Great morning start with a 6AM wake up.
Spent an hour in the morning at home setting up the RedStores.com supplier message. RedStores.com is coming along quite well.
Good part of the day was spent on organizing the process to document and procedures the HR functions. With HR coming to me in a month, and given HR’s very repeatable and stable nature – its a low laying fruit to procedure it. Started by listing out any major functions in HR and asking for a work flow (process diagrams), then moving into SOP’s that we may or may not have, and an activity Calendar to allow us to plan repeatable checks and tasks. The goal here is that HR should be able to run itself (including payroll) with only very few hours of executive time devoted to HR operational functions. BUT to get to this goal, I have committed to put in 40 hours of review, conversation, design to get this done.
I focused as well on the org chart – and planned out the chart that will ‘grow’ for at least 2 or 3 more years. Basically, I moved things into ‘team’ orient structures vs.. department structures – now still many people show up in many different functional boxes – but with a good plan – as the growth comes, it will be much easier to specialize various functions. The org chart in a way foreshadows the growth and the DNA of the company – it looks good – and I think it is very workable – and should be able to handle up to 100 people before further re-org is required.
My task management system is working great – gaining a huge amount of time and efficiency – the few minutes in the morning focusing on the day ahead really create a great feeling of accomplishment – and no FEAR of forgetting things – which I guess for me has always been the stressor. Lots of green on this weeks schedule – which is indication that I’m working on strategic issues.
SilverDevotion.com is on track – we are using Amazon cloud – its working great. I moved a bit faster on the software development for future sites – basically the payback will be less than 3 months.