November 9th, 2010 2
You were given opposable thumbs – so use them.
The (Simple, Business) Definition of Monkey Work. (1) : any repetitive, methodical task that takes a single Homo Saipan ten hours or more to complete every month. (2) : a good candidate for automation.
Entrepreneurs, you know what I mean. We’ve all faced a never-ending pile of simple, repetitive, but necessary tasks that must be completed routinely and on time to ensure “the machine” runs and continues to grow as smoothly as possible. The pile starts small and manageable, then the list of required tasks gets longer and harder as you win more customers, foster more vendor relationships, and plug more into your business.
Inevitably, one day you’ll look up from a mundane task and cry, “Help!” The way you answer the call will determine the fate for you, and everyone working within your four walls. Even the “outsiders” like investors, partners, and service providers will be impacted by the culture you build to sustain your existence. It’s your responsibility to ensure all parties’ best interests are upheld. No pressure, eh?
When I reached that point with my company, we couldn’t afford to bring more people in to help just for the sake a doing so. We had limited space, limited time, limited funds, and a damn good idea that was starting to catch on. That’s it. The scope of resources available to make it come to fruition was limited to our wits and decision-making skills.
Knowing the way we chose to tackle our growth would severely impact the future and value of our company, I evaluated three options:
- Continue to do this work ourselves at the sacrifice and delay of tackling our bigger objectives,
- Invest in Capuchin monkeys, or
- Automate
There were no successful animal trainers on staff, so we chose automation.
When we sat down as a group (yes, we were small enough to still do this) to decide what to automate, EVERYONE had a request. We faced about fifty individual projects just to plow through the initial list. Obviously, we didn’t have the manpower to complete them all at once, so we set out to eradicate them in priority order based on how closely they matched our concise and over simplified definition of monkey work.
We prioritized all the automation project requests around that simple definition as mentioned above, and set out to tackle the most time consuming, frequent, and costly ones first. Here are a couple examples of how how we did it.
Automate Quotes for New Customers
In sales, you gotta strike while the iron is hot, and we found that between live chats, phone calls, and questions from existing opportunities, our sales personnel weren’t taking the time to send quotes for new services to every single prospect. This wasn’t because they don’t “care” or because they enjoy closing less deals, they simply didn’t have enough time in the day to prepare a hand-crafted, Word-based quote for services every time a prospective customer inquired.
The process of creating the quotes was so arduous, our sales manager HAD TO CHOOSE which prospects were worthy of the time commitment it took to put together and send over a simple quote.
As the CEO of FireHost, I would like to see growth very quickly (sound familiar?), I care about getting as many customers in the door as possible. Learning that many interested, prospective clients weren’t receiving adequate follow up was a huge punch in the gut. I was confident that automating this process would make our sales people more affable, keep them charged up for doing the right things, and ultimately lead to more customers.
We scoped, built, and launched the system, then revised and launched it again over the course of sixty days. Without going into all of the gory details, we essentially created a turnkey process that allows sales people (or anyone in the company) to very quickly customize and send quotes to potential customers. Along the way, we synced up this process with our website, so customers could get quotes online, and then integrated it with our billing software.
The system is now fully adopted and operational, and we’re experiencing real, positive payoffs.
- Sales personnel are saving 25-45 minutes per quote, per prospect.
- Billing personnel are saving up to 60 minutes of reconciliation and validation time per completed order.
- Clients are ordering services 20 percent more frequently than before.
Automating the rest of the systems, one by one
Once we tackled automation for delivering quotes to prospective customers, we set out to make provisioning new customer services faster and more accurate.
When a customer orders online through our shopping cart or via our online quote, all items the customer purchased are immediately brought into our provisioning system. No more lost time on attention to details and we’ve eliminated the communication gap between sales and support.
Building on the success of these two endeavors, we’ve introduced automation to customer service, customer support, and marketing. In every case, investing in technology as well as smart humans to manage it has helped us reduce errors, increase productivity, and achieve optimal return on investment.
Did it cost us money up front? Yes. Did it cost us a lot of time? Sort of. Did our lofty ambitions feel like a huge undertaking for a small company? Definitely. Today however, we can’t imagine doing business any other way.
The process continues to evolve, and I can honestly say that removing monkey work from the hands of homo sapiens has resulted in more quality time being spent on tasks that matter and less mistakes overall. We now take the time to call customers and make sure all is well because we have those precious few minutes in the day. What a concept. Can’t do that when you’re knee high in monkey work.
In Business PERMALINK Comments [2]
Great post Chris. Spot-on. I have tried to espouse the wisdom of the sweat-equity of this type of approach at almost every company I’ve worked at. Interestingly enough, the people who push back the most are often those who it would serve to benefit the most. I think this is probably because it is human nature to have “monkey work” on hand when we don’t feel like making the effort of doing the real thing.
Mel – couldn’t agree more. People that want to have “monkey work” need to be quickly identified and either changed or removed. The biggest value we received from automating mundane tasks is we can focus more time doing valuable things (like talking with customers). Thank you for your comments!