Rework Review: 5 Steps Your Firm Can Practice
"Rework" is a to the point business management book that will really force you to rethink your assumptions about doing business.
"Rework" is a mold breaking business volume written by the brains behind of 37signals.com.
If you're a small office and you're not familiar with 37signals.com they feature a wondrous, low-cost selection of web products for small businesses.
We utilize "Basecamp" at CPA Site Solutions every day to deal with projects and tasks for accountants, so when we heard 37signals published a book we needed to give it a read.
When you finish reading materials that informs you the next reasonable step is to extract away a few things that resonated to implement in your company or day-by-day routine.
Here are 5 actions we will apply in the following quarter.
1. The software your firm is using don't count. What you do matters most. Do not let yourself or your organisation to get hung up on what version of software you are utilising or waste time learning a gimmicky new tool you will not need in two weeks.
2. Inspiration will spoil. If you get a notable scheme, initiate work on it NOW, before your idea rots. Basecamp is ideal for this task. Arrange a milepost, an actual calandar task, and make actionable points that you can execute in the next couple of days.
3. Scratch your own itch. Construct widgets or web apps that you would utilise to make your ideas work.
4. Out-instruct your competitor. Create help files for your widgets or software. Share these tools to your clients. Competitors can imitate your feature list and tool offerings but they can't duplicate your education. That requires genuine thought and initiative.
5. Meetings are toxic. Firms ususally use a great part of their week in meetings.
This section made us anxious. This was warning sign, though, that we ought to pay extra close attention to the idea. We learned a long time ago that when we're uncomfortable it frequently means there is space for improvement. We truthfully looked at our meeting procedures and exploited these suggestions to make them more efficient:
- The price of a meeting is the time taken away from each person in the meeting. If 10 folks take part in a 1 hour meeting, that's 10 hours of productiveness taken away.
- Always e-mail an agenda to your team preceeding the meeting.
- Adhere to the docket. If someone goes too far off off-subject bring them back to an agenda topic.
- Only invite individuals who truly need to be there and those who will give to the meeting.
- Construct action steps for any resolution to a setback that arises and make it due in the next two weeks. If it's not done, or can not be done in two weeks then it probably wont get done.
- Set a timekeeper on your watch, phone, computer or other device. When the timer goes off the meeting is finished, no exceptions.
"Rework" is a amazing read. I belive it ought to be required reading for every business proprietor. It's a very light read, and it's well worth the time. You can read the whole thing in a few short hours.
About the Author
Jim Tourville is the Executive Director of Operations for us here at CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's leading edge web design firms oriented entirely to CPA Websites. Our company at present provides websites for more than 4000 CPA and accounting firms.
If you would like to be a Guest Author for this blog contact brian.oconnell@cpasitesolutions.com.