The Naked Business: Why we never ever get anything done at all

Welcome to the Naked Business….

This is an article for all of us:  for anyone who runs a small business or who is thinking about starting a small business. And when I say small business I mean stretching from one person to a couple of hundred. So don’t think just because you’ve managed to build a business through hard work and long hours you’re not part of this discussion.

First, I have an admission to make: I am lazy (meaning I don’t really want to do things that don’t interest me). But I also know, really know, that if I want my small business to succeed we must be very productive.

I don’t mean the “working hard or long hours” sort of productive which is the stuff of legend and myth. You’ve heard about them, people who wake at dawn and send blackberry messages at 3AM, and who brag about their working weekends; the warriors who count coup by counting hours.

I mean just the opposite. I mean getting rid of the inefficiencies that suck up every waking hour of our lives and sap the enthusiasm from our souls. I mean the delays and endless discussions and email chains that cause us to weep when we open our inbox.

I mean being so overwhelmed that we don’t even have time to finish making our To Do list before we are on to the next thing to do.

I mean not getting done reading the book called “Getting Things Done”.

I mean having that weird feeling of general anxiety we get when we go to a business conference and we hear about all the new stuff that’s coming and instead of being charged up we walk away even more aware that there is no time left to do what we already haven’t done, much less taking on new projects, approaches, tasks, missions, applications, services and ideas that we know will lie around like the exercise equipment we bought every January sure that we’d be on it and looking fit just a few months later.

So how do we do it? How do we do the impossible? Well, I know what doesn’t work. Hiring more people doesn’t solve the problem. If a group of people are not efficient, adding another person will simply cause more inefficiency. In fact if you add just one person to a group of 5 people then you could potentially slow everyone else down by 20%…

Throwing software and automation systems at it doesn’t work either. If your processes are dis-organized, then anything you automate will capture for all time all the inefficiency you already create.

The answer is deeper and simpler. And it is the beginning of a journey for us at School for Startups. We are not just a small business, we are a small business on a journey to become a very efficient, very “lightweight” small business.  We want to be able to work easily and effortlessly, we want to float above technology and kit. We want to be able to focus our time on the things we enjoy, and which matter. We want the oily gears and machinery and processes that must be done, to get done without some poor shmuck having to do them.

We also want complete leverage. If we get a customer we want to do everything with that customer over the lifetime of our relationship that could be done. We want them to be delighted, not satisfied and we expect that in return we will be more profitable.

We don’t want to be measured by the hours we spend on the road, or in an office, or the number of meetings we hold; we want to be measured by the progress the company makes towards its very few real goals. And we except to be rewarded in proportion to that accomplishment.

So for the next six months we are going to publish our journey. We are going to be candid about our problems, we will admit to our wild inefficiencies; in short we will live our company in the public eye and let you see what works and what doesn’t. It will be a voluntary tourette’s on the tickings of one small business and our efforts to do things a bit better.

We hope that our naked exhibitionism will cause you to join us in the discussion. We really are doing this because we figure that if everyone knows what we are up to they will help us figure out how to do it better.

So keep an eye out on this column.