Minimalism isn’t just about the way your home is laid out or your personal life. It applies equally to your business. However, many business people I’ve met and discussed this with have never given it a thought. Applying minimalism to business is a very effective approach to causing clarity, simplicity and automation.
I’ve been looking at operational minimalism in our business over the years and while we aren’t perfect (minimalists never feel like they are minimal enough) we do have quite a good model. I’m super confident we are a lot leaner than all our main competitors. I think this is partly because it’s our capital in this business. When businesses have other peoples’ money to play around with they tend not to see that there is a love affair between capital constraint and minimalism. Minimalism in business drives lower costs, reduces risk and increases your ability to automate. Lazy capital on the other hand breeds complexity. Complexity then makes it hard to automate.
Classic minimalist traits in business…
Electronic forms and docs
I still see lots of businesses using cheques, paper remittances, paper letters and forms. It is easier and cheaper to build and maintain a webform than it is to design, print and reprint paper ones.
Many digital devices
I have quite a few crazy friends who have a personal and a work mobile. If you’re employer isn’t flexible on phone usage then you should insist they fund your work calls on your personal phone. Ask them to explain why their policy loves to waste resources, capital and create digital waste through overconsumption of devices. Be an internal activist on this. Encourage BYOD policy and culture in your organisation.
Fewer social networks
Cherry pick which network(s) you will hang out in. Personally I’m Twitter because of it’s 160 characters, I can follow who I like to read but equally I don’t have to stand in front of the firehose of conversation that is Facebook. I do use Facebook and LinkedIn but sparingly. Google+ is on my Radar because it has attracted more professionals. For the moment though Twitter is my choice.
Short writing
I’ve spent some time encouraging staff in Saasu to keep emails short. I prefer to write emails with only a sentence or two. A conversation can be had otheriwse in person or on skype. Tweets are great because they force one sentance through the 160 character limit. SMS is great because it forces short phone calls. All these rules force me into the habit of being succinct, they save you time and respects your readers time. I don’t count the letters by the way breaking the rule occasionally is ok.
Single small light laptop
Many people have more than one computer. Desktops at home, work and maybe a laptop. A single small laptop and if you must a large format screen for digital paper shufflers amongst us. Start a BYOD culture which has the dual effect of allowing staff the freedom to choose their preferred device, pay them slightly more and effectively get what was once a capital intensive need off your plate. Some simple policies and procedures can address security and control issues.
Non-electronic invoicing
Stop snail mailing invoices and statements. Enough said. This might not sit well if you the kind of person who lets customers drive your business model instead of the other way around. Personally I believe in an efficient system for the broad benefit of the business and thus a low cost of sale. So I tend not to encourage specific behaviours for specific customers that blow costs out at the expense of cost of sales that then lead to higher prices to cover these specific activities.
Simplified pricing models
Quite often business finness pricing to the nenth degree across lots of facets and services. This optimisation of charges causes product offering complexity that can confuse customers, adds billing complexity and increases billing error rates and queries. We are still going through simplifcation ourselves in Saasu but we have never looked back from each simplification step we have taken.
Very few spreadsheets
Attempt to de-spreadsheet your business. I personally have only one main spreadsheet in use. I share others but my needs are quite simple. One thing I stopped doing is trying to collate lots of KPI and other data into a single spreadsheet. Web apps these days tend to have good report sets, so for example I can easily see service, social, financial and development KPI’s from the various reports from the systems we use that are built in. Where there are gaps build a report or use a spreadsheet but your systems should do the heavy lifting for you.
Digital cupboards
So many people I’ve met use Dropbox, their own servers, their personal laptop and desktops drives at work, usb sticks and maybe a document manager, google drive, iCloud or their smart phone hard drive to store their data. What are you insane?! Leaving the security risk aside, lose some of those digital cupboards. Get down to three core storage systems and don’t tell people what you use for obvious security reasons.
