Sitting at my wooden standing desk (oh my, what a contradiction) late this Friday afternoon, with the setting sun bouncing off the building next door and shining with a yellow richness into my office, I had a sudden realisation of the piles of stuff around me.
No matter how hard I try to be That Amazing, Organized Woman With Nails And Style And A Perfectly Clean Everything, my creative subconscious doesn’t really dig it. By the end of the week, I’m in a splurge of papers, pens, and scattered brainwaves scratched out on notepapers of all kinds.
I might run a fully digitized Office 4.0, with a handful of brilliant people who are remote, but you’d never know it from my workspace.
And the behind-the-scenes work I’m doing at the Pixie to solidify our systems and processes won’t change that.
Some of my clients proclaim proudly how they ‘used to be notebook people’ but are now ‘tablet people’. They’re the same clients who insist on face-to-face conversations, share files using Dropbox, send comments in emails, and have review processes that are as convoluted and archaic as the Big 4.
I might tell them that they suck at being digitized, but it’s not really my place.
In any case, they’d do better if they scribbed by hand, fast, at the speed of thought, while interfacing with the rest of the world seamlessly.
It’s an issue that I’ve written to you about a lot this year. The systems thing is top of mind, and it turned into action thanks to an innovation mentor who planted the seed.
So it is that I approved purchase of TheBrain.
So it is that I started comparing file repositories and pricing, and fell in love with Keybase. (Despite the risk it carries, given Keybase insists on providing services for free.)
So it is that I’ve spent time every day for the last two weeks cleaning up the services library in our digital proposals system.
The remarkable nature of taking action, darling reader, is that it brings everything into alignment in ways you don’t expect. For example, cleaning up the services library has forced me to really focus down on what we do extraordinarily well. That’s translated into more effective daily emails. And clearer services pages on our website.
By removing all content on our home page except for a mailing list opt-in, we are gaining subscribers at an incredible rate of knots. And that without any social media, or any podcasts, or continuous SEO service, or editorial, and without advertising of any description. Since 1 October we’ve gained over 100 subscribers.
Once the services are done and the file system reworked, we’ll be in a position to really kick some serious a!se.
That’s what I mean about getting ducks in a line.
We might be coasting along, doing our regular and fabulous thing.
We might be delivering excellent and unusual works.
We might be inspiring people like the Behaviour, Brain, Body Research Group at the University of South Australia.
But once we get everything in a line, we’ll be able to start firing.
It’s a funny thing, to be talking about getting started, when you’re thinking about the “firing” kicking off some six months into a company’s seventh year.
But I really believe that it isn’t until your business is 10 years old that it’s even in a position to make a serious impact on the world. By then, you’ve been around the block; you know what works and what doesn’t; you’ve got your sh*t together; you’re a mature business person; and you’ve got the confidence to know how, when, where, and why to fly.
It sounds like forever, doesn’t it, 10 years?
It’s really just the blink of an eye.
As I peer through the scope of the weapon I’m piecing together, I can see that I need more patience, more bait, a little more rectitude.
And as I rest with my elbows in the grass, knitting it all together, the ducks are taking their places.
Then,
soon,
when the time is right -
I’ll pull the trigger on Phase 2.