In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Nathan Kontny — the CEO of CRM platform Highrise.

Since becoming CEO of Highrise almost overnight in 2014, Nathan Kontny went from being thrown in the deep end to getting to work in the space of one day. Since then, he’s been getting to grips with the processes in place for shipping software, managing projects, overseeing developers and getting the best out of his new team.

Find out how to adjust to becoming a CEO, and learn team management practices from a true expert.

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.

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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast we talk to Tom Cagely, the host of SPaMcast and Agile expert, about Agile software development. 

When it comes to agile software development, it can be hard to get a comprehensive place to start. Thankfully, this week we speak to Agile veteran and host of SPaMcast, Tom Cagley. Tom goes through the whole Agile process, from tools to best practices. He explains it simply enough for anyone to understand, but also lets us in on a few advanced techniques that surprised us.

Whether you’re actually managing a software team, or just looking to work more efficiently, Agile is well worth adopting in your business. It was born out of the same movement as the lean startup, so you may be already familiar with it, but there’s always room for improvement. Listen to this podcast to learn more.

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.

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In the lifecycle of every startup, there comes a tipping point.

For companies focused on aesthetics and creating something beautiful, there’s a time where the founders need to shift towards their product — look inward and think deeply about the problems it solves, who’s it for and how to refine user experience.

For product-focused startups like Process Street, a necessary early shift is towards design.

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What is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)?

Yes, business process outsourcing is something that Coca-Cola does and spends millions on and something Vodafone uses IBM for to build its customer-related IT requirements, but it’s also for anyone and everyone.

It doesn’t have to be done on a massive enterprise scale, and in fact it can be even more impactful for small businesses because it means the difference between hiring a full-time legal team and using an as-and-when needed one from another company. That’s a massive difference in cost.

When you use an agency, or hire an accounting firm, that’s business process outsourcing. While the term has been taken over by enterprises and maybe shifted to mean something different, at its heart, every business does it. Every business without a full time accountant, legal team, marketing team, designer, IT guy, etc, does it.

It’s enterprise-y because it started out at those levels. Coca-Cola was a pioneer:

“ BPO is […] a subset of outsourcing that involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of a specific business process to a third-party service provider. Originally, outsourcing was associated with manufacturing firms, such as Coca-Cola, that outsourced large segments of its supply chain” — Forbes

But no matter what size company you are, there are considerations…

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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, Tony Brown the author of Standard Procedure and Vinay Patankar from Process Street, have an in-depth discussion about the most effective content promotion methods for their businesses.

You can spend as much time as you like creating content, but it’s a massive waste of time if you aren’t promoting it. It’s not 1999. You can’t artificially game search engines to get huge visibility or spam newsletters to push your content out to thousands of people. You can’t even hope to get discovered organically if you don’t already have a following. And that’s the problem we’re trying to solve in this podcast.

In this episode, we run through every promotion tactic that’s helped build Process Street to a blog that gets over 100,000 monthly pageviews, and ranked highly for some of the more competitive keywords in our niche.

Discover the ‘silver bullet’ we swear by, and the tactic that has spiked our traffic by over 15,000 in a single day. Did you know there is actually a way to use social sites to generate traffic as consistently as organic methods? Find out all about that and more in this week’s episode.

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.

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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, Tony Brown the author of Standard Procedure and Vinay Patankar from Process Street, talk about systemizing the processes and creating top content as well as explaining why content is so important to a company.

Ever wondered how small businesses can consistently create such amazing content? At Process Street, we produce at least 6 posts per week — some on our own blog and some as guest posts.

That’s not even including the podcasts and videos, which both come out weekly and are mediums that take considerably longer to write, design, produce, and polish.

So, how do we do it?

In this episode of Business Systems Explored we decided to take a break from having guests on and totally rip apart our content creation process for Process Street, BSE, and tonylbrown.com.

We talk about why content is important, whether you should create it yourself, and the kinds of content that are most effective. By following these tips, you can balance content creation with your other business functions and get the added bonus of that rare thing called a personal life.

Here’s how to consistently create winning content.

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.

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Productivity is great. The more productive you are, the quicker you work. The quicker you work, the more you get done. The more you get done, the better you’ll feel about the time you’ve spent and the more important you’ll become to your team or company.

Unfortunately, humans can’t work like machines, and so you’ll need a bit of help from technology to work at your most effective pace. From experience, testing, and research, we here at Process Street have collected the 30 best productivity apps ever created for you to cut through your workload.

Now, I’m not saying that you should use all of them; that would defeat the point of streamlining your workflow and optimizing your day. Instead, these productivity apps are best used by picking one or two from each category.
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Just like the basic ideas of processes and the division of labor, business process modeling was born in the mechanical industry.

In the winter of 1921, Frank Gilbreth presented a paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers entitled “Process Charts: First Steps in Finding the One Best Way to Do Work” — an excellent title by any standards, and something that turned a lot of businesses onto the idea of modeling their processes so they can optimize them.

Gilbreth, the paper’s author, is probably better known as the author and central character of the 1950s novel Cheaper by the Dozen. While I’ve never read it, it amused me to find it that an industrial engineer-turned-management consultant wrote a novel with time and motion study as an underlying theme.

Gilbreth was an interesting character, but also a man laser-focused on exactly what processes are for: finding the one best way to do work.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we speak to Amy Schmittauer – the founder of Savvy Sexy Social, the home of her hugely successful vlogs which have amassed over 2,200,000 views.

Amy Schmittauer runs a YouTube channel with over 2,200,000 views and a membership site to help others have the same success with personal branding and video marketing…

The crazy thing about it all is that she doesn’t even have a team. Amy does 95% of the work you see by herself, which obviously means she has some insanely efficient systems in place that you need to hear about it if you’re interested in systemizing your marketing, social, or branding.

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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The following is a guest post from Robin Singh. Robin is a Technical Support Executive with a combined experience of 6 years. He currently works with Live2Support – a live customer and sales chat software by ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.

Creating a great customer experience has never been more important, especially if you’re a SaaS company.

Your customers deserve a great experience and this is why it is important to support them with every tool in your arsenal. SaaS tools aren’t always perfectly self explanatory, and to ease the amount of support tickets and provide a self-serve option, you should be providing a knowledge base.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is used by companies to reduce support tickets and bring down customer support costs.

At the basic level, it’s the FAQ in your website that helps customers find instant answers, on their own without calling your support or raising a ticket.

Using knowledge base software, companies can create not just FAQs, but all kinds of help content from user guides, software manuals, online wikis and more.

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