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20-29 Community 23 Forum and chat
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Cross-posted from Discord.

This post is a place to discuss the upcoming ‘small business’ system.

The General Idea

Here’s our overall vision. Obviously, it’ll be a Johnny.Decimal system. Probably two areas:

  • 10-19 Company Admin will have all the stuff you expect. That’s what’s on the mind map, below—work in progress.

  • 20-29 Product will focus on your product. This is an area that we can’t know much about, and we haven’t talked much about it here yet, but we’ll at least give you guidance. You will get this system by downloading software that builds your system according to your preferences. Do you want the emoji and the header symbols in your file system? Do you want Markdown or plain text JDex files? Do you want tags and wiki-links in them? You’ll choose these options, click a button, and your system will appear.

I have a working proof-of-concept of this already, which builds the Life Admin system from structured data (JSON). It’s a cross-platform Electron app. (Sorry not sorry). It’ll be member-only channels here and on the forum, structured around the system—probably at the ID-header level. So if you want help about 13 > 13.30 Expenses, there’ll be a channel #13.30 Expenses full of people who also have questions or expertise on that topic. This will be mirrored on Discord/Discourse.

Operations manuals

When information appears that we feel should be made permanent, Lucy and I will extract it and make it part of the system. It will live in your operations manuals, which form a key part of the new system. Your JDex tells you where your stuff is; your Ops Manuals tell you how to work. Examples:

  • When you get a new/change your existing bank account, what do you do?

    • (You tell the tax office so that they don’t send refunds to your old account… which I learned the hard way yesterday.)

  • How do you ship and send things?

    • A simple checklist with the courier’s details, website, your account, etc.

  • Maybe you have quarterly compliance stuff. How do you do that?

  • And so on.

These Ops Manuals will grow over time as we learn from the community. They’ll be locale-specific where necessary—tax is different wherever you live. (And this is why we can’t just write them—we don’t know how tax works in the Netherlands… but @_FJ does!)

Your business community

And finally, we’ll have places like ⁠this channel where you can hang out with your colleagues, make connections. Maybe there’ll be a channel where you can present your work and get some sales? Who knows. TBC, but we’re all open to ideas.

I’m in another Discord that promised to be a place for small business people to talk (Daniel Vassallo’s ‘Small Bets’ if you’re interested). It started okay, but the last time I logged in, the channels had all turned into discussions about how to stay healthy by drinking kombucha in the middle of the night and shady drop-shipping techniques. WTF? It’s totally pointless now.

We’ll be carefully moderating these new channels. This is a place to get stuff done. Sure, there’s a lounge for chat, but we want to help you do more work. That’s why you’re here.

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It’ll be a subscription

Oh, and I might as well drop it here to gauge the reaction: it’ll be a subscription. I have big plans for this. I want it to turn into the most useful small business resource on the internet. Seriously.

I think I can make your business 1% more efficient. That doesn’t sound like much, but think about the impact to your bottom line. And if we’re going to spend so much time on this, it must be sustainable for us. (The current packs barely are. We scrape by.)

I haven’t decided how much yet and, as always, Decimals who are already here will get a deal.

Of course, your system will never be taken away. What your subscription buys you is community access and the ongoing updates to the Ops Manuals. This puts the onus on us to make it worthwhile.

2 Likes
2

I really love this idea, as I said in the Slack forum.

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And jus to say, if any emails have been sent RE the business Pack development I haven’t had any yet :frowning:

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You’ve missed nothing yet!

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https://decimal.business?

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What app are existing small business owners using for their JDex, or equivalent? i.e. where are your notes?

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Apple Notes and Evernote

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I use DEVONthink.

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This week Lucy has been putting some proper shape to the first ‘small business’ category, 11 The business & its people. And I’ve made a good start on the helper app that will create your system for you.

Before we started working on this pack, we talked about using the ‘life admin’ pack as inspiration. You can draw a line from your personal life to a business that mostly makes sense.

