'Small business' update 03

This was originally sent as an email.

In the previous messages [0], I spoke about area 10-19 Office administration. This is the common area that contains the stuff that most of us deal with: company, staff, premises, money, tech, and so on.

[0]: https://jdcm.al/qssb/01 & https://jdcm.al/qssb/02

But what about your product? The thing that's unique to you, that only you create?

That's going to be 20-29 Your product, and it should be obvious that there's only so much guidance that we can give you here. Because neither me or Lucy are hairdressers or landscapers or forklift rental companies or...

Here's the plan. For product, we're going to guide you with patterns. A lot of Johnny.Decimal is basically patterns and behaviours. If you've been on the forum or Discord for any amount of time you'll have seen people ask a question that stretches the edges of the system, and my answer is always:

Make this thing your own, because
I provide guidance, techniques, patterns, and behaviour: not hard rules.

Absolutism is one of my least favourite human traits. As soon as you start a sentence with the word 'all', you've lost me. (Unless you're a mathematician.) Because we're different: our brains, our lives, our situations, all different.

But we can make life easier -- for ourselves and everyone else -- through common patterns. Here's one: when you have one version of a document, and you want to update it, what do you do? There's a bunch of ways to handle this.

Just update the document in-place. You've got backups^*; if you need to recall an older version, you can restore it.
Copy it, leaving the existing version and the seven other older versions where they are, calling the new version Document NEW COPY version (008) Jim's copy.doc.
Copy it, appending the current date to the filename in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
- Move this copy to a subfolder called archive.
- Ensure that only one version remains in the master folder.
- Work on this version.

(^*You have backups, right? Small business will make sure that you do -- it'll be one of the core operations manuals, and we'll hold you to account.)

The first method is what we should probably do. But humans seem to like to have a readily-available copy rather than relying on version control and backups. So we need to be pragmatic.

The second will be painfully familiar to many of you. Let's call this the 'I work in a large company' model.

The third is simple, effective, and takes no time. It's just a behaviour: a simple set of rules that, if followed, make life easier and less stressful. So why don't we ever do it?!

Just because we don't know the product patterns for hairdressers and landscapers now doesn't mean that we'll never know them. Because, over time, I hope this community will work together to create them.

I truly believe that community will be what makes this successful. Two people work at JDHQ and we've already established that one of them is no hairdresser. (I do cut my own hair but I'm not sure that counts.)

But once we've got a few hairdressers, our job becomes to discover and codify knowledge. And so by the time the 10th joins, we do have an idea of how that product area should look. And now we've got 10 hairdressers who can all connect and ask each other for help, based on a common language.

Imagine that we've also filled out the company admin area, being specific with examples that relate to hairdressing. So when you're setting up your system, you can choose the hairdressing template and it'll be even more helpful from the start.

(Nerd side-note: I realised that this might be a cool use for that decimal.business domain I bought. What if salon.decimal.business took you straight to the customised version...)

All of which is to say that we're full steam ahead here, and it's progressing very nicely. However: we've realised that we're not going to have this out by our initial end-November deadline. As a reminder, that's when my family lands from the UK. I'll be working minimal hours for 3 weeks.

It's not our style to release something half-baked. I mean, I'd take your money, but Lucy wouldn't be able to sleep at night. ;-) But seriously, while there'll always be more to improve, we want this pack to be a solid v1.0 when it's released. I'll keep you informed.

Tell us what you do! We've got a bunch of example businesses that we're designing for, but it helps us enormously when you mail us. Screenshots of your existing folder structure are pure gold -- it really lets us see inside your business brain. Lucy pores over them and they directly influence what we're building.