Paperless processes
It’s a process and not a policy. Be clear on what is electronic and accepted by authorities. A photo of a Tax Invoice doesn’t pass as an electronic record necessarily. Create economic time or money incentives for staff to adopt paperless. Remove the fear for people stuck in their old ways. You can mandate it but then you have an inauthentic adoption of the process so it won’t work well. Replace physical reminders with digital ones. Paper is still strong because email is often not trusted so people revert back to paper. Ensure users can trust your email or do things like training users and customers to communicate through networks and portals instead of email.
Reduced/Structured meetings
Unstructured use of meetings can be time suck from your organisation. Just don’t allow them. If you have a good processes in place for a business minimise the meetings down to be just planned meetings, have environments where new issues are raised but don’t allow the grenade meeting just thrown into the mix at all the particpants expense to serve often just an individuals needs and agenda.
Depersonalised desk
Have a photo of you love ones maybe but do you really need all those pens, staplers, magazines, brochures, files and the like creating a little bower nest. Have workstations in your office for printing and other stationary intensive tasks.
Eclectic walls
Minimalism isn’t about nothingness. Minimalist designs and people have quite varied forms of art, photos and other content on walls in their offices. They see walls as pallets reflecting company mood, ideals and goals.
Integrity and openness
Minimalist people often don’t want the clutter of lies, politics, secrets and games. They often run more open environments and open businesses by the nature of their desire to create clarity and purpose. They see environmental and operational minimalism as being about truth, openness and self expression. Real aspects of business liberation.
Freedom
Many of us are owned by our stuff and our habits. Minimalism creates a freedom as it moves you away from being too physically connected to a system or space.
I could go on all day about this but I’ll stop here. If there’s enough interest I’ll do a follow up blog that goes into more specifics in our own business and what I see in my friend’s businesses that work well for them.
Photo Credit: Altasian and their new minimalist San Francisco office.
Would definitely be interested in a follow-up post.
Interesting article that made me think about all my accumulated digital cupboards. I operate completely in the cloud and outsource development work overseas etc, so cloud computing is the only way for me.
Lets make a list of just some of the software I use…
Sales and project management:
Pipedrive.com for sales management – great visibility of pipelines
Highrise for crm – good for general client management
Basecamp for project management – great for project management
Confluence for procedures – great for procedures
Camtasia – to make my video procedures
Screencast and Vimeo to store my videos
The above I’d like to consolidate, but they all do specific jobs very well – however none of them do the whole job I require.
Then there’s file storage:
Dropbox for file storage
Local disk – not anymore as I now use Dropbox for almost everything
Web platform (I build websites):
Business Catalyst – for saas website hosting
BackupBox – for automated website backup
Dream weaver to build the websites
Accounting – saasu – very happy with this
All of the above software costs me monthly fees.
And I fear this is really just the start of it. Whenever I get a new requirement I’m onto the Internet looking for a solution. I’m wondering if others are experiencing the same issue or alternatively there is a better way of consolidating all this software.
@tonyhollingsworth. Yes indeed! You know I love it
Inspired post Marc thanks for sharing. I suspect @ZenHabits “Power of Less” is at play here in forming some of your thinking around this too hey? I’ll be re-reading this post often and please do that follow up post.
Best,
Tony Hollingsworth
Sholto, you got me. haha. I tell you it’s really tough being short and not sounding rude! I resort to tacky smiley faces all the time to fix that prob in two characters
Hi Iain,
I love the “don’t let stuff in” language. I think that nails it. It’s just to easy to accumulate stuff these days including in-tangible stuff. Always feels great doing a cleanout.
Marc
It seems as though minimalism and focus are both part of the same tactic: don’t let stuff in. Have a strong filter. Do without by default.
I just went through this bizarre process of “cleaning out” a lot of Highrise deals and Basecamp projects that were lurking around – deals that would probably never eventuate, projects that existed solely to hold a backlog of things that would never get done, or things I was doing ostensibly for free as a result of having done a fixed price project in the past.
