I was watching a program about the Vaux Swifts that fly through Oregon every fall. Now they inhabit chimneys in the city, but traditionally they would find an old snag in the forest to live in on their journey. I started sketching this out as I watched, it felt like my role in my company.

Customers as visitors

As I reflect on how customers interact with my business, they are much like the Swifts. They come in for a visit, pick up some resources during a particular time frame, then they are off flying again. Many of them come back over and over, some regularly, others with more time between visits.

Stocking the snag

The core of the business has been around for a long time. Not a Douglas Fir long time, but a small business long time. The current incarnation has emerged from work I’ve done for decades. It feels like it is emerging from something old and stable, that might not look at first glance like it is still alive, but lots of life comes from it.

I’ve started seeing my role as one that maintains the resources that live here. Sometimes that’s creating the products, sometimes training. I gather information from the flock and share it.

Making the foundation visible

Once I was clear about the idea of what I was doing, and my role in it, I needed to get it in front of me. I took the sketches and hung them on the wall in front of my desk. I know the images will speak to me if I let them, and putting them somewhere I see them all day works the best for me.

The first words I added are the core values I wanted to make sure cascaded through everything I did. I put them on big pink stickies so they stood out, so I can’t forget or overlook them. Not that I could, since they are so important to me, but I wanted them there and obvious so I could check each piece against them for alignment.

• Creativity
• Curiosity
• Inclusion
• Continuous Learning
• Generosity
• Collaboration

I keep a stack of sticky notes in various sizes nearby. I jot down ideas as I think of them and put them on the wall. Logical groupings begin to appear. I move the paper around until the groups feel right. For some types of ideas I type them into a mindmap program. Other times I will reorganize them onto color and/or size coordinated notes.

It’s a process that emerges over time.

Next up

Putting words to images. How insights emerge from the process of moving back and forth from the visual to the verbal.

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I find Charlie Gilkey to be a fascinating person. In a Barbara Walters kind of fascinating. Why? Because he’s really different than many people who I have met in the creative realm. He brings another approach, another beingness that offers me another angle on the world. He’s a multicultural, former military, academic, philosopher, business coach, creative. And that only begins to categorize him, and not very well.

The first thing that got my attention was his suggestion that I consider my peak creative time and guard it for my own self. At the time, I was agreeing to meetings during my peak times and wondering why I wasn’t getting as much as I wanted done.

Email Triage

When I was struggling with managing my email, I found Charlie’s email triage product to be very helpful. Simple, yet effective. So I began to pay more attention. Reading his blog and newsletter, watching videos. Noticed the changes in my colleagues who hired him as a coach.

Living the Good Life

Charlie has a new product, Living the Good Life. It’s a compilation of some of the posts from his blog, Productive Flourishing. It comes with a set of audio that alternates between Charlie talking about why he wrote each piece and then reading each post. So you have a camera like perspective, zooming in and out between a thought piece and the behind the piece look. It’s deeply reflective, analyzing the world and his perspective on it. Yet, it never becomes preachy or prescriptive.

Instead there are all sorts of productivity ideas sprinkled through out. Not tips so much, but examples of how these things are put into practice. Questions, to help you think through how to apply the ideas to your life. Sometimes it’s something I can apply right away, other times, the concepts  sink in slowly.

Designed for the format

Something I particularity appreciate is even though this is a product that emerged from blog content, it’s not just a quick copy and paste into a Word document. The e-book is well designed with professional illustration and layout (and it isn’t portrait so it fits well on screen.) It has been edited. So have the audios. No asking people to mute their lines or background noise that you hear in so much repurposed content. Everything is pleasant and well done.

Who might like this?

Anyone who is fascinated by how other people tick. Anyone interested in productivity, especially in the intersection with creativity. Fans of Charlie and Productive Flourishing blog. People who are thinking about creating repurposed content from their blog. People who are thinking about making a digital product and want to see a well done example. People who learn from having people show them how they put things into practice. Anyone looking to hire Charlie or attend one of his programs and want to get to know the type of person he is.

It’s affordable at $28 and will have bonus extras thrown in. Just because that’s the way he is.

I like it. The team at Productive Flourishing did a great job putting this together.

(Yes I am an affiliate, but only because I get value from his products.)

Finding Center

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Getting Help When Your Business is Drowning, I chose to bring an operations person into my business. Aaron and I have known each other for several years, and we co-hosted a podcast for our local ASTD chapter. He has a wide range of skills and was willing to come in for a while to help me reorganize.

