Research And Development > Standard Operating Procedure
We’ve already discussed the importance of doing some experiments.
And in an article the other day, I talked about how I’m being more professional as of late. As such, I now refer to “doing some experiments” as “research and development.”
So today I tried to do two things, and stumbled across the simplest business structure ever.
Those two things were:
- Planning Research & Development
- Creating Standard Operating Procedure Guidelines
Outside the fluffy business speak, that’s planning some experiments and writing up some to-do lists.
And then it hit me…
This Is The Simplest Business Model Ever
You start with research and development, or doing some experiments. This is the “pre-professional phase.”
So before you become a gardener, you have to try and plant flowers and you’ll probably fail a thousand times.
And you learn from the lessons you’re taught by the world.
So you build your knowledge and you internalise it.
If you do this, then you will have something of value: knowledge, and the “data” that you’ve gained through trial and error.
These are valuable things.
But you continue until planting those flowers and bringing them to maturity is a simple thing.
And at that point, you want to move on to different things. It might be more gardening stuff, it might be something else entirely.
So what do you do?
Chances are you either quit (not sensible) or you try and find ways to optimise your workflow so you can get on with your seed planting and then spend the rest of your day doing whatever.
In other words, you create standard operating procedures.
These are worth more than their weight in gold.
Standard Operating Procedures: Worth Their Weight In Gold
So here’s where I was at this morning. I’m writing walkthroughs for all my processes – consciously because they’re going in the ever-delayed private member site, but mostly because it’s a pain in the arse when you go to create a new project and you’re relearning all the stuff that you’ve done a hundred times before.
Really, there’s no excuse for not having a book cover template ready to go in a few minutes when you’ve released dozens of the things before. There’s no excuse for wasting half an hour because you’re setting a new site up and somehow you’ve forgotten to do things in the right order.
And there’s no sense in sitting in front of the PC for hours “trying to think of a topic to write about” when you’re a veritable content generating machine with more ideas than you could ever talk about.
Yet that’s where we are, and so I’m writing blueprints for myself.
Do this, do that and finish this.
The benefits of creating a standard operating procedure are many:
- You can automate
- You can outsource
- They’re valuable to sell as blueprints
- You save your own time
- Effectiveness is maximised
… and if you’re stuck for ideas, they constitute the second stage in the business plan that isn’t really a business plan.
R&D > SOP
You do some research and development. You start a blog detailing your journey, lessons learned and more. Or you don’t start a blog but tweet about it and email. Whatever you choose.
But you write about your experiments publicly because people will help you with advice.
And then you create that feedback loop. The more experiments you do, the more knowledge you gain and the more data you collect.
Eventually you’ll start to win. It might be that you get 10,000 twitter followers or it might be that you work out how to turn used tin cans into pure profit somehow.
But people say, “Hey, how did you do that and can you do it for me?”
Suddenly you’re charging money.
Eventually, you’re run off your feet with the amount of work to do and all you want to do is more experiments.
So you choose to write everything down. You sell the information to the people that follow your progress. It saves them time, trial and error.
And you hand off your operations to an assistant or you get someone to write you a program that does it.
And you move on to bigger and better things.
You can follow this model whatever your interest.