Efficiency is vital for startups to scale and survive. To be efficient you have to document your processes to make everything repeatable and scalable.
All of which means nothing if your processes are bad.
“Process innovation” is a fancy term for improving your business’ processes. Instead of haphazardly solving external issues, you focus on improving your core processes and standard operating procedures to make your business efficient and able to grow.
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So you’ve decided to hire remote? Good idea.
Working with a remote team can vastly increase your talent pool, save significant amounts on office overheads (on average $11,000 per company), and allow your staff to work in ways which suit them.
Your remote staff are 13% more productive. And, according to Chris Byers, CEO of Formstack, they’re twice as likely to work beyond 40 hours a week. You’re getting more hours, and more out of each hour.
…But don’t get too excited. Managing, training, and onboarding a remote team comes with its own challenges and difficulties. If you fail to train, you train to fail.
Here are 4 crucial points to remember when training a remote support team:
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…
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.
In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Hack the Entrepreneur’s Jon Nastor about starting a podcast and getting 1,400,000 downloads.
Podcaster Jon Nastor has been host of Hack the Entrepreneur (HTE) since 2015, and between then and now his podcast has quickly become a runaway success.
From a few tentative early episodes to 1.4 million downloads, HTE has exploded. How did Jon do it?
We’ve all had conversations like this:
You: Hey, so I’m going to be writing 3 posts a week now, so I’m handing off newsletter writing to you.
Them: Ok, what do I do?
You: I dunno, go into MailChimp, make the newsletter, check it’s ok and send it to everyone.
Them: Right, I’ll let you know if I have any questions
[Later that week]
Them: [1,000,000 questions, a terrible newsletter and hundreds of complaints from subscribers about broken links]
The informality and laziness of shooting off a few instructions over Slack and ‘let me know if you have any questions’ can kill productivity faster than reddit.
When was the last time you forced your eyes onto a glaring screen at 4am, furiously typing after just waking up with the best idea ever?
Last night? Never? Well, neither answer is surprising. As I suspected (yet can now say with complete certainty) content writers are an odd mix between two types of people:
While readers think of content in terms of ‘video’, ‘infographic’ and ‘blog post’, we writers think of it as that damn thing which keeps us up at night. So much so that Ed Fry, general manager at Inbound.org, has started writing short-form posts to get the idea out of his head and allow for a proper night’s sleep.
A recent thread at Inbound.org revealed excellent tips which both shared new ideas with me and reassured me that I’m not wrong in the head.
In the discussion, members of the Inbound community like Mention’s Brittany Berger and SplashOPM’s Derric Haynie share their blogging process – both step-by-step (for the more ‘together’ writers) and free-form rambling-style.
In this post, I’ve collated and curated the information to give you an overview of how successful and prolific content writers go from idea, to draft to finished piece.
I’ll also be taking careful note of the way I write this post, and give you a bullet-pointed rundown at the end.
Which text editors do bloggers use, exactly? Should you write to educate or provoke discussion? How far in advance should you plan your content? Let’s find out.
It’s one of the most painful moments in basketball. Your favorite player is fouled—they have an easy opportunity to make 2 points—but they miss the free throws.
In fact, it’s kind of astonishing that even professional players who make millions of dollars a year to perfect this craft still only make 75% of free throws. But a lot are actually much worse. Shaquille O’Neal’s was around 50%, a percentage so abysmal it resulted in the now infamous Hack-a-Shaq play.
And it’s not just Shaq. Some of the most dominant centers of this generation have the same problem. Both Andre Drummond and DeAndre Jordan are hovering around the 40% mark this season. Last year, Jordan made only 39 of the 84 free throws he took during the playoffs.
It’s gotten to the point where fans suggest that they shoot free throws underhand, granny-style—which no one has done for fear of getting mocked in the locker rooms post-game.
It’s clear that you can be a good basketball player and be terrible at free throws. But as it turns out, you can be a totally normal guy and be great at free throws. A lot of people are surprised to find out that the reigning champion for consecutive free throws is not an NBA player, in fact—it’s a dairy farmer. Free throw ability just all boils down to process.