  • 11 Me & other living things → The business & its people
  • 12 Where I live & how I get around → Where you trade & how you get around
  • 13 Money → no change
  • 14 Technology → no change
  • 15 Travel, events, & fun → perhaps becomes marketing & PR? TBC

We really tried to humanise ‘life admin’. Organising your files is already a boring chore – I don’t need to make it more tedious. And we found that by telling ourselves a story, and explaining that story in the pack, things became more obvious in our minds.

And unless you’ve really rationalised it, chewed it over in your mind, changed your mind a few times, thought you were crazy, realised you weren’t, yes, no … it takes a while for this story to find its feet. For the narrative to emerge.

When it does, the story coalesces, and the structure really starts to make sense. It’s like it becomes tangible.

Earlier today we had a discussion on the nuance of your 11.12 Licences & permits. In the context of a business, what licences does it hold, which are held by its employees, and what’s the difference (if any)?

This pack is a challenge to produce because everywhere you look, ‘it depends’. You can very often find a counter-example.

Say you’re a freelance forklift driver. In order to be that, you MUST have a forklift licence: therefore it lives in 11.12.

But a few years on and you’ve hired people to work for you. Now you win business and manage accounts. And so the staff hold forklift licences, and those licences live somewhere alongside the staff members. They’re no longer core to the business: because if one of those people loses their licence, your business doesn’t stop trading. You just employ someone else.

Now, though, you rent a warehouse, and to run forklifts from there it MUST comply with city ordnance §23.6.(b).iv. So now that’s the thing that needs to be in 11.12.

We think the best way to explain how we feel about this ID is this: there’s a knock on the door. It’s the city’s inspector. The first thing they want to see is the licences & permits that your business requires to trade. After that, they’ll continue their inspection: but until they’ve checked the basics, there’s no point going on.

This visit is no stress for you: you just give them everything from 11.12.

Meanwhile I’ve got the skeleton of the JD-system-builder app up and running. You give it ‘a system’ of data, and it creates your index files and file system folders.

Given the variety of apps that people use to keep their notes, that’s not a world I want to play in. I’m going to produce Markdown and plain-text files for you, and you can import them in to whatever app you already use.

But we thought that this app might serve a broader function, as your system manual. For ‘life admin’ we produced a PDF, and we won’t be doing that again: it’s a nightmare to keep up to date.

Instead of that, what if my app was your manual? Searchable, constantly updated, all the latest information, interesting links as we find them, new versions of ops manuals as they’re written, translations – whatever you can think of.

This means that we can keep the long wordy stuff out of your JDex. It stays simple: just the ID’s header and brief description. Then the rest of the space is yours to keep your own notes. And if you want more background, there’s a link there that’ll open up the manual page in the app.

(If you do want a PDF, I just got that working earlier today: just hit a button, and it’s generated on the fly.)

This is surprisingly hard work, but I sit writing this underneath a crabapple tree in full flower, so life’s okay. Onwards and upwards.

A photo of the tree. It's covered in pink flowers in full blossom.
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FIGURE 22.00.0085A. THE CRABAPPLE TREE.

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How do you feel about re-doing life admin? :wink:

Lately I’ve also been working with scales of IDs with two rules:

  • Takes one day of work, and then stays stable for a year.
  • Has a common reader/writer (like all my e-books have a similar source or software to open them, or all my domain receipts and DNS reports have a common reader my nameservers, or all my banking details have a common reader my budgeting app).
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No! What do you mean?.. does it need fixing? :astonished:

We were just chatting over morning tea. ‘Suppliers’ in the SB context is an interesting one that we’re grappling with. Where do they live in the system? You have all sorts of suppliers but we think we’ve got it down to:

  • Back office. Keeps the office nice and the staff happy.
    • Fruit delivery.
    • Copy paper.
    • Bathroom cleaning service.
  • Front office. Is related to providing your service.
    • Bar staff need t-shirts.
    • Cafes need napkins.
    • Bakeries need bread-making machines.
  • Product. Is the thing you sell.
    • Bars buy booze.
    • Bakeries buy flour.

