Kim's Blog

I Wish I had a Crystal Ball [Part 5]

In previous posts (see “I Wish I had a Crystal Ball [Parts 1-4]” below), I talked about the difficulty of trying to make a 2009 sales forecast. Confident in my knowledge that my company’s commitment to quality was not going to change, I knew another certainty for Shakespeare Squared.
Our process is just as important as our content. Most people might think we focus so much on quality that how we get it done is an afterthought. Not true, as our editorial team solves our content challenges everyday while our project management and operations teams make sure we are being efficient, meeting deadlines and communicating continually with everyone involved. Oh yes—it’s all done while staying on budget. Our process has become a sense of pride and has allowed us to increase capacity, stabilize some of the more complicated projects, and raise our profitability all simultaneously.
The interesting thing to me is the evolution of process. When I watched my parents run their bakeries, I often wondered why it took so long for a policy or rule to be applied to a specific instance.  Why wasn’t it just there? Aren’t all rules in place at the beginning of something? What I witnessed much of the time was a reactive approach to boundaries. Making rules for rules sake was not a regular practice (and I can’t say I like to do that either).  Instead much of the time my parents were focused on the process of how products were made, developing new concepts and selling, selling, selling.
In the beginning at S2, we did not follow a model on how to build a business. We put processes in place as needed and when there was a quiet moment (Ok, there wasn’t really a quiet moment!) we would improve processes.  Of course, over time we would stretch our process a bit more than was comfortable in order to handle growth. In that time, our entire company participated in part of the process of ideas. We now have automation in our major departments to allow us to be more productive and have more time for creativity. We have built it custom and it’s able to handle any scenario we throw at it.
I now value the art of a great process almost as much as a great glass of Riesling!
Come back soon for part 6.