How To Turn Your Business Into a Digital Factory
In our last rendezvous, we unveiled the three concepts that will guide you on your path to truly enjoying the growth of your business:
Embracing the Henry Ford assembly line factory model.
Harnessing the scientific method of running experiments to spark and fuel growth.
Sculpting your business into a product that delights not only your customers but also you, the mastermind behind it all.
Today, we’ll plunge into the first component: The Factory Model.
I worked with a chef a few years ago, and as the process nerd that I am, I asked him about how he handled the chaos of a professional kitchen. He told me it was all for show. The flashy stuff we see when we’re looking over the counter top is all for our entertainment . . . Or it means something has gone terribly wrong.
The real work, the chef explained, happens behind the scenes, hours before the restaurant ever opens. Cutting, cutting, and more cutting as the team prepares the food that will be cooked that evening.
During that time, the concentrative silence is almost monastic. No one is talking for there is nothing to discuss. There is only the next task.
We don’t usually think of factories as monastic. Bombastic more easily comes to mind. But the cacophony of the machines hides a serenity. Workers doing the same task over and over again. Machines processing the same materials over and over again. Each person attends to the detail in front of them and nothing else.
That is what we want to create for you. No more constant pings on slack, dropped customers, or a tidal wave of unrelenting emails. Just a quiet, continuous flow of your employees solving problems and generating a profit from it.
If that sounds boring, it is. The exciting stuff is when we get to running the experiments that will help you grow and improve your business. Right now, the “excitement” of putting out fires is controlling your time and therefore becomes chaos. You need the power to choose your excitement. That is what building a well-run factory will give you.
A major goal in this course is to show you how to implement technology to automate as much of the back-end of your business as possible.
Here’s the thing: you’re gonna suck at using technology until you understand where that technology came from, and the foundational principles behind how and when to use it.
If your strategy isn’t aligned with your purpose, nothing that you do will matter.
As that chef taught me, a knife in your own hands can either be your greatest asset, or an immense danger to your well-being.
That’s why we generally don’t let small kids help out in the kitchen: they don’t know how to. It’s not just that they lack training. . . . They don’t understand fundamental concepts like gravity or even deeper ones like cause and effect. Putting a knife in the hand of someone like that is dangerous and irresponsible.
Similarly, there are fundamental, powerful business forces swirling around you, affecting you and your customers, just as powerful in the electric world of commerce as the laws of gravity.
The first part of the course focuses on teaching you those laws. We’ll discuss them explicitly and use examples to help you develop your intuitive sense of them. Only then, will we unleash you onto the technology.
You must learn to walk before you can run, you must learn to read before you can write, and before you can build, you must learn to analyze what has already been built.
In subsequent lessons, we will architect your very own 'factory', using time-tested principles from the realm of software engineering to ensure seamless scalability. We'll navigate through the tools that will aid you in constructing a factory that not only functions effectively but is tailored for your operations. And don't worry about delegation – we'll guide you on how you can entrust the factory building process to experts without the fear of mishaps.
Along this path, we'll illuminate the common pitfalls that often entangle entrepreneurs in their early stages, arming you with the foresight to bypass these obstacles.
So let's roll up our sleeves, my fellow entrepreneurs, and dive headfirst into the world of the Factory Model.