We work this out by telling ourselves stories, and I realised that’s what’s been missing from file systems: the story. Any link whatsoever to the real world! We create these structures without considering the story and so they don’t reflect reality and so we can’t find stuff again.

I hope that what we’re doing with these packs is humanising, like I said above, these systems. Linking them thematically to the real world. If you run a cafe the person who runs the office doesn’t care about the napkins on the tables and the person running front of house doesn’t care about ordering bread because the chef does.

So ‘life admin’ and ‘small business’ will look different, because the stories are different! (Obviously.)

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No no, it’s only a slight joke because you seem to be coming to a new insight into a possible broader “scope” of an ID.

In what feels like a different lifetime now, I once worked one level below C-suite in a fairly complicated business. Couldn’t be described succintly. What we figured out the problem was, was that depending on the stakeholder, they could get a different perspective, and therefore value, out of interacting with us.

We then started advertising ourselves as “we are an X program, masquerading as a Y event, to do Z in the world”. I didn’t like that advertising. But what I think it served well, was introduced our clients to the idea that they could interact with us immediately on three separate “branches” of our business.

Flipping it around, the problem of the amorphous definition of a small business package to encompass “types” of businesses might be a case of “not thinking big enough”?

What if there was no category for “the product”, but rather “our medium”. Some companies sell soap. Soap is the medium. But they do it to replace plastics and silicones, because they sell soap bars. Environmentalism is their goal. And they’re the best known brand in the world for this. First mover advantage is their competitive edge. Neither of these three things are handled by the same people if a business scales up, nor are they cared about by the same audience who might come on the business’s door. I think maybe some investigation of “thematic areas” is warranted? Broad, truly broad, categories that are business-specific like “our mediums” (for products, advertising, supplier interface), “our advantage” (for IP, inter-business relations, customer retention systems), “us” (for the people that make up the company’s functioning skeleton). These are of course terrible names, but do you know what I mean?

On some level all business is taking an input, cooking it in the kitchen a bit, and sending it back out into the world at hopefully a higher value. I think drilling down into structures different businesses can have is wise to find edge cases, but maybe also a central system can still work when the categories are truly broad enough? And the DIY-build system is the perfect use case for “naming” of the categories and IDs?

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Super interesting … I’ll read this a few times and let it cook in my brain.

My IT services background is proving useful. We – the industry – transitioned about a decade ago from selling you a 3GHz server with 64GB of RAM with Microsoft Exchange and 500 mailboxes – a very specific product – to email for 500 users with 99.95% uptime – a service.

Because it turns out most people don’t care how you implement 500 mailboxes. They just want 500 people to get their mail reliably.

You can think the same way about most businesses. What is this thing in service of? So we’re asking ourselves that question a lot.

Why do you get fruit for the office? To keep your staff healthy and happy. (Small business: back office operations.)

Why do you buy napkins for the cafe tables? So that you have a nice customer experience. (SB: front house ops.)

Why do you buy bread? So that you can sell sandwiches. (SB: product.)

Because all three of those things have a supplier, and so why are those suppliers different? Aren’t they all just suppliers? And I don’t think that they are. They’re in service of different goals, and I think that’s how we place them in our minds and, hence, how we would look for them in the future.

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@johnnydecimal
Johnny, I am not sure how helpful this would be, but how about organising suppliers in a similar way to expenses. I use Xero so all of the business suppliers are stored in the supplier contacts list, so very broad, and I do not usually do the placing the order jobs but I think I would naturally look for suppliers in the same way I would look for expenses, which I categorise under the default COA as follows;

The nominal code number could perhaps be added to the end of the ID number, or be an ID number (IDK, I am tired, working late and this popped into my head, can I pay you to do the thinking for me haha) so still streamlined?

