The way you used to work might not fit the business you've become

Joanne Butcher

5 days ago

6 min read

One of the things I've noticed from working with growing businesses is that the way they work behind the scenes rarely changes at quite the same pace as the business itself.

It happens gradually.

A new person joins the team. There are more clients. More projects. More meetings. More information to keep track of.

Everyone picks up a little bit of the extra work as they go.

Someone looks after the CRM. Someone else knows where a particular set of documents lives. A director keeps organising meetings because they've always done it. Another member of the team has their own way of filing things.

Nobody sat down and deliberately designed it that way, the business simply grew around it. And for a while, that can work perfectly well. Until, gradually, it doesn't work quite as well as it used to.

Nothing is necessarily broken

I think this is an important distinction.

Most of the businesses I support haven't come to me because everything is in chaos. Things are getting done. Clients are being looked after. Projects are moving. The business is growing. It's just that, behind the scenes, things are taking more time and headspace than perhaps they need to.

I've worked with businesses where directors are still doing a surprising amount of meeting and calendar admin, looking after expenses or keeping the CRM up to date. Other members of the team have picked up different pieces of the admin pie along the way.

The information everybody needs is usually there somewhere too. But there might not be one central place for it. Or there is, but it's been added to at different times by different people. Filing systems have grown organically. What makes complete sense to one person doesn't necessarily make sense to somebody else.

All the pieces of the puzzle are there. It's just taking everyone longer than necessary to find the right one.

And all those extra five or ten minutes add up.

But I think it's the headspace that's particularly easy to underestimate.

It's another thing to remember. Another job sitting somewhere at the back of your mind. Another “I mustn't forget to do that.”

When the workarounds start becoming the process

I've seen this happen lots of times.

A workaround gets introduced because it solves a problem at the time. Then something else gets added to it. And before you know it, the workaround has become the process.

One client had a system for dealing with new leads that involved taking the information, putting it into a Word document and emailing that document to the CEO and sales team. Parts of the same information then had to be taken out again and added to an Excel spreadsheet.

There wasn't anything technically wrong with the process. It worked.

But the same information was being handled several times.

Looking at the whole process with fresh eyes, it was quite easy to see that we could create templates so the information only needed to be entered once, with the email and spreadsheet information then generated from that.

A relatively small change. But repeat that process over and over again and those small savings become much more significant.

I've seen the same thing with newsletters still carrying old logos, company documents using different fonts and formatting because everyone has created their own version, and folders that have gradually developed folders within folders within folders.

None of these things is going to bring a business crashing to the ground. But collectively? They make everything just that little bit harder than it needs to be.

Sometimes improving business processes means looking at the bigger picture

I love technology and I'm always interested in finding ways to automate repetitive work.

But I don't think the answer is always another piece of software or a clever automation. Sometimes the filing system just needs sorting out.

As a company grows, so does the amount of information it holds. If nobody takes a moment to look at the bigger picture and think about how that information needs to be organised, not just now, but as the business continues to grow, the filing system can become a little higgledy-piggledy. Files get duplicated. People aren't sure which version is current. And everyone spends more time than they should searching for things.

You don't necessarily need a new document management system. You might just need someone to stop, look at what you've already got and organise it properly.

I think that's often true of business processes generally.

Before trying to make a process faster, automate it or buy a new tool to manage it, it's worth asking:

Does this still need to be done this way at all?

Sometimes improving a business process isn't about adding anything new. It's about simplifying what's already there.

The longer you know a business, the more useful you can become

This is probably my favourite part of working with clients on an ongoing basis.

When I first start working with somebody, naturally there are questions. I need to understand how things are done, where things live, who does what and how everyone works together.

But I'm also listening to the things they aren't necessarily asking me to help with.

If somebody tells me they're spending far too much time organising meetings and making sure everybody has the updates, I'm thinking about the immediate job, but I'm probably also wondering whether everyone's calendars are linked properly. I'm wondering how meeting information is stored. Whether there is a system for filing the emails afterwards. Whether everybody is naming and storing documents consistently.

I'm not going to arrive in week one and start changing everything; nobody wants that person joining their business. I want to understand why things are being done the way they are first.

But the longer I'm there, the more context I build.

With one long-term client, I was asked to help with a large exercise reorganising the way contacts were categorised within their CRM. Because I already understood the business and had been working with the system for some time, I wasn't simply following a list of instructions.

I could test what was being proposed, spot where some of the ideas might not work quite as intended and suggest alternatives before the team spent a lot of time implementing them.

That's very different from where I could have been during my first month with them. It's accumulated knowledge.

And eventually it means that if this happens, I already know that that needs updating and somebody else needs to know.

Nobody has to give me three separate tasks.

Sometimes the best support is almost invisible

This does occasionally create a slightly funny situation.

With my long-term clients, I generally work pretty quietly in the background, making sure things keep ticking over. Sometimes I suspect they almost forget I'm there.

Thankfully, I keep a time log of everything I've worked on, because every now and then it's useful to be able to say:

Here's what I've actually been doing this month.

And when you look at it written down, there can be an awful lot of little things.

An update made because something else changed.
Information added somewhere.
A person contacted.
A document updated.
Something organised before anyone needed to ask.

None of those jobs sounds particularly impressive on its own. But that's rather the point.

Good business support isn't necessarily about one enormous thing. It's often about dozens of small things being taken care of without everybody else having to keep them in their heads.

And the longer you work with a business, the easier it becomes to anticipate them.

One of my clients organises a team away day every summer. I've helped with it a couple of times and, historically, the planning has tended to start rather later than everyone would probably like. This year, rather than waiting to be asked, I contacted the person responsible a few months before it would normally take place and gently asked whether they'd like me to start looking at possible venues.

Tiny thing. But I knew it was coming. And that's the difference.

Does the way you're working still make sense for the business you've become?

Businesses change.

Teams grow. Client numbers increase. There are more projects, more information and more moving parts. It makes sense that the way you work behind the scenes needs to change occasionally too.

That doesn't necessarily mean you need more software. It doesn't automatically mean you need more people. And it certainly doesn't mean everything you've been doing until now was wrong.

The way you worked before may have been exactly right for the business you had at the time. It just might not be the best fit for the business you have now.

Sometimes it's worth stopping and looking at the work happening behind the work.