You can't grow your business with Post-It notes

If your monitor looks like this let’s find a better way of doing things.

One of the first things I do when I meet with a new client is count the number of post-it notes on their screen.

As a general rule of thumb, the more post-it notes someone is using to try and run their company, the less likely it is they’re getting the opportunity to work on the longer-term, proactive, really valuable projects. The ones that are really going to make the biggest difference for your clients, your team, your business and especially you.

(More Post-It notes usually correlates to more stress, frustration, chaos, rushing from one emergency to the next trying to keep all the plates spinning. All day, every day.)

I’ve seen people who needed a 48” ultra-widescreen monitor simply to have more space to stick post-its. Some people just get two monitors instead.

“What got you here won’t get you there”

Marshall Goldsmith

Post-its may have worked fine when you first started, but they’ve got a low capacity and you’re going to hit a ceiling sooner rather than later. Trying to grow your company by managing things this way isn’t very scalable. Even for 3M.

There’s only so much real estate space on a whiteboard too. Even if you decorate all of your office walls in them and use tiny writing.

I’ve seen more than one ambitious £500K+ company trying to scale whilst managing all of their client projects on whiteboards like this. It’s hard to see the bigger picture with your nose pressed up against a whiteboard with a magnifying glass trying to read the delivery details for client project #72 of 120.

But you don’t need to spend £10K+ and try to fit your business into a complicated, confusing, all-singing, all-dancing application you don’t understand that could run a multi-national conglomerate either. Going from one extreme to the other just creates different problems.

There are better ways to run things. Ways that are much better suited to where you are now, the challenges you’ve got and where you're headed. You might not know what they are but if you'd like to find out, send me a message.