In the last few months we progressed on several aspects. In particular I think we are getting better at operations.
- Our new admin is really in charge of her tasks and I can see many things being handled without my involvement. I do not need to check on her and to follow up that stuff does not get lost. She is planning and implementing improvements with a good level of autonomy. It is a great relief to have her on board!
- Our PM is handling many projects with a very limited involvement from me. I take care of selling projects and I keep a relationship with customers. Ultimately my role is to ensure that clients are satisfied with working with us, so I can intervene with decisions necessary to guarantee that but for the most part I just need to show up and get the compliments for the work performed by my colleagues. Not a bad job to have!
- We are streamlining and simplifying our selling process. That means that we do less errors, we make proposals quicker and we have made our life simpler. This is important now because we are not overwhelmed by working on proposals but it will allow us in the long future to delegate sales. One very important thing to internalize is this: as an entrepreneur I am the only one who can do things freely: I can take arbitrary decisions without having to follow any process or restrictions, so I am the only one who can adapt as needed to unpredictable situations. When areas of the business require this level of flexibility and decision making those are areas that cannot be delegated. This will also mean that sooner or later they will become a bottleneck in the business. If instead we streamline sales, we make it possible one day to have a person different from me taking care of sales, which is a very important goal in the long run
Now that we have seen good news, what I am working on to prepare the future? Two things
The first one is our hiring process. We have a decent hiring process but hiring is extremely important. Given we are so small hiring one wrong person would be catastrophic. Also, if we plan to grow, we will hire more people more frequently so getting this right is important. We are studying how to better find candidates which are a good fit. To do this we can better explain who we are, differentiating ourselves from “typical” companies (you know, those writing in their ads that they are “Leaders in their niche, with a dynamic environment and offering compensation based on experience”). We want also to attract people who believes in our vision. For example, we do not work overtime, so we reject candidates bragging about how much extra time they love to put in. There are however factors we are not good at evaluating. We do not have a clue about evaluating psychological traits. We are working on that specifically.
Once we get better operations and a better system to get more people to work on operations there is only one thing really that we need to work on and that is marketing. We get more clients because of returning customers, and this brings slow organic growth. But we are not getting more clients from organic leads. I think one reason for that is the fact we do not identified our market clearly and we did not present a clear value proposition. Who should buy our products? To get which benefits? How can we reach those ideal customers? There is a lot of work to do here, and that is the kind of work that I do not know how to do. One colleague of mine is going through some marketing training to help with that, but I think we need to resolve these issues at the entrepreneurial/strategic level. This is my hard nut to crack. Very hard to crack, and I am honestly a bit lost regarding this. On the other hand I know that if I solve this, scaling by ten times should really not be a huge problem. So, I have definitely some motivation to work on this!