Your experiences with SBS after a few months?

Small Business System The water cooler
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colleagues,

there hasn’t been much chatter here yet, I guess everyone is finally just getting stuff done with their super-efficient new admin system!

I was curious if anyone has some experiences to share. Has this been helping you? Have you adapted it in any way? Lessons?

My thoughts: the Small Business System has helped me both practically and in what we could call ‘moral support’.

Practical

I think I’ve said elsewhere that I have kept my bespoke numbering system which is a bit more condensed than the SBS. But the SBS layout has really helped me finalize choosing some category and ID names. A few I’ve taken over verbatim, and others helped me clarify what I needed. I link to the SBS IDs from the related ones in my system.

The ones that I’ve used as-is are in the products, orders and jobs, and shipping and fulfillment sections. Seeing that structure helped me get that sorted out to satisfaction. The Library of creative inputs and outputs is also more or less the same as in the SBS, so good job on getting that pattern figured out @johnnydecimal and @LucyDecimal.

My general business admin looks a little different, because I want to keep things more compact for now. So few of the frontoffice and backoffice things are relevant to me yet that I decided to keep those in a lot fewer folders. But I will admit it is a bit vague and overlapping in there, so I may adopt more and more of that structure eventually.

Moral support

It’s an interesting thing … just reading through the SBS categories and IDs gives me a sense of motivation and clarity. It gives a sense that everything does fit together. I’ve started to notice that I can better appropriate all the information for business operators that you find online. For example: the government tax website doesn’t feel so unclear and overwhelming anymore. I can place that within the map of the whole which is my System. I know that I can create overviews and templates and checklists for all those tax rules, and that knowedge alone makes that information feel less confusing. I guess seeing a whole business mapped out this way in the abstract motivates me as a big picture kind of thinker, and then the detail work, for which I’m naturally less motivated, starts to make sense and feel worth it too.

My business activities are quite part-time freelancing stuff beside a whole bunch of other responsibilities and interests. So there’s often a bit of fuzziness there. I’m not a born entrepreneur, nor am I a born linear thinker who understands that the fastest way to get to C is to accept that A comes before B. Having this system makes the relationship between ideas, dreams, and the cold hard requirements more meaningful to me. For example: my vision and mission and business plan are ‘just’ slots in the machine of an operating business. It takes the pressure off, so to speak, in getting that all recorded and making honest calculations and plans.

It somehow moves me that so much effort has been put into bringing all this information into one overview, that honestly presents how many moving parts there are to a working business. I guess it comes down to that cliché phrase which is at the basis of so much of human motivation: I feel seen.

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What incredible timing that you posted this! I should be in a thread “your experiences with SBS after a few hours” though, lol.

I jumped in with two feet a few months ago, thinking I would start with the personal JD side, then got stalled and sidetracked and didn’t get back to it. I started getting back to it this week, but decided to flip my thinking and start with the SBS side.

Where I’m at so far is nearly done setting up the structure with several areas that I don’t think are relevant to me, but also it made me think about things that I didn’t consider before in my business.

My SBS is 1 area within a larger system, my 20-29s. I’m a one-woman business, and 16 years into it, that will not likely change, so I don’t need to factor in file sharing with others in my business. I also have one Obsidian vault, same reasoning. The challenge so far is taking the structure laid out over multiple areas and fitting it into one area, which is what I’ve worked through this week. I’ll post more about where that ends up!

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Thanks for sharing!

I’ve done this essentially too. So it’s possible!

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We also have ‘moved in’ to SBS, just like everyone else. While we did, of course, design it with our business in mind, we didn’t design it for our business. So making things fit has been interesting.

Like you, I found the fact that there are now more areas of my business that I might have identified by myself to be revealing. I definitely won’t use them all, but the more I think about where this thing should be, the more I see, oh, it’ll probably go in that place there that I thought might be unused.

A couple of examples. My use of Obsidian is something I’m keeping a close eye on, because it’ll shape how I talk about the app, and how I recommend others use it. So where does that fit? Immediately it’s not in 10-19 because it’s more than just the running-of-the-business. I’ve decided that it fits in 23 Equipment & machines 🛠 because, to me, Obsidian is:

the equipment and machines that you use to make your product or deliver your service.

The next sentence in the text has the word ‘physical’, which we’ll be removing in due course.

The other one is 24 Processes & procedures 📋. I think I’ve come up with a really neat way of keeping on top of to-dos & project stuff using the system. It’ll become its own course, but basically you use the fact that there are mostly 5 of everything and you assign one to each day of the week–

  • Monday: 11, 21, 31, 41
  • Tuessay: 12, 22, 32, 42
  • …

–and on that day you spend some time on the thing and you review your tasks and just keep on top of it.

That said, we’ve been totally consumed with our 21 Products & services 💈 world. For the last 2 months all we’ve done is work on expanding the SBS website to include all of our other products. Life Admin is coming in, as is all of the build-your-own course material. So the rest of my business has been neglected, but I know it. That in itself is interesting. I’m looking forward to getting this thing out the door (later this month) so I can go and tend to those other categories. And having them there waiting is this weird relief. I don’t have to wonder what I’m ignoring: it’s right there! Hah.

Thanks @hans as always for the thoughtful note. I’d love to hear from more of you. Our intent was to continually evolve this thing: that’s why it’s a website and not a PDF. So tell us what you need; what’s good, bad, missing, too much.

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Thank you for writing this thoughtful post @hans. It’s the kind of feeling we probably were hoping to provide, but it’s hard to describe.

I’m confident that if I’d stumbled on this when I was starting out as a freelancer/sole trader it would have really helped me. Because I knew nothing about being a business. Even a really simple one. If memory serves, towards the end of our Excel course I share some of my OG ‘spreadsheets’ circa 2009. So embarrassing. :see_no_evil_monkey:

This system took a lot of sweat and tears, literally. But I believe it was worth it. :flexed_biceps::nerd_face:

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this is interesting … it gives prominence to a software app. Just like you need to maintain and service a physical machine (clean or replace those filters on your shop vac, everyone!!), you need to put effort into maintaining critical software. Not only keeping it updated, but actively learning how to make the most of it and use it efficiently. Excel, text editors, cough cough.

ooooh, sounds interesting. Curious to hear more. As it happens, I’ve stumbled on a tickler-based system of reminders in the past month which has been helpful. Some overlap there, I think.

Yes, exactly!

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