A lot of entrepreneurs choose entrepreneurship to experience the freedom that they were unable to get in their work life. However, when you make the transition to entrepreneurship, you find that freedom also translates to a lack of structure in coordinating your various activities. Structuring the numerous activities and developing coordination mechanisms is essential to build the venture.
The structuring and coordination must be built into a routine set of activities that need to be executed not just by yourself but by any new individual who joins your venture. These routines must be developed and constantly worked on to improve efficiency and ensure that the activities are executed without fail. These methods that get developed must ensure that the venture is reliable for an external customer, and also ensure that the value that is proposed is consistently delivered.
These routines also are a means of capturing the knowledge that a venture has gained. For example, at NSRCEL, there was a time when the mentoring process was completely sporadic and had no predictable response time. As we began structuring this, the first thing we did was make the response time predictable – every alternate Friday. We could accumulate the requests for mentoring for two weeks, make our allocation of mentors, and revert. As the cycle became more predictable, we were able to make this a routine activity, and decrease the response rate and increase the mentoring frequency. From two mentoring Fridays with about 10 – 12 entrepreneurs mentored every month, the process continued to be handed across different office members. Today, it caters to around 30-40 entrepreneurs every single mentoring session i.e every Friday and is done up to four times a month.
The learning from the first attempt is captured in the first version of your routine. As you learn, you can improve and create variations in these routines. These also allow for the attention allocation of your people to be very specific and hence ensure that the outcome is predictable. These routines also ensure that the service quality parameters remain consistent at a minimum and are improved over time. Have you begun developing the routine for your venture?
Ask yourself:
What are the activities you often repeat? Could you structure this as a routine?
What is the expected outcome and response rate? Have you designed the routines to allow someone else to take responsibility and execute their work?
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