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So you would have the basic accounts; assets, liabilities, overheads etc further subcategorised, for example

The bread/the product would be
direct costs - cost of goods sold

The fruit for the office/back office operations would be
overhead - entertainment or office expenses or something

(Recognising these terms/the way things are recording might vary from country to country, business to business)

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Yeah we considered this. I’m also a Xero user. And I don’t mind it, but we decided to go with the tell a story route, as I think it’s generally more memorable.

This is another one of those decisions: do you be all business serious and use things like charts of accounts? Depends who the audience is. I feel that the audience for this is more people who could really use the help just being basically organised, and so the more human route is the one we chose.

Doubtless some people will hate it as a result. :rofl:

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Small business update 03 2024-10-22

This was originally sent as an email.

In the previous messages [0], I spoke about area 10-19 Office administration. This is the common area that contains the stuff that most of us deal with: company, staff, premises, money, tech, and so on.

[0]: 22.00.0086 'Small business' update 01 • Johnny.Decimal & 22.00.0085 'Small business' update 02 • Johnny.Decimal

But what about your product? The thing that’s unique to you, that only you create?

That’s going to be 20-29 Your product, and it should be obvious that there’s only so much guidance that we can give you here. Because neither me or Lucy are hairdressers or landscapers or forklift rental companies or…

Here’s the plan. For product, we’re going to guide you with patterns. A lot of Johnny.Decimal is basically patterns and behaviours. If you’ve been on the forum or Discord for any amount of time you’ll have seen people ask a question that stretches the edges of the system, and my answer is always:

  • Make this thing your own, because
  • I provide guidance, techniques, patterns, and behaviour: not hard rules.

Absolutism is one of my least favourite human traits. As soon as you start a sentence with the word ‘all’, you’ve lost me. (Unless you’re a mathematician.) Because we’re different: our brains, our lives, our situations, all different.

But we can make life easier – for ourselves and everyone else – through common patterns. Here’s one: when you have one version of a document, and you want to update it, what do you do? There’s a bunch of ways to handle this.

  1. Just update the document in-place. You’ve got backups*; if you need to recall an older version, you can restore it.
  2. Copy it, leaving the existing version and the seven other older versions where they are, calling the new version Document NEW COPY version (008) Jim's copy.doc.
  3. Copy it, appending the current date to the filename in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
  • Move this copy to a subfolder called archive.
  • Ensure that only one version remains in the master folder.
  • Work on this version.

(*You have backups, right? Small business will make sure that you do – it’ll be one of the core operations manuals, and we’ll hold you to account.)

The first method is what we should probably do. But humans seem to like to have a readily-available copy rather than relying on version control and backups. So we need to be pragmatic.

The second will be painfully familiar to many of you. Let’s call this the 'I work in a large company’ model.

The third is simple, effective, and takes no time. It’s just a behaviour: a simple set of rules that, if followed, make life easier and less stressful. So why don’t we ever do it?!

Just because we don’t know the product patterns for hairdressers and landscapers now doesn’t mean that we’ll never know them. Because, over time, I hope this community will work together to create them.

I truly believe that community will be what makes this successful. Two people work at JDHQ and we’ve already established that one of them is no hairdresser. (I do cut my own hair but I’m not sure that counts.)

But once we’ve got a few hairdressers, our job becomes to discover and codify knowledge. And so by the time the 10th joins, we do have an idea of how that product area should look. And now we’ve got 10 hairdressers who can all connect and ask each other for help, based on a common language.

Imagine that we’ve also filled out the company admin area, being specific with examples that relate to hairdressing. So when you’re setting up your system, you can choose the hairdressing template and it’ll be even more helpful from the start.

(Nerd side-note: I realised that this might be a cool use for that decimal.business domain I bought. What if salon.decimal.business took you straight to the customised version…)

All of which is to say that we’re full steam ahead here, and it’s progressing very nicely. However: we’ve realised that we’re not going to have this out by our initial end-November deadline. As a reminder, that’s when my family lands from the UK. I’ll be working minimal hours for 3 weeks.

