In nature and in human success there is always a common theme.
Unity
However, in business Unity is hard to come by and getting people to work as a team is often a difficult task, but any thing worth doing is often difficult. Just like geese flying in formation or the talented and skilled heroes you find in your fire and police departments working in unison to save lives, strategy and unity are paramount to success.
But how do we achieve this? With 3 steps.
1.) Education
One thing I’ve found is that businesses that have a uniformed training and methodology in educating and training employees fair far better in customer relations, quality and talent than ones that throw new employees into the tutelage of older ones to get a quick and dirty training.
See, quality is about attention to detail. And Quality work means being thorough and diligence. In all my years of web design –and other jobs I held with companies outside of web design — I discovered that most problems with customers, clients, and accounts was the direct result of improper training. An, while I’ve never been at the receiving end of one, improper training leads to lawsuits and disaster. This is not a major problem with smaller one-man shops, but when you have design studios and teams and a firm, piss-poor training can spell disaster. This is actually true for any industry. I’d venture to throw out about 50-60% of all lawsuits are connected to poorly trained employees not doing their job right and cutting corners.
The great part about web design is the fact 99% of all information on it is easy to find and there are plenty of people to ask for feedback and get knowledge from. So really, poor training and education for a web designer in inexcusable and people, our customers and clients, are quickly becoming aware of this.
If you have people working under you, I’d actually recommend taking the time to site down and train them, retrain them, and once that is down pat — train them some more! You’ll need to set aside a small amount of you budget for training, but it goes a long ways in helping your business succeed.
2.) Paperwork
A year ago, I was horrified when I met a fellow local web developer and host. And it wasn’t because he was untalented or overcharging. It was because of his paperwork. He had little to no documentation of all the work he did for the customer, and what he did have was stored on corners and wedges of paper with no consistent notations.
Paperwork isn’t the most glamorous part of web design, but it is an essential part. Your memory isn’t perfect and you shouldn’t trust it with your client’s needs and goals. Not to mention bad paperwork often leads to larger problems down the road.
By nature, and we all know this to be true, humans are lazy creatures. We’ll start using short hand codes, annotations, and shortcuts to get the unpleasant parts of our day out of the way faster. Yet by sticking to a standardized system for documenting your work (like work-orders or a changed history log) you can save time and be able to show your work.
Now this fellow web designer had no such system. And he had himself in a pickle with a customer. It turns out the client was not going to pay him on the work he did and had already seized control of the site behind the web designer’s back. This web designer in question was preparing to take them to court to get his money, but he couldn’t prove a damned shred of work because he didn’t track his work properly. Instead he had a stuffed folder of trash to show for what he did.
Well, his mistake was caught by the mediator who ended up siding with his client and leaving him with nothing.
In the aftermath, he showed me his original filing system from 2 years prior where everything was organized, but over time he just started skipping over the paperwork to simply get the task done quickly. Now team should have also caught this too as they took part in that site’s development – but they too let their own paperwork lapse and let stuff slide.
But no one did their jobs. Now they all lost out on a large sum of cash and their legal costs.
Had they kept their system of filing going, this would’ve been caught and fixed and that web designer would’ve have to use his own savings to pay his team not to mention the embarrassment of loosing in court.
On the flip side, I have a friend who audits his customers files every few weeks looking for mistakes and issues corrections routinely. He’s not in web designer, he’s just an average joe who works for himself. But he takes the time to do things right, and as a result never has any problems that is of his fault in his business. He told me, “Responsibility is about doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do.” Can’t be any truer than that.
3.) Unity
When people are divided against each other, pulling for their own needs first or putting themselves before their fellow man, they fail. They also make enemies all around themselves. They don’t realize they do it, they also don’t recognize who has gone from friend to loathing adversary. Office infighting and competition doesn’t always breed excellence but it does breed rebellion. I’ve seen successful businesses suddenly implode, for no reason at all, because one employee wronged another and didn’t recognize it. Inside the office, everyone must work together and respect each other and lean upon each other for help.
Without teamwork, failure is a certainty.
Outside the office, it’s important to for relationships not just with your clients and leads, but also with others in the industry. I know I’m banging an old drum here, but if people in the web design indstrusty (or any other for that matter) spent more time working together on improving their industry reputation as a whole, we become better as a whole.
I’ll tell you right now, web designers are not respected.
And every web designer knows this. Clients have this perception that their 10 year old nephew with a copy of dreamweaver can hold a match to us. Clients also have a perception that our services are nothing more than a hobby.
Every person in our industry is an oppurtunity to improve ourselves, not a rival out to steal customers. Yes, there are ones who are in this for themselves — and their actions cost them in the end — but we must never forget that teamwork builds success.
So there you have it.
My three steps to improving your business.