What was so surprising about it was the number of things that I “let in” my business. Although technically most of these things didn’t really take up time or cost money, they had taken up *some* time and some of them had cost *some* money, but more importantly it seems they were having an impact on my business just by existing, albeit in a digital format.
It’s funny though because it creeps up on you. It can be hard, especially when you’re a really small business, to keep focused and remember that it’s the fish that John West reject that make John West the best. You think this stuff doesn’t really have an impact, but I can tell you that the impact of *removing* that stuff from my business systems (and removing several “In Real Life” business relationships they were based on) was very positive and I feel like the sooner you do it, the sooner you will propser.
By purging this stuff electronically, I now have a single entry point for new responsibility, accountability and risk: my email inbox. By starting afresh and assessing each new enquiry as a fresh “deal”, with a stronger filter in place, I can make a better decision about what I let in, and what I let go.
So that’s why your emails are so short! Interesting post. I wrote a take on it for BoxFreeIT http://www.boxfreeit.com.au/Blog/how-to-avoid-time-killing-cloud-clutter.html
Marc, it would be great to gain greater clarity on what counts as a valid digital receipt (or not).
Please keep us posted
Hi Ryan,
We’ll do a follow up given the interest we’re getting on this. I’ll happily share some of the internal secret sauce on this. I agree there’s so many apps and tools out there. Until people adopt a portfolio management approach to technology usage they usually end up causing more problems than they solve.
Cheers
Marc
Hi Matthew,
The photo is an Atlassian photo available in their media area on their website. It is credited in our blog post but we should have credited in the email also with hindsight. Thanks for pointing that out.
Cheers
Marc
Excellent article which we can learn from. Thanks.
Isn’t the photo from the email the Atlassian Office in San Francisco? Slightly misleading, and missing credit to the original source: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=multimedia_detail&newsLang=en&eid=50237518
Interesting summary… I’m keen to hear more about some of those ‘specifics’ in your business. Particularly how you deal with the complexity of having many systems, each for a very specific task, which seems to be the resulting nature of using great ‘apps’ like saasu.
What have you found to be the most useful connectors or dashboards for the various systems? Or do you tend to build your own?
Fantastic post. Couldn’t agree more!
Hi Aaron, Bad spelling agree. I fixed them already but RSS readers don’t update
Hi Matt,
The ATO uses the terms digital “scanning” and “copying” a lot interchangeably. I’ve never heard/read them say photo’s of receipts are ok. I’m cautious on photo’s because it’s an environment capture rather than more definitive scan/copy of a document. If they issue a clarification then I’d take a different view. I’m part of the Software Development Consultive Group for the ATO and I have raised this previously for clarification in our meetings and will let you know how it goes when it comes up.
Excellent piece. Thoroughly agree.
You spelt billign wrong.
Thanks Marc, great post. Disappointed though, thought it was the Saasu office pic!
I’m just wondering about why a photograph of a tax invoice would not be acceptable as a Tax Invoice?
The tax ruling states “Where paper records are produced or received in the course of carrying on business, the Tax Office accepts the imaging of those records onto an electronic storage medium provided that the electronic copies are a true and clear reproduction of the original paper records”
PS. Looking forward to seeing the new Saasu. Will you be releasing any information soon?
This article is spot on, each role I am in or have been in, I regularly take time to review all business processes and make changes that simplify the workplace and business. I find it helps my view on the business and helps the business evolve.
Marc – terrific post containing further inspiration for creating an environment free of the clutter that prevails in the world at large. A number of the topics mentioned ring true for us. Interestingly, Saasu is part of that story with our paperless invoicing and statements, as has a couple of other excellent cloud apps assisting us to run the business. The simplicity creates a certain agility in business, something I view as increasingly important to achieve.
Merry Christmas to you, the team and the family.
Mark.