I had some of the operational pieces in place. I had some operational concepts that I had gotten as far as my skills allowed. I knew there were areas that needed attention. Most important, I trusted Aaron’s skill. We had a foundation of laughing through our differences, knowing full well we approach the world from places that are often opposite.

Operational people organize differently

This is one of those areas where I think, of course. However, it does not begin to describe the implications on a daily basis. Allowing someone to come into the core of my business was not easy. He didn’t do anything wrong, to the contrary he was contributing hugely, it was about how many of my buttons were being pushed. I was so wrapped up inside my business that anything that was wrong with it felt like it was wrong with me. So a system not working, or a system that was a mess felt like I was wrong or a mess. I didn’t get stuck in those feelings and was able to observe them coming up and let them go, but I noticed it was really draining.

There were areas that felt organized to me that were not perceived that way. Other places I had done quite a bit of research, only to discover that the criteria I used to evaluate were very different. Oftentimes I had developed systems based on the way something technical worked, adapting to my technical skill level. A technical person designs what they want and makes the technology do it. Things that took me days, only took hours.

Change was happening so fast I needed to find a place inside myself to hunker down. A calm in the storm.

Organizational change is an inside job

No matter how much I knew I needed to change, and how much I wanted it, there was still the human side of me that struggled. I needed to change first. I had the curse of the founder, emotionally attached to the baby I had created. I’ve worked with enough leaders over the years to know if I tried to hold on, it would be very painful. My job was to learn to let go, to allow others to collaborate and contribute. To recognize and articulate the core values that were important, and allow others to collectively express a variety of ways to get there.

My goal was to create an operational framework that would allow others to contribute in new ways. I’ve have the dream of creating a content publishing system where I can contribute the visual tools to deepen other peoples work. In order to manifest on the level I was dreaming, I had to let others in. I needed to put aside my desire to control and places of perfectionism. I had to accept I’m not always right and it is my responsibility for my own stuff and emotional reactions. Mostly it’s about letting go at new deeper levels.

Returning to my strengths

I’m pretty clear trying to fix my weaknesses is never going to be my greatest contribution. Not that I won’t continue to grow, but it’s not strategically the best use of my time to attempt to learn things out of my core skill range. There are some things, like having more than an intuitive sense of the bookkeeping, that I have to make peace with and do anyway. Then there are the areas of product design and development that are where I need to be spending my time.

Through it all, I continued to paint. Not as much as I wanted to, but I did steal time regularly to do it. So you’ll start seeing new work soon. So much has been brewing under the surface, soon it’s time to get things finished and bring them into the world. I’ve adjusted, the storm is calming. Not that there won’t be another one, but I will be stronger and more prepared having grown through this transition.

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Structuring Chaos

Last February I wrote a post, My Business Has Cracked where I admitted that my business model wasn’t going to work. It was a tough post to write, but I got a lot of suggestions and help as a result.

Since then I have been stripping everything to the core. In the process I had to accept that I just do not have all the skills needed to create the company I want. One of the comments Gary Woodill made on the series of posts I wrote back then has really stuck with me.

At a minimum, I wouldn’t get involved with any new company that didn’t have a management team of at least 4-5 people, and enough capital to survive for a year or more. The skills needed include managing finances (an accounting type of personality), business strategy (a clever hyper-competitive CEO who has learned from lots of mistakes), technical management(a genius super geek who can also relate to people), marketing (a publicity hound who understands how to get positive attention), sales (someone who actually likes calling people and closing sales, and is very good at it), and product development (a visionary who excites people with deep knowledge of the industry and the creative ability to translate needs into products and/or services that people want).

Can we just say I/we fall a bit short in more than one area? Every one of them was in my face. My days were consumed with putting out the fires, but never getting to the strategic level. I was spending time working on things out of my skill range, sometimes so far out as to be pathetic.

E-Myth Revisited, nice theory. Solution, not so much.

The E-Myth Revisited by Micheal Gerber, does a great job describing what happens to so many entrepreneurs. You are good at what you do, what he calls being a technician, and you become consumed by the tasks of running a business. You work in the business instead of on the business. Because of this, he suggests creating a franchise model of sorts.

Most small businesses are dependent on the expertise of whoever is on payroll at a given time. As a consequence, how tasks are performed changes as people come and go. The danger is that customers will have unpredictable experiences with your business, and might not come back.

The solution is to create a systems-dependent not people-dependent business.

I’ve run into a couple of problems with this. The first one being if you are a big picture person with technical expertise, who says you have any ability to design systems? And if you do design systems, will they be anything another person could ever follow? Part of this concept is to create systems so detailed that anyone can come in and just follow the directions. You also have to want to work with people who only want to follow directions, and have some desire to teach them to do so.

