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When the Details are the Devil

Nice turn of phrase and very appropriate for a client I am working with. The client is growing; in fact it is growing so fast it has decided to implement process to handle the growth. The process is so detailed that it is actually slowing growth and in some areas, forcing a decline in growth. So I was asked why.

The why was very straightforward to discover. You have a sub-$10M company implementing the same process as a $3B company. Not only is the process decisioneered beyond rational thought, it is so complex that asking a single person to manage it is crippling. For example;

When a company sells a product that adds onto or works with another product, infrastructure, or application the process should reflect the “aftermarket” nature of this business. Look at Home Depot. They do not sell houses, but they sell about every aftermarket part and piece for homes (and outside the home) you can imagine. And they make no bones about it. One does not go to home depot to re-engineer their house they go to add on or to augment their existing domestic installation. Nowhere in home depot do you find white papers on how to maximize your domestic infrastructure, but you do find data on how to tile or re-tile a floor. In a similar manner a number of my clients want to focus on home building and not home improvement. Now that I have exhausted this metaphor I will drill down, from a tech perspective.

BASF has it nailed. How big is BASF? They are the little firm that does not make the audio tape they make it clearer. They do not make the paint, they make it brighter. Yeah they do all that to the tune of over $50B in revenue a year. They make chemicals, petrochemicals, plastics, coatings, agricultural products, functional polymers, cosmetic ingredients, nutrition ingredients, the list goes on. And what are they selling exactly? Home improvement or more literally; product improvement. They are selling shovels and clothes to the hurried mass of the 20th century equivalent of the gold prospectors. That works.

Back to our topic, when the devil is the details.

Since the Google-Geeks made it big by selling ads and figuring out how to effectively (and I mean better than anyone in the world effectively) cluster and scale servers to sell ads, there are a number of folks who believe that rigorous analysis of process and metrics will result in scaling accompany. In fact rigorous analysis of an emerging business is required but it must be balanced with the reality of the overall goal; revenue. Often I see so much Monday morning quarterbacking that the velocity of transaction required to scale the business is lost in the need to get more and more data in order to build a predictable and scalable model. This just in; you cannot control rapid growth, but you can contain it. Force yourself to look at the most important part of the process to influence, notice I did not say control I said influence. Oh, and make sure it influenced in a positive manner.
If sales needs to scale put all the tools in for scaling sales, if you lag in hiring, get a specialist for hiring. If your lead system is f-ed up, get someone focused on fixing it. If you need a better web site, do not debate ownership, fix it.

Process while important is also a double edged sword and keep in mind it cuts deep both ways. How many companies use Salesforce.com and think it is the bomb? I thought so. But it does enough to corral data to keep the machine plugging along.
Details are the devil when more time is spent on deciding on the details than growing the business. It takes a lot of discipline, and some measure of faith, to work toward positive containment and not literal control of growth.

BTW, contained and fairly well managed growth sure fixes a lot of process issues.

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