Carsonified

I had a good look at my to-do list the other day and it hit me, I was still working primarily in the business, instead of on the business.

As you all know, it’s vital that the leader of a company (CEO, Director, Founder, whatever) is thinking about the direction of the company and is actively planning and thinking about the future. If that person gets bogged down in actually doing the day-to-day activities, then it becomes impossible to do that.

A few examples

Here are a few things that I realised I was getting bogged down with that really should be done by someone else:

1. Payroll, dividend vouchers and pensions - I finally decided to delegate this to Mo, our extremely talented book keeper. It’s a task that naturally fits into her skill set and it’s something that takes a fair bit of my time at the end of every month.
2. Data collection for analysis - Occasionally we do some research on our competitors, which can be quite time consuming. As I blogged about, I’ve now gotten a very capable virtual assistant who I delegate this to.
3. Marketing our events - Lisa has now become the Marketing Manager at Carson Systems. She is in charge of marketing across all of our products and events.
4. Making coffee … Just kidding, I’m still the coffee boy around here :)

Management by Delegation, not Abdication

So am I just saying that you should be delegating the time-consuming, boring stuff? Definitely not. You should be delegating everything (at least eventually).

As a business owner, you should remember that eventually, everything will be done by other people. This is the only way to truly realise the value of running your own company and the financial benefits of selling it someday. However, in order to get there, you need to train your team properly and then hand over responsibility.

Michael E Gerber, author of The Emyth Revisited, coined the phrase “Management by Delegation, not Abdication”, and it’s a powerful concept.

Management by Abdication says: “I don’t care how you get it done, just do it.”

Management by Delegation says: “Let me teach you how we do this here, and then you can have complete responsibility for it.”

The latter example ensures that the quality of service and products are preserved, whilst freeing you up to focus on running the company.

I just finished Tim Ferris’ excellent book The 4-Hour Workweek and it’s already had a significant impact on my life: It’s given me more free time.

The best tip I picked up from the book was hiring a virtual personal assistant (PA). Everyone has those annoying things on their to-do list that have been there for months, which just aren’t getting done. They’re important but you just don’t have enough fricken time to finish them.

Enter a ‘Virtual PA’. If you’re running a small business like Gill and I, you can’t justify spending £18K-£30k on the luxury of a PA. However, with the advent of the global marketplace, you can get a quality PA who works remotely, at a very affordable price.

I signed up with Get Friday, a reputable service in India. I’ve been assigned a PA named Shinu and he’s been very professional and helpful with the two tasks I’ve given him so far. The rates start at $15/hour and if you use them enough (160 hours a month) you can get that down to $7/hour.

Tips for using Virtual PAs:

1. Make sure their English is excellent (let them know you’ll need to speak to them over the phone)
2. Clarify exactly what the task is - don’t assume anything
3. Give them a deadline
4. Tell them how long they should take

(By the way, I took the above photograph while I was at the pub tonight. I just picked up a new Casio Exilim Card camera, so expect to see some more photos in the future.)

When Ryan Singer did a workshop for us at FOWD, he and I got chatting about how they run things at 37signals. He gave me an amazing idea that we now use at CS, and I’d like to share it with you all.

Any of you who are managers will know that you need to keep up on how your team is doing and what they’re doing. At the same time, it’s never helpful to micro-manage and constantly bug your team.

Answer: A company chat room!

We use Campfire for this, and it’s perfect as it’s cheap and simple. We have a room called ‘The Howdy Room!’ (for no other reason than I think the word ‘Howdy’ is rad).

Daily check-in

Here’s how it works: When you get in the office, you log into the room (I have it set as my home page) and I post a message starting with ‘[IN]’ and I then list what I’m up to that day. Here’s an example:

Then right before we go home for the day, everyone enters a check-out message, starting with ‘[OUT]’, like this:

Weekly check-in

In addition to daily check-ins everyone does a weekly check-in. It starts with ‘[THIS WEEK]’ on a Monday morning, and ends with a ‘[DID THIS WEEK]’ at the end of the week.

We have weekly Tuesday meetings (for the Bath office) at a coffee shop and by doing this weekly check-in on Mondays, we already have a good idea of what everyone’s up to for the week, when we start that meeting.

Extra benefits

In addition to helping Gill and I know what everyone is up to, doing a daily and weekly check-in also helps everyone else know what they’re up to. It keeps everyone informed without having long meetings and lengthy unnecessary conversations.

We also use this room as a place to chat about interesting things. As you all know, when someone starts talking about something so everyone in the office can hear, it can be quite a distraction. You have to ‘come out’ of whatever you’re doing, listen, and then respond. After that, it takes a good 3-5 minutes to get back into what you were previously doing.

By saying things like ‘Hey, has anyone seen the site www.xyz.com?’ in the chat room, only the people who have time to answer will choose to jump into the conversation. If someone is super busy, they’ll just ignore the ‘Beep’ from the chat room. It’s great!

If you have any tips for keeping your team running smoothly, please share!

The other day I was starting to feel overwhelmed by my massive todo list and my overflowing inbox. (Isn’t everyone?!) I’m sure you all have those moments - mild panic attack are fun!

Then it hit me - it’s because I was nicely organizing all my todos into categories, but I wasn’t prioritizing them at all. Everything was shouting at the same volume: NOW!

So I created a new category in Outlook 2007 called ‘Important’ and chose the color red (see above image). Now I can categorize all my emails (that need a response) and my todos with their category and whether or not they’re important.

This is one of the things I love about Outlook 2007 - the visual colors that go along with your categories. It’s very helpful to just scan my list of things to do today and do the Red ones first. Bam!

I’ve been doing some research trying to figure out a normal EBITA multiple for a company like Carson Systems. I think it’s important to have some idea what your company is worth, so you can do financial planning for your future.

The problem is we do so many things! Vitamin, DropSend, Amigo, FOWA, FOOA and FOWD.

In regards to our conference business, I’ve had a look at one of the few publicly traded events companies, which is Informa. They’ve got a P/E ratio of around 17, which seems quite hight to me. I’m thinking that if we ever sold the conference business, we’d get around 5x - 7x multiple on yearly profit. But as we learned with DropSend, something is only worth what someone will pay and no formula will calculate that for you!

If anyone has any experience in valuing businesses, please share!

We just hired our fourth employee! (Six total, counting Gill and I). Her name is Jo and she’ll be starting next Monday.

It’s so exciting to be growing, but our office is really starting to creak at the seams. We’re just getting too big for the space and when we add a web designer, we’ll have to move.

Right now we spend £500+VAT (17.5%) for rent, which is a fricken bargain. However, we’re technically throwing our money away on rent, instead of investing in property.

We’ve found an amazing office right in the middle of Bath and we’re going to meet with our accountant on Thursday to discuss our options.

You can only get a commerical mortgage for up to 80% of the value of the property (unless your willing to get hammered with a really high interest rate), so we’ve got to come up with a way to secure the 20% deposit. It’s just beyond the cash we can afford, so we’ve got to get creative.

There’s all sorts of clever ways to buy property. I think Gill and I might actually form a Partnership and have it buy the property. Then we’ll rent it to the company which will make selling the property much tax efficient.

However, I could be wrong - after our meeting with Nick (our accountant), we’ll know more!

If anyone has experience buying an office, please feel free to share your experiences. Tips are welcome!