It’s not our style to release something half-baked. I mean, I’d take your money, but Lucy wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. :wink: But seriously, while there’ll always be more to improve, we want this pack to be a solid v1.0 when it’s released. I’ll keep you informed.

Tell us what you do! We’ve got a bunch of example businesses that we’re designing for, but it helps us enormously when you mail us. Screenshots of your existing folder structure are pure gold – it really lets us see inside your business brain. Lucy pores over them and they directly influence what we’re building.

j.

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An offer to any small businessperson interested in the pack: let’s do a Zoom session and you can tell us your problems. it’ll really help us and make sure we’re designing this thing right.

Schedule yourself a session.

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19

This was originally sent as an email.

This week we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about some of the patterns inside category 12 Where I trade & how I get around.

‘Where I trade…’ includes all of the things at those premises, and the management of these things. We’ve split them in to ‘back office’ (or ‘back of house’ if you like) and ‘front office’. In considering all of the types of things that you might have there, here’s the structure we’ve got so far.

12.20 ■ Back office equipment & operations ⛔️
12.21 Keep the basics running
12.22 Keep us safe
12.23 Keep it nice for us
12.24 Keep the back office well equipped
12.25 Keep us fed and watered
12.26 Keep us sending & receiving
12.30 ■ Front office equipment & operations 🛎️
12.31 Keep the basics running
12.32 Keep our customers safe
12.33 Keep it nice for our customers
12.34 Keep the front office well equipped
12.35 Keep our customers fed and watered

By now you shouldn’t be surprised to see patterns emerging. Patterns help your brain, and patterns are surprisingly useful when you’re designing a system because they reveal potential gaps.

And you’ll notice that we haven’t used boring words. We started with boring words: ‘office equipment’ and so on. Turns out, making them less boring has a number of benefits.

  1. They’re less boring! (adj. not interesting; tedious.)
  2. They’re more memorable.
  3. They encompass more when you express them as intentvs. content. We can’t possibly know what all of you might put in here; but if we can figure out how each of you go about your day, we can hopefully provide a place for (almost) everything.

Let’s put a quick example in each of these things. At JDHQ we’re using a hairdressing salon as our working example because it seems to provide a nice spread of services, and conveniently Lucy had a cut & colour earlier this week so she had a good look around and asked a bunch of questions.

12.20 ■ Back office equipment & operations ⛔️
      - (This is a header.)
12.21 Keep the basics running
      - Electricity supply to the premises.
12.22 Keep us safe
      - The office security system.
      - This has an operations manual: how do you open up at the start of the day and lock up at the end?
12.23 Keep it nice for us
      - Buying a comfy chair for the staff area.
12.24 Keep the back office well equipped
      - From staplers to photocopiers.
12.25 Keep us fed and watered
      - Getting a fruit box delivered.
12.26 Keep us sending & receiving
      - Parcels and post.
12.30 ■ Front office equipment & operations 🛎️
      - (This is a header.)
12.31 Keep the basics running
      - You might have utility-like services that are front-of-house only. e.g. gas bottles for portable heaters at the front of a cafe.
12.32 Keep our customers safe
      - Security guards.
12.33 Keep it nice for our customers
      - Cleaning the toilets.
12.34 Keep the front office well equipped
      - Hairdryers and straighteners.
12.35 Keep our customers fed and watered
      - Buying a Nespresso machine & pods so you can give your customers a coffee while their colour sets.
      - This has an operations manual: how do you refill it? How often? Who does it? Where do you keep the pods? What happens when they run out?

Each of these IDs is really broad and, again, this is by design. This system will theoretically include a place for everything: a design goal is that we don’t want you to have to create your own IDs. As soon as you create your own thing you’re off the standard track; that standard gives us all a common language.

So, within each of these IDs there’ll be a well-defined set of subfolders. All the same: as usual, consistency rules. Here they are. (*Noting that this is all a work-in-progress.)

