Doing Things the Right Way - Lessons Learned

This is episode 10 of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. (See the right-side column.)

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Today's topic: Doing Things the Right Way 

As you might guess, from the guy who built a business on Standard Operating Procedures, I firmly believe there's a right way to do most things. More precisely, I believe most things can be done properly in at least one way. Your "best way" might not be mine, but it's just as correct. 

AND I believe there are LOTS of ways to do things wrong.

If you've followed me for long, or taken any of my classes, you've heard me give my advice and then say something like, "Of course, you need to adjust this for your business. You probably don't run a business in Sacramento, CA with my clients, my offering, my bundles, my pricing, my vendors, and my employees."

What I don't say is, "And if you want to ignore all this and pretend that you don't need a process, that's okay, too." You do need a process. You need YOUR process. You need your way of doing things. You need your standards. And it's okay to copy someone else and then make improvements.

Early on in my consulting experience, I saw lots of examples of the wrong way(s) of doing things. How did I know they were wrong? Well, I did have plenty of professional experience before I went out on my own. I was committed to SOPs and to documentation.

Perhaps the most important tool you can use to determine whether your way is a good way is a simple question: Would I be happy paying someone to give me service like that?

Here's an example. In my last real job, we had someone who came in once a month to perform preventive maintenance on our HP 3000 system. He used to clock in and then go stand in the hallway and take phone calls from other clients. This was the very early days of cell phones. Somehow, that just didn't sit right with me.

So, one day I told him that it bothered me. I told him that he was either ripping off me or the other client. And maybe both. I asked him to please find a way to either 1) not take those phone calls, or 2) document that we were not being charged for the time he was on the phone with another client, AND 3) find a way to assure us that his divided attention was not affecting his job on our server.

He didn't take it too seriously until I mentioned that I was going to make the same request of his boss. Right or wrong, I had expectations. And the appearance that I was getting less than I was paying for just didn't sit right with me.

Skip ahead about seven years. When I had employees, I set down some very clear guidelines. Don't take any calls when you're at a client's office. Don't let the phone interrupt conversations. And don't do anything that makes a client feel like they're getting less than 100% of your attention.

Far in the future, we would develop what we called The KPE Way of doing things (KPEnterprises was my company, and this was an homage to the HP Way philosophy). For now it was simply:

• This is how we document
• This is how we invoice
• This is how we secure a network
• This is how we do backups
• etc.

For us, there was always a "best" way of doing things. There might be other best ways for other companies. But everyone should have their best way. 

This is really a commitment to quality and professionalism. It just happens to also lead to "best practices" and a belief that some ways are better than others. 

In my opinion, letting each employee do whatever they want is not the right way. It doesn't guarantee that things are up to our company standards. And it doesn't build our brand. It might build the technician's brand. But since the company is paying for the technician's time, I think it's fine to ask them to do things our "right" way.

And so began my formal march toward documenting everything and every process, constantly working to make it better and better.

Note: If you feel that I treated employees as idiots who couldn't bring their genius to work, you would be wrong. We constantly asked the techs to talk through all these processes and agree on the best way. We asked them to constantly improve every process, when they could. And so, as a group, we all got better. We all improved what we considered the right way of doing things. Everyone got better. And the company did, too.

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Next week, we turn to a very practical consideration from my early years. 

Up next . . . Finding Sources for Hardware and Software.

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