 | CREATING THE EDITORIAL MACHINE | | | | | How one book changed everything ... | Posted on 10/01/2012 @ 08:00 |
Around 6 months ago, i read a book called The eMyth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber and to say that it completely changed my thinking about sblogit.com and how I work within it is a massive understatement. But it took a while to sink in ...
 the stages of your machine must fit together like well-oiled cogs
During the summer, I was busy ensuring that the finishing touches were being done to our clients' blogs and to sblogit.com itself. I was very much in "technician" mode, thinking about features and functionality in the front end and not really concerned about my own workflow behind the scenes. After all I'd designed the system and added everything I needed, but it was taking time to create new posts and I was finding entire evenings were being taken up by editing just a couple of posts. That's not conducive to a healthy work-life balance is it? It was quite frustrating if I'm being honest.
However, on sunny days, I'd take a break from coding and head up to Costa Coffee in Cental Milton Keynes and enjoy a few hours reading in the blissful warmth. I said in my New Year post that you should always keep learning and that sometimes the things you learn don't flag themselves up as important until something else clicks into place first.
One of the core principles of The eMyth Revisited is that within every business owner there are a number of "aspects". The three main ones are the "Technician", the "Entrepreneur" and the "Manager". Each one has to be listened to in equal parts or else the business owner gets out of balance and they will never progress their company further than it being just a job.
My inner Technician was happily programming and editing, my inner Entrepreneur was out being Miss Awesome and networking herself all over Milton Keynes, but my poor inner Manager was sitting there twiddling her thumbs wondering when she'd get her chance at working ON the business rather than the other two hogging the limelight and working IN the business.
And that's the second principle of The eMyth Revisited. Give yourself time to work on the business! You're not just building a company, you're building a machine, which is a collection of defined stages that you follow step by step. Think of them as cogs, all perfectly aligned, nicely oiled and working together as a production line. You feed in raw materials and you get finished products out of the other end. In my case you feed in raw "thoughts" - turn the handle - and out come finished posts for our clients.
At the beginning of December my inner Manager couldn't hold back any longer - she'd had enough of being ignored - and one morning in the shower she made me remember that The eMyth Revisited explained exactly what I needed to do to improve my editing workflow, increase editorial turn around and reclaim my evenings. It was quite an epiphany!
And so, thanks to her, the idea for "MyQ" was born. It meant changes to everything from the way my clients submit their raw thoughts to me, through the editing process, to the way my clients are kept informed. Each stage was quantifiable, each stage was distinct and they could be plugged together - like cogs - one after another until the new post was published on the clients blog.
My inner Manager was very happy the day I wiped all my white boards clean and started to spec out the stages and procedures involved in this new workflow. I was expecting the whole process to take at least a month to develop, but I put my head down and got on with it, and just five days of thinking, coding and tinkering later, my inner Technician, Entrepreneur and Manager had worked harmoniously to create an editorial production line!
I experimented with it over Christmas, and made numerous tweaks and adjustments to the workflow. I can now edit a new post for a client in around 30 minutes, whereas before it would take well over an hour per post, so there's a productivity improvement almost immediately.
The additional benefit to having a defined workflow is that I can easily train up other editors to use it and they pick up new submissions, edit them, quality check each others work and ensure that the end product to our clients is of the highest possible standard. I'm currently training up a new editor who is finding the whole thing very easy to use and of course we're tweaking things as we go, refining the processes even further. It's always good to listen to the people who are actually using the machine ian't it?
After learning so much during the building, testing and everyday implemention of MyQ, the next task is to do the same for building new blogs for completely new clients. This process has a seperate set of stages - many, many more in fact - and the cogs will all fit together differently. However, I can easily duplicate and modify what I've already created for the editorial workflow and turn it into a new one that I'll probabuly call "MyB" - or something equally obscure!
The eMyth Revisited, available on Amazon, is a highly recommended read and is something I dive into on a regular basis now. Michael E Gerber got it just right when he said that each business owner has a inner Technician, Entrepreneur and Manager - each must play her part and each must have her say.
I'm glad my inner Manager was finally heard!
Love, light & logic ... 
STEFFI LEWIS
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