A Form of Obsession

I’m going to talk about a super exciting topic.

Forms.

I can feel your enthusiasm coming through the screen at the mere mention of the F word.

But I hope you’ll bear with me.

I think forms are the missing link inside of a lot of small businesses - and I’ll tell you why.

Imagine trying to give directions to someone, and you have a beautiful map - but you don’t know where they are starting from on the map.

How good could your instructions be?

Pretty shitty, right?

Forms provide a consistent starting point for your business processes (whether they are internal, or external) and this leads to a bunch of positive outcomes.

I’ve long believed that many knowledge-based tasks can be structured like assembly lines.

After all, if items in a factory aren't standardized, how can we expect high volume/high quality output?

Same thing with the knowledge work within your business.

I’ll give you two examples; a short one, and a long one.

I was recently working with a custom sign shop that was struggling with growth and inefficiency.

There were quality control issues and a lot of duplicative systems - mostly designed to catch mistakes.

After looking carefully, we figured out a huge part of the issue was a non-standardized intake of leads!

Because they didn’t get the same info every time, it caused chaos 5 steps down the line.

So the first fix we implemented was a uniform, online “Lead Form”.

The same info was collected every time, from every channel.

No more “Shit, we forget to confirm the color they want” chaos.

This created wonderful predictability!

Relatively simple form, wonderful result.

Here’s my second example, from my buddy Jake (@jakelywakely) - he told me I could share this.

In addition to his moving company, he also owns a luxury property management company in Vail.

We were chatting one day, and I heard that he was using PDFs to track things like weekly maintenance, move-in prep, and other critical Property Management functions.

It was a bit wonky!

Forms to the rescue.

We built him 4 forms - weekly home inspection, prep for arrival, final prep for arrival, and a maintenance request form.

Each has a maybe 50 questions on it.

Because of the software we use we can do stuff like dynamically hide and show questions (based on responses) and allow for direct uploading of images/videos/whatever.

These submissions are all neatly put into OneDrive (they can go anywhere) for use by back office staff.

Dare I even say used by global talent?!

We were also able to build a custom mobile app , that houses all these forms.

This will let Jake and his team not lose their mind as they continue to scale.

Can you imagine doing all this via paper and pen, or email?

Here’s how it looks.

Think of this as just “supercharged” forms:

Here is what the submissions look like to back office staff, if someone answers “No”.

Look how organized everything is!

Next step is to bring some global talent onboard - who with this new level of organization, can do things like deploy vendors to solve the problems discovered via the form.

Magical.

In a world inundated with information, it's the simplicity and efficiency of tools like forms that often make the most profound impact.

I hope you’ll give them a shot.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S. Buy my system to hire and use a global talent assistant, without the brain damage.

Passage of the Week:

Touring the young United States in the 1830s, Alexis Tocqueville, the French lawyer and historian discerned an unexpected ill corroding the souls of the citizens of the new republic.

Americans had much, he observed, but their affluence did not prevent them from wanting ever more or from suffering whenever they saw that another had something they themselves didn’t.

In a chapter of Democracy in America (1835) entitled “Why the Americans Are Often So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity,” he provided an enduring analysis of the relationships between dissatisfaction and high expectation, between envy and equality:

“When all prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone …an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects.

When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. But when everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed …That is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them even in calm and easy circumstances.

“In America,” wrote Tocqueville,“I never met a citizen too poor to cast a glance of hope and envy toward the pleasures of the rich.”

The poor citizens observed rich ones at close quarters and trusted that they too would one day follow in their footsteps. They were not always wrong. A number of fortunes were made by people from humble beginnings.

Exceptions did not, however, make a rule.

America still had an underclass. It was just that, unlike the poor of aristocratic societies, poor Americans could no longer see their condition as anything other than a betrayal of their expectations.

Alain de Botton

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