernible impact and it has given me back almost 5 hours a week in total, which I consider a huge chunk of time. There are many other examples I have implemented, but this one is sufficient to convey the general idea. Small artisan businesses need to have a laser focus on identifying non essential activities and eliminating them if they are to thrive
It is so easy to get bogged in your business, rather than standing upon it and being able to look around and consider your direction for the future and identify what is holding you back.
Management consultants of every stripe have built fortunes on the astute marketing of a relatively simple idea, which might even be labelled common sense in some quarters, as something profound
One such idea from a decade or so back was the need to be prepared to sacrifice ‘holy cows’ within your business. In other words things that you would intuitively ring fence from any restructuring activity. You might think this concept would only apply to corporates and multinationals, but i think they apply equally to small business too
The basic economic problem you are trying to solve is exactly the same as a large enterprise; how to wring the maximum from the resources you have available. To achieve this you should actively be reviewing every process in your business on an on-going basis
The trick is that in a large corporation this review would be hugely resource intensive in itself as everything has to be formalised and documented and sit within an ISO certified control framework, and no one wants to get their hands dirty so they need to be given a team to do the dirty work, blah, blah, blah
As a small business you can execute this review in your head every time you perform an activity and simply think to yourself, is there a smarter way i can do this, or better still, can we completely eliminate it? You can implement your change almost immediately and if it blows up in your face you can almost always switch it back, still having learnt a valuable lesson for a fairly nominal cost
Technology is moving at such a pace that i find it difficult to keep informed of the latest solutions available, even though i find it broadly interesting. The great news for small business is that almost all of these new technologies are vastly less expensive than the rigid, formal, overhead heavy technologies that they are challenging, which by virtue of their price point have only been accessible to large organisations until now
With the time you free up for yourself as a result of your process reviews, i would strongly suggest that you spend some of it keeping yourself informed of emerging technologies. A good way to do this is to speak to your tech savvy friends who regard keeping up with tech as fun, rather than a chore. Given that they will probably know something about your business they are also well placed to bring technologies to your attention going forward as they discover them