10 Invoices, receipts, & warranties (buying it, or supplies for it)
20 Product manuals & training (how the vendor says to use it)
30 Operations manuals (how we use it)
40 Maintenance, repair, & service (keep it in working order)
50 Vendor & supplier details (who to contact)
60 Sale, cancellation, & disposal (it went away or ended)

The (words in parens) here might or might not make it to the finished product, but they’re certainly helping me with the design. See previous email re: telling a story.

So now we have a place, for, say, explaining how to reset the office power breaker:

10-19 Company administration
   12 Where I trade & how I get around
      12.20 ■ Back office equipment & operations ⛔️
      12.21 Keep the basics running
            30 Operations manuals
               Electricity - how to reset the mains power.txt

And that little text file tells your staff where the breaker is and how to safely turn it back on, etc.

Designing a system that will theoretically be usable by any small business is, obviously, a challenge. I guess that’s why nobody’s ever done it. So I’d love to know what you think: do you read this and think, 'yeah, I could use that’…

…or do you think something different? Tell us! Now or never… :wink:

j.

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Thanks for sharing work in progress!

I do think ‘yeah, I could use that,’ with some caveats/questions.

I’m still thinking through what exactly some of those are, but I can start with a few thoughts-in-progress.

I’m currently mulling over what I think about the type of thing being higher in the hierarchy than the things themselves. I.e. under 12.22 I won’t see ‘security system’ while I’m frantically searching with the alarm blaring. Same for resetting the breaker when the power goes off.
I get that it makes it possible to limit the subfolders to a well-defined set.
I’d almost feel like you’d need a subfolder 00 list of things in this category where you list them all … like the comfy chair, for example.

But on the other hand I see how you actually you can just look in 10 to see if you have something, and in 30 to see how to operate something, and in 60 to see if you still have it … and have complete certainty you’ll find the relevant info there, if you’ve filed it consistently. very elegant!

(the only problem is if all the information comes in one email or PDF … but I guess you can always copy paste or hyperlink ;))

Maybe all I need is to name subfolder 30 Operation manuals and (emergency) procedures to make it cover the contents better.

I guess I’m curious to see how another type of company would look. A furniture maker, say, with only a work shop. Are you thinking that would be 12.40, or they’d use 12.20 for that, or 12.30? Would they then put all their materials and supplies in 12.24? Or should they use 12.30 for their workshop and keep 12.20 for their office, and since they occasionally they receive customers at the office, just record the Nespresso machine there?

I was worried this would lead to ambiguity down the line when trying to make this into a universal vocabulary. But writing it out, I am getting a stronger feeling that this will actually work with the principle of ‘choose the first one you encounter that works, going down the list’. That way simpler businesses will stay in the 10s, and the more complex a business grows, the further down the list they will progress. If so, I think you’re onto gold. It will be very foreign/counterinituitive to many people, but I think I discovered an aspect of this when designing my system around physical locations, and I have a feeling it could totally work.

could these ‘type’ subfolders be made to correspond to the standard zeros?

see if they can correspond 1-1 with the standard zeros?

00 Index <=> 00 Receipts and warranties (kind of the index of what you've purchased)
01 Inbox <=>  quotes for new things? Archive of correspondence related to buying the things?
02 WIP   <=> same; plans and notes on your idea to get a 30-foot Christmas tree in the parking lot 
    (for future years the tree, the lights and decorations, etc. and the instructions get filed appropriately)
03 Todo & Checklists <=> 30 obviously correspondes to manuals and procedures
04 Bookmarks <=> Vendor & supplier details
...
09 Archive (almost deleted) <=> 90 Sale, cancellation, disposal

Or alternatively, would it be better to use letters for these subfolders, to prevent confusion with the AC.ID numbers? Since it’s a closed set, there’s no chance of the order getting messed up with new additions at this level.

A last loose note is that I sense some ambiguity with 12.22 and 12.32. Lots of businesses aren’t going to have security guards for their customers. And security guards in the front office might be for the company’s safety, too (preventing theft?).