How we keep getting things done with a small team
2023 is coming to a close as fast as you can imagine, and we are certainly not slowing down. As a new and very small business, we need to operate efficiently and effectively, and our impact needs to be far bigger than our effort. Think about dropping a pebble into a pond and what kind of ripple that would make. Your imagination is letting you see a slight movement around where the pebble hits the surface of the water. Now, imagine you had 30 of those pebbles hitting that same pond but having them spaced out to hit different areas at different times. The result will be a pond that has many ripples running into overlapping patterns, with a result that is far more visible than just a single pebble.
Mortgage Workflow Partners Inc. is that pebble in the mortgage industry services universe. 2023 started where we spent about 80% of our time helping a single client, whereas we are helping nearly 30 companies with 100% of our time. How can we possibly do this with our very small team? In the same way, you can help your entire company with a small team. You need to leverage proper planning, focus, organization, collaboration, and a collaborative communication platform (we use Basecamp by 37signals for this part.) It would help if you had all of these skills and tools to succeed at some level.
Sounds easy enough, right? You probably feel good about planning. Everyone usually does, but how does your focus enter into your plan? What about when an executive decides to change their mind? What about when a crisis arises or another team needs your resources unexpectedly? You are most likely not able to say no to either of those situations, so how do you keep your focus while maintaining your plan? We leverage the art of delegation to assign work to the appropriate person on our team or our client to do the work that needs to be done. How do we ensure that we keep track of who is doing what when that is due, and how that is interwoven into the overall needed outcome? We leverage Basecamp to make sure all of this asynchronous work is performed by all of our internal resources and our clients.
By following this methodology, we can continue to work with new clients without impacting our existing clients's projects. We believe in empowering people who are involved in the process of accomplishing a successful outcome. To do this, we have found that you need to communicate and collaborate clearly and easily. Our clients love how we keep our focus on getting things done. They know what is being done because they can see the work displayed into defined categories or identified, figuring it out, in process, ready for review, and done. Throughout the entire engagement, regardless of the length, scope, or size of the organization, the plan is always the same.
This is how we keep getting things done with a small team. If you ever want to see it firsthand, let me know. I will be glad to show you. I hope this helps you understand that you can do it, too.
