We have been the client.

Thirty years of running businesses came first. We have signed off the implementation that did not work, and we have had to ask three people to get a straight answer about our own company.

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What should be true of your business

Automate the carrying. Never the caring.

Most businesses automate at the customer boundary, so a caller meets a phone tree while the fetching and chasing behind it stays with the staff. The inversion is to automate behind the boundary, so when a person does pick up, they already know and can already act.

Customers inside the work

You should own what runs your business

A vendor's economics depend on selling the same product to your competitors, so anything that arrives in a box arrives in everyone's box. The part that decides whether somebody picks you has to be built, and then it has to be yours: the code, the data, and no fee per person on top.

What owning it means

Standardising the ordinary is a strategy

Customising ordinary software is how a business pays twice: once to build the change, then forever to keep it working through every upgrade. Doing invoicing differently has never won anyone a customer.

What standard costs

Being good at it is not an asset until it survives whoever is on shift

When the way you work lives in heads, quality varies with who is on. Putting the process into a system does not remove anyone's judgement. It removes the lottery of whose judgement you got.

Checklists instead of memory

Where this comes from

We built the software we could not buy

Wilfred spent thirty years running businesses rather than advising them. He founded factories, grew one from two people to a hundred and sixty, and wrote its production software himself because nothing he could buy fitted the way the business actually worked.

That is where all of this comes from. The parts of those businesses that were ordinary, the invoicing and the leave forms, were ordinary everywhere and should simply have been bought. The part that made them win work existed in no product on the market, and having it written down and owned was the difference between a business that could grow and one that depended on whoever happened to be in the room.

Between the three of us there is also a long stretch of enterprise work, on the systems large companies run and the integrations that hold them together. That is useful, and it is not the same thing as having carried the risk yourself.

The method

Learning a business is the actual job

Writing software has got faster for everyone, and it will keep getting faster. What has not got easier is knowing which part of a business is genuinely the advantage and which part is ordinary work it should stop paying to reinvent. Get that call wrong and better tools just help you build the wrong thing more quickly.

So there is a map. Forty-one areas of business activity, broken into just under 1,800 individual things a business can do, and it gets extended whenever a client does something the map has not seen before. Working through it is how a business gets learned properly, instead of asking what somebody wants and building that.

One of the forty-one is billing and revenue. Inside it sit forty-three separate things, and almost nobody raises more than a handful of them unprompted. Several of the rest are quietly costing money. Occasionally one of them turns out to be the thing a business does better than anyone else in its industry, and nobody had ever written it down.

That is why a Monday in a factory and a Thursday in a medical device company are both possible without being shallow in either.

Learning a business is not the same as changing it. Nobody is asked to work differently until the work is already easier. Every step gives something back before it asks for anything, which is the difference between a migration and a system shock.