Potato Systems
He extracted the item, delicately, as he exited the drive-thru. One eye on the road, the other glancing briefly back to the grease-lined package. Anticipation rising, he stopped. And before continuing, he took the first bite. A cacophony of deep-fried potato warmth ensued; the prophecy had been fulfilled, as if there were any doubt.
This moment of reliable satisfaction was Ray Kroc’s legacy in action (RIP). His maniacal lust for order, systems, and protocols meant that years after his reign, the rewards of post-Saturday morning sport-duty Dad could be met with without any doubt.
Sitting there, steering wheel in one hand, half-eaten hash brown in the other, I thought of Ray and his McDonald-themed world. Not the food itself but the system. An iterative, repeatable, reliable masterpiece. These days, it’s a global mega-corp (aka evil), but if you squint hard enough, you can’t help but respect Ray and his achievements.
The E-Myth Revisited is a bestseller for a reason. It’s an homage to Ray's ways, applying systems thinking to business. One of the leading hooks is:
Work on your business, not in your business. If you’re a slave to your business, you don’t have a business; you have a job :(
It’s calm, say less.
My E-Myth TL;DR
Businesses are like universes. As the owner, your M.O. is to keep the ecosystem running while actively observing its patterns (good and bad), creating and documenting processes, and ultimately making each facet reliable, predictable, and repeatable.
Slowly, you amass a WIP bible for running your universe. You’ve narrowed in on the secret sauce, but it’s now documented. In fact, in many cases, the secret sauce is its predictability. At this point, you can replace yourself, department by department. This is a big deal; most businesses never get here.
Thanks to the system, you won’t need 10x performers. Instead, you seek go-getting systems-deprived disciples.
Eventually, you free yourself of all day-to-day operations in favour of finessing the system. Of course, it’s never really finished, but the system-as-a-culture is key. This doesn’t rule out innovation; in fact, the system allows for pragmatic cycles of strategy, prototyping, evaluation, iteration, and documentation.
What about digital studios?
Can it work for service-based teams, like digital studios? Why not?
In fact, due to the creative problem-solving and scenario-based nature of studio work, without systems, teams will naturally adopt new approaches or techniques as needed.
That said, digital studios are businesses that serve people (much like restaurants), meaning there are many moving parts that can be made repeatable and predictable.
I’ve spotted evidence of digital studios attempting RAY's WAYS™. While reading a recent piece on working with clients, I was reminded of HAWRAF, a studio that generously published a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes processes as their parting gift when they closed up shop.
When the studio announced it was shutting down after only a few years in business, the four partners decided that their final act would be to live up to that initial idealism: They scrubbed their internal documents of client names and published them in a public Google Drive folder.
There was also Tom Sach’s 10 Bullets—a military-esque set of principles for fellow artists working in the studio to abide by.
Finally, one of the better examples is Gardener NYC’s Notion Resources, which is an open-source-like approach to ‘running a studio’.
I suspect all long-lasting studios keep their E-Myth strategies private, understandably. After all, how you work is often just as valuable as the work itself.
Some parting E-Myth gems
The system runs the business, the people run the system.
Create a ‘A systems-dependent business, not a people-dependent business.’
The difference between creativity and innovation is the difference between thinking about getting things done in the world and getting things done – Prof. Theodore Levitt
