5 Lean Principles To Evolve Your Business Blog Without Fuss

    lean-principles

    Lean principles are not a process or a method to adhere to but a philosophy that should drive your growth or your business growth.

    Both myself and Ravi have been practising lean principles over a decade at an enterprise level as part of our IT consulting and are certified too.

    However:

    When we tried to apply this in our non-enterprise business lives 3 years ago, we struggled.

    In fact:

    It’s a different ball game altogether when you have to apply lean principles or philosophy at a personal level or your non-enterprise business.

    That led us to implement the very principles on our own blog and property investments including our personal growth last few years with failures and successes alike.

    Needless to say then:

    We have personalised on what worked for us as lean philosophy taking and implementing some from the actual principles.

    Here is the deal:

    You got to have a method to the madness when you are managing your business.

    You can simply start evolving that from a state of “I don’t have a process or system to manage my business” with only way to go upwards.

    You will automatically end up being creative when you make such a start.

    So, here are five lean principles that you can start evolving your business with.

    1) Continuous Improvement

    The whole concept of “Incremental Growth” that we have been practising and help our clients with as well, stems from being able to improve ourselves continuously.

    For those who do not know, we have done a tech blog before and sold it that made us realise many things which we implemented in this one quite effectively.

    Through this year:

    We managed to continuously improve this blog based on few of these lean principles across a full year with a system to publish, evolve our writing style, a very lean content management system without customisation, writing to specific audience, evolve our email marketing and more.

    The blog further evolves into an overall content repository and an information radiator this year to our community.

    For anyone to be able to action continuous improvement here are few principles.

    The improvements have to be

    • Small and incremental
    • Repeatable
    • Low cost
    • Measurable

    2) Uncomplicate Your Strategy

    We are not talking about buy to let or HMO or any other strategies and neither we are talking about cash and cashflow.

    We are purely talking about having an outline view of how your business will evolve.

    Example:
    Stage 1: The blog is focused on becoming a voice publishing rich content that is authentic and is a result of our own experiences.

    Prove to ourselves and our audience that we can generate such a content in a timely manner and to the quality.

    Stage 2: Evolving the strategy further, move to content products that will help audience to digest and implement even better with firm focus on sales and marketing.

    A business at the end of the day is no business if it does not earn money.

    You get the picture. Define that high level strategy to develop your business across few years or few stages.

    3) Minimum Viable Results

    The concept in the world of lean principles is minimum viable product.

    i.e.

    Don’t wait until you have developed full product, instead release the features of product incrementally just about a set that offer enough value to customers, however minimum.

    We are extending that a bit to define your increments to a level where you are able to achieve minimum viable results.

    Property has to be results oriented business more than any other business given the higher sums of money involved.

    Just like in the picture below, define those minimum results you need and work towards those results.

    cyclic-growth4

    Here is the deal:

    The stages in your strategy should each be aligned to your incremental results to ensure you don’t deviate from your vision or goals.

    You ignore that, you risk setting up new goals every end of year.

    4) Retrospection

    Another lean principle where once you define and action something, you look back and identify what have you learnt from it.

    Put simply, thats 3 questions.

    • What went well
    • What has not gone to plan
    • What actions to take from the learning’s where things didn’t go to plan

    Here is a post that outlines one of our retrospection session at Limitless Monks that can give you a great depth of detail.

    5) Repeatable Systems

    The continuous process of improvement tweaks and retrospection leads to evolution of patterns and systems you can start documenting at your own time.

    The reason why we say, you have to document is to ensure everyone who is joining your business exactly understands how it works.

    McDonald’s is known example for the implementation of such cookie cutter systems.

    And guess what:

    Buy to let investments or any other property investment strategy is no different. Once you have one property refurbished in a particular way, you make it a cookie cutter.

    Whilst we have put systems in place that works for us at Limitless Monks, here is our documented viewings system that we have been adhering to for best part of 2+ years.

    Evolve your own system that works for you based on your situations.

    You may have short term pain evolving the system but without a doubt will result in considerable long term gain.

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