After 6 months of work, the Small Business System has launched. Here’s why it took that long, what’s in it, and what’s next.
Why’d it take so long?
Firstly, if you signed up a long time ago: thank you. Some of you gave us money … let me see … back on the 10th November. (Anthony in Reading, you were first!) That’s a long time, and that money has kept us going. It’s allowed us to focus on creating this thing and to not worry about promoting everything else. That’s massive, so thank you. You literally made it possible.
So, we followed the process and went deep on discovery. MindNode was, as always, indispensable. Here’s an early version, once we’d given at least some shape to the initially-random thoughts.
That took about a month. Many whiteboards, mind maps, walks, chats over a beer. What would it contain? Who was it for? What’s a ‘small business’ and what does it contain?
What’s a small business?
A question worth answering. We had a couple of ideal businesses that we kept coming back to. There’s person who makes candles and sells them at local market. There’s small hairdressing salon like my best friend Berry.
There’s personal trainer who meets you at 6am and makes you skip rope and do weights. We’ve got Jeff from Lovett Sundries who make their own natural cosmetics. Or my mate George who runs a fleet of high-end taxis in Melbourne.
And then classic businesses that we can all relate to. Restaurant. Bakery. Professional services. Consultant. Freelancer. Farmer. Dog groomer.
So you can see, there’s a lot to consider. Do you have premises? A vehicle? Staff? Do you keep stock? Do you have a handful of customers or thousands? Do you make a thing, deliver a service, or a bit of both?
We think we’ve designed something that fits everyone. If you run any sort of business and you have between 1-10 staff – maybe more, we’ll have to test it out – we think we can accommodate you.
Complete and consistent
The design phase took so long because we checked, again and again, that this thing met our two main design goals: that it be complete and consistent.
We think there’s a place for everything. It might not feel like exactly the right place to you, but we learned with Life Admin that it’s more important just to pick a place, and get on with it. This is a tool, not art.
And Lucy has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that it’s internally consistent. How she holds it all in her mind I’ll never know. I’d write something and she’d say, but up here we said…, and we’d revisit that and line it all up.
What’s in it?
So what’s in it is hopefully a structure that will accommodate all those types of business. Some of you will use more of it than others. That’s by design.
We’ve ended up with 5 areas containing about 20 categories and about 200 pre-defined IDs. Some of the areas are designed for you to create your own IDs as we can’t know, for example, how your list of products should be structured. So you’ll end up with more over time.
There’s guidance on how to do this. Suggested templates (which are included in your download). A whole help system. And user settings: you log in to this thing. Initially that’s just do you want to use emoji, but this gives me the ability do to more over time. See below.
Lucy’s master document clocked over 46,000 words; about 340 pages. She wrote essentially all of it, while I built the site. (I should rename this thing Jucy.Decimal.)
What do I get?
We learned a lesson with the Life Admin System: manually creating PDFs and folders full of text files is a nightmare. It’s difficult, unwieldy, and unmaintainable.
So I’ve built a website. I think it’s pretty neat. Think of it as your business operations dashboard. From there, you download a set of folders and JDex files that are generated on-the-fly. So we can update the system really, really easily. Constantly. Frictionless. We update it, you refresh the page, you see it. It’s a joy.
A shared language
This is the natural evolution of Johnny.Decimal which is, of course, inspired by the Dewey Decimal system. In that system, every library doesn’t invent its own scheme. That’d be madness. Rather, I can tell you 152.42 LEMB and that’ll guide you to the book I’m reading in any library on Earth.
Now imagine this same power in your business life. If you want help with your IT backups, you don’t have to explain the scope first: just tell someone you’re at 14.23. Now we know exactly what we’re referring to, and we can reference (and contribute to) the same set of resources. And you can chat in a channel dedicated to that part of the system. Targeted. Focused. Efficient.
What’s next?
We can’t emphasise enough that this is version 1.0. As well as constantly upgrading the content, I’d love to build this to be a fully-featured app.
Here’s a small example. One of the things we’ve defined is an ops manual that tells you how to configure and then test your IT backups. So how can we help you do that?
Well, I can build a system of reminders. You tested your backups yet? Check the box and we’ll automatically make a log in your JDex. Don’t check the box and I’ll nag you. Maybe this can feed in to your calendar. This is all fairly easy, I just need the time to build it.
So that’s the next couple of years for us. Assuming this is successful enough to keep us off the streets, we’ll be working on it full time. We have no plans to start anything new. This is it for a while.
The vision
Because here’s my long-term vision. You start a business. Let’s say you’re making those candles. Maybe this is something you do on the side, so you don’t have a lot of spare time. And it’s your first crack at being indie.
Today, you have to figure everything out yourself. From business registration to insurance to calculating your taxes and backing up your IT systems, tracking your customers, orders, stock, your marketing, setting up a website and email, all of it. That’s wild, right? It’s 2025 and unless you go and do a business course at your local tertiary education place, there isn’t one place that you can go and find all this information.
I want you to be able to log in to the Small Business System and for that all to be taken care of. I mean, you still have to do the work! But we’ll guide you all the way. I want this to feel like you’ve got us – and the rest of the community – on your staff.
The community
I’d also love this to become a genuinely useful community of like-minded business people. You’ve already self-selected in to a group of people who are actively trying to be more organised. Imagine what that community can do for each other.
I know all about IT. Ask me: I’ll help. But marketing? Clueless. Well one of you reading this is a marketing expert. Hi! Let’s help each other. Let’s swap skills and knowledge, and buy stuff from each other, and support and recommend each other.
I’m in other ‘small business’ communities. The quality of discourse is … low. Because it’s mostly full of dudes trying to get rich quick on a lazy internet idea. This is not for them. This is for people who are getting on with making a thing. Your time will be respected here.
‘Preview mode’
When I built the site I had an idea: what if there wasn’t one site with all fancy graphics (lol, me?) that tried to sell you the site, then entirely another site once you were in?
What if it was all the same site?
So that’s what I built: one site. If you’re signed up, you see it all. If you’re not, you see the ░░░░░░░░░░ version. I really like how it turned out.
Check it out at https://sbs.johnnydecimal.com. Now if you’ll excuse me I think I might have a few days off.
Perfect timing on DST Sunday when everyone else is still asleep.
Congratulations Johnny. The only way I can relate to how you are feeling is submitting my dissertations, which are far less work than what you’ve put in here. I have started downloading, and going through everything, but it’s going to take me a while, very excited to get my system up and running. I am really proud of and happy for you and Lucy, this is the start of something great. I love your creativity and the search function is brilliant. Thank you for staying real and human. Enjoy some rest!!! Big hugs and gratitude from little old me in England. Thank you for making some areas of my life so much easier.