Processes and Perfection.

Waking up is hard to do without coffee. My mother started giving me coffee when I was three years old - to try to stunt my growth. It didn't work.

So, there's a lot to do, so much to do in fact that it all has to be taken step by step. Shortcuts do not work, at least not very well. I'm a huge fan of documentation, of gathering information, organizing it and increasing accessibility to it. That solves a LOT of problems. It is why good companies develop "Standard Operating Procedures". An SOP is a step by step instruction on how to do any given task. Each step has a desired outcome. Everything you do should be associated with a desired outcome. It runs from accurately matching product to order to avoid returns or packing it in a manner so it does not get damaged in transit. So, I would like to talk about that a little bit.

Especially with small businesses - family run businesses or a sole proprietorship, there is a tendency for a very small handful of individuals to try to do everything themselves. Scaling to growth is not always easy. The threshold of exactly how much you can do and still be efficient about it usually hits a wall faster than one would expect. Starting out, too, you operate on the basis that you will always be there to take care of business. We can call that optimism bias - it's hard to factor the future. That's why there's contingency planning - for the days that you are too sick to get out of bed, or when after a year, you decide that you do need a vacation. Entrepreneurs can easily put in 80 hours a week and still never be done.

An Standard Operating Procedure assists you in scaling for growth by providing step by step instructions so that anyone who walks in the door can do your job. There are a lot of companies who define their profitability on less than a 10% profit margin. Okay, so some of them have some pretty fancy accounting tricks. We know that the bigger a company gets, the fancier those tricks get. That's a different story for a different day, though.

Lets look at that 10% margin. You take three days off in a month, that's a 10% net loss in work hours. Five percent of your products are returned for replacement by your customer? Is that a 5% loss? More than that, probably like 7.5-8% loss per item in actual work hours - which is fine if you are not at capacity, but then... if you aren't at capacity, you could have done things right the first time and not jeopardized customer satisfaction.

Yes, SOP's are boring, but they make it possible for you to have fun while being more productive. But, What does all of this have to do with BulletBlocker?

Ahhh, you're reading my mind! It has everything to do with every business, ever. My intention is to share as much as I can about what and how I'm doing in the course of developing our online program - to essentially build an SOP for social networking and online business development. I'll make it a little more interesting to read than a technical manual written in twelve languages in font size 1. A lot of it is not new, but some is. There are dozens, probably hundreds, of other examples out there you could use, too. Point is to get it all organized into one coherent set of documents that you can easily access anytime.

So, yes - we're going to have some fun - because if you look around at the economy, what you are seeing are the results of excessive fixation upon short-term results. If you focus on results, sometimes you'll get it right, most of the time you won't. Focus on the process and perfecting that process and your result will be consistently and predictably near perfect. There's always room for improvement. Perfection is impossible, because by the time you reach perfection, your standards for perfection will have changed.

Coffee is a good thing.