Standardize Before You Optimize: Put Systems First in Your Author Business

Make it repeatable before you get it perfect

Photo by Call Me Fred on Unsplash.

Here are a couple non-obvious sequence matters authors, creatives, and small business people can get wrong in their enterprises:

• They try to make things perfect before they’ve made them consistent.
• They try to make things consistent before they’ve actually built them.

Standardizing before optimizing is a principle from operations and manufacturing that translates easily on to author businesses:

• First, create a system.
• Then, once you have something repeatable, make it better.

Perfection and polish are not preceding steps. They’re later steps — and they should only be considered once you have something to refine.

Build the System First

Don’t fret. Your author business systems don’t have to be complex or sophisticated. They just have to be repeatable.

System!? For business purposes, a system is structured “how-to” information, any set of repeatable processes, methods, tools, specific actions that work together to achieve a specific goal. How you process orders from your website. How you set up your booth at…