Over the last year working remotely at Process Street, I’ve been researching as I go. I survived on dumb luck and baseline writing skills.

However, in the last 30 days I’ve built a system to teach myself how to read more. I’ve built up a library of articles, authors, quotes, books, tips, and ideas I can draw upon whenever I need to write or find the motivation to keep going.

The best part is that I spent next to no extra time outside of work in order to do this, and it all boils down to five elements:

• Filling dead air with podcasts
• Setting up an RSS feed
• Always having a book on the go
• Productively procrastinating
• Following 50 people on Twitter

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Running a business is complex, especially when it’s unclear who is responsible for what.

To move your business from an informal organization to a well oiled machine, you need processes. There’s no getting around them.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Doyle Albee, host of PR is Dead and president of PR firm ‎Metzger Albee.

Public relations expert Doyle Albee shares his stories, tips, and processes on building a PR strategy for your business.

We chat about everything from building relationships with reporters to knowing the perfect time to strike with your story. And, the myth that ‘all news is good news’ is debunked!

Get inside the world of reporters and their motivations with these unique insights from the president of Metzger Albee PR firm, and host of the Rainmaker.fm podcast PR is Dead.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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Aside from the raw product you’re selling, company culture is everything.

It’s made up of your work environment, ethics, mission, expectations, and goals. You can have a great product, but without a solid culture to back it up, its development can fall apart.

Buffer, for example, has a notable culture of transparency. All employee salaries are published for co-workers and the public to see. They emphasize working out loud and being receptive to one another.

On the other hand, Amazon is noted for its toxic culture that exhausts employees and holds “unreasonably high” expectations.

Which side of the spectrum are you on?

In software companies, it’s important to promote a culture of communication and transparency. What would an issue tracking system look like for a company with poor culture? Pretty desolate.

In this article, I’m going to give examples of how different software companies bolster their QA efforts with a strong culture, and why that’s so important.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, I explain how to manage your tasks, delegate work, and build systems that help your business keep costs down, and work more productively.

At Process Street, I manage several different teams and assign hundreds of tasks every month.

You’d think that when you have to explain, upload, and send information to so many people so regularly, you’d have no time to do anything else…

You’d be wrong.

Managing a busy startup means you need to take a lot of shortcuts. So, thankfully I’ve found and documented a way to assign tasks to anyone from any device without switching between apps, sending emails, or messing around.

In this episode, I break down the system I use so you can re-create it and start delegating tasks successfully and efficiently.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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There’s a big difference between successful software companies and those shoddy unverified apps you get off the app store:

Quality assurance.

While small-time apps aren’t heavily used, and the creator won’t receive many complaints or bad press if anything breaks, Google and Facebook are used by billions of people worldwide.

If a bug affects 0.01% of the user base in a small app, it’s not worth the energy. If it affects 0.01% for Google and Facebook, that’s thousands of complaints, and possible media scandal to deal with. And we all know what the price of that can be.

So, when it comes to studying quality assurance there’s no better examples than two of the biggest Internet companies in the world.

I’ve deliberately not chosen to give Microsoft the time of day in this post, because I’d say their QA is pretty damn weak for their size.

…However, read on to pick up tips from Facebook and Google on how to make software that doesn’t break down, cost you more money, and cause frustration for your customers.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Zachary Sexton, host of The Productivity Show for Asian Efficiency.

Whether you’re a maker or a manager, you could use a little more efficiency at work. It’s not like you’re choosing to goof off and doing a Homer Simpson, but you might be spending way too much time on email or less important work.

But how do you know? What really is the most important task for today?

We’ve looked at this topic a lot on the Process Street blog, but today it’s a focus on improving efficiency at work from the perspective of building a culture of productivity in your workplace.

Zachary tells us the tools, systems and methods he’s learned while running Asian Efficiency’s Productivity Show and the Buckets consultancy.

Listen to this week’s episode to supercharge your productivity, and find out what to do when you have a few bad days in a row.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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If you think your writing’s any good, this book will cut you down to size…

I used to think that I could write well enough…

See William.

See William run.

See William write a 300-page book which taught me how to correct the mistakes I never knew I was making.

That’s what this book is; a display of how bad both you and I are at writing. As such, this On Writing Well review is as much to show the key points to William Zinsser’s thoughts as it is a review of the past year of my own work here at Process Street.

Here’s to improving our writing and avoiding common content writing mistakes, all whilst making an ass of myself.

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Sales will make or break your business

Outbound sales feed your team. Your cold-callers are foragers. Your senior sales staff are hunters.

They find the new clients and bring them back to the tribe of engineers and human resources staff who depend on them.

But we live in a more complex world than the hunter-gatherers of old, and with that comes the need for more complex processes.

The key to a successful sales process is understanding the overview.

There are lots of individual processes you can employ to improve different aspects of your sales and they need to fit together into a coherent sales narrative. Some call this narrative a sales funnel, and others a sales pipeline.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, Vinay explains the system he uses to hire at Process Street.

Hiring is the single most important thing any company does.

It’s right at the top of the chain, and the effects filter down to impact revenue, reach, signups, customer satisfaction, and more.

So, instead of settling on someone early because you can’t be bothered to manage relationships with hundreds of candidates, you should try the system described in this podcast.

The system involves ways to automatically reach out to great potential candidates, screen with automation, and use AI to schedule meetings. And, it’s nowhere near as complex as it sounds.

Listen to this episode to learn this semi-automated system for yourself and get it set up in a few hours!

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

Quote to tweet:

“People are the ultimate system. It’s all about the team. Your company is how you hire” (tweet this)

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