Workflows are the building blocks of your business.
Whatever business you’re in, workflows are your business.
They act as representations of your whole operation. They can be used to smash inefficiencies and increase profits.
…But what are workflows, and why do they really matter?
Why should they be documented, and how can Process Street help you optimize them?
Let’s find out.
From September 1st 2015 to June 23rd 2016 the polls were clear that Britain would vote to remain in the EU.
According to the Financial Times, there were only two weeks over that period where the Leave campaign were ahead.
Yet, when the results came through, British voters had opted to leave the EU with 51.9% voting out.
How did the leave campaign strategy overcome the clear gap held for the year leading up to the vote?
A clear narrative and a range of big promises?
Well, yes. But also by selling those narratives and promises through a slick targeted marketing campaign powered by social media and big data.
According to the Laboratory for Social Machines from MIT Media Lab, Donald Trump was the most influential force on the 2016 election.
More than any television news stations, newspapers, or other public bodies. Donald J Trump, as an individual, was the most powerful influencer on the nation.
This influence was driven by his huge social media following. In March 2016 he had 6.8m Twitter followers, 6.3m Facebook likes, and 4.1m views on his YouTube channel. Now, he has over 22m Twitter followers.
But his eventual success lay deeper than just finely crafted tweet storms.
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.
In 2013, Zenefits co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad made a bold statement at TechCrunch Disrupt: “If you’re an insurance broker, we’re going to drink your milkshake.”
For a while, it seemed he would make good on this promise. Zenefits, the YC-backed free 2-in-1 HR platform and insurance broker, is championed as one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history. Last May, the company raised $500 million in yet another funding round, bringing its total valuation up to an eye-boggling $4 billion.
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.