I want to work with creative people, and they aren’t the type of employees this idea utilizes.

You can hire a virtual assistant

Depending on the types of things you are drowning in, this can be a good solution. Assistants have a wide range of capabilities, but all of them need at best guidance, and at worst a lot of supervision. Which can take a lot longer than it takes to do the work. You always hope it will pay off in less work over time, but its not guaranteed. You also have to be able to give them some level of direction, and when I am feeling like I am drowning, I lose my ability to do that for myself never mind someone else.

You can hire a consultant or a coach

We have access to a wide array of amazing consultants and coaches. Some are colleagues, many are customers. All want to help. They believe in what we do and want to see us succeed. In the process of redesigning the business, we talked to a number of people with different approaches. Some offered great ideas, others have a more accountability style. The result of many of these sessions is another list of things we could do.

Ideas are not in short supply here. We drown in ideas. Talking with consultants and coaches is often enjoyable and energizing, until the implementation reality sets in. In a small business the question is always, who is going to do the work? There is more than people can do everyday already.

You can hire someone with complementary skills

I kept thinking about the comment Gary made about needing people with other skills. I was spending most of my time wrestling with my shortcomings and skills gaps. There were so many things I could learn, but I was slow and it was exhausting. It made no sense for me to try to learn things outside of my strengths.

I decided to hire an operations person. With organizational, systems, and IT skills.

Small business as accelerated personal development

Letting new people into your business is an interesting process. You have to simultaneously offer some kind of leadership/direction and deal with all your buttons getting pushed and weaknesses exposed. It’s especially true when you are filling a skills gap. Most everything I did to cope was thrown out. It was like a  bomb went off in my operation.   It needed to happen, but there were times it was happening faster than I could process the emotions around it. I certainly couldn’t go through it and write about it at the same time. It felt like holding onto the tail of a tiger who was running very fast.

I’m learning about a whole new level of collaboration. My identity has been tightly wound with VisualsSpeak. I’m trying to slowly unwind it. Allow others to take my ideas and grow them in new ways. Allow the team to grow and change, to offer other avenues to connect.

It’s certainly an interesting process.

What has worked for you?

How have you coped with having too much to do and too little time? Have you hired help? What has worked best for you?

I’d love to hear your comments and stay in touch with you.

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Vision is great, but how often does it get created then put aside? Getting clear is certainly helpful and some things will occur as a result, but I want to work more consistently with my vision this year.

Creating a Mind Map

Mind maps organize information in a visual sense, so that is where I started. I have a tendency to create elaborate mind maps with hundreds of elements. I knew this wasn’t going to work, so I focused on identifying the key action areas that were the next steps in moving toward my vision. I use MindManager to create my maps.

There is still a lot here, but at least for this week, it felt like a manageable number of things to think about.

Looking for chunks to focus on

When I work on a big project, I work on everything at once. Doing something until I either finish or get stuck, then shift to the next thing. In the last few months, I’ve had  a bigger chance of getting stuck than finished, so I have been bouncing around a lot. Over a much wider range of tasks than is on this mindmap.

I am using the mind map to help select tasks to work on. I’m asking myself a couple of things:

• How can I select an action that will further multiple areas?
• What is easy that will clear space?.
• What feels stuck, but has a lot of payoff if I can clear it?

Going for Maximum Effect

Looking at my map, I saw I have a lot of content to develop. The end results will be used for different purposes on both sides of the map, but there is overlap in the general topics. I have years worth of articles, posts, case studies, handouts, and designs scattered all over the place. Some embedded in newsletters, some in the blog archives, in various folders on multiple hard drives. Just thinking about this felt yucky. There was no technology structure in place to help me keep track of it. Perfect example of something that offered big payoff and could effect multiple areas. Now just to find a way to make it easy.

I decided to use Google Sites to build a simple website to store all the parts. I selected a project template and built it out in a few hours. It is easy to make it accessible to only those I chose, so I can open it to selected contractors as well as our internal company members.  Once the framework was in place, I just had to find all the pieces and put them there. But look at what I gained:

• Created an off site back up of all the content
• Made it easy to share files in remote locations
• Organized content by topics that make sense for developing

I was able to get movement across the whole map. I did not have to use peak time to find, copy and paste, so I got a lot of it done during my less productive afternoon hours.

I still had time to paint!

Being more strategic in my choices, it was easier to spend time painting. I wasn’t as worried about using it to avoid other things. Besides I’ve committed to  being Creative Every Day . I’ve been doing a series of paintings about the winter holidays, now I’m doing a story about heart which is only half done. You can see them in this slideshow.

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