Reading The E-Myth for the first time several years ago changed my view of business and entrepreneurship. It’s has been one of the most significant influences on my business life and views.
Consequently at iThemes, we talk a lot about our McProcess — the system for doing what we do, which, in general, is WordPress theme development.
If you’ve read The E-Myth, you know a key theme is building a process similar to how McDonald’s produces burgers and has become a multi-billion dollar company.
Thus, the McProcess … or “working ON the business, not IN it.”
Generally, our McProcess includes these steps:
- Discovery — thinking through what our customers want and establishing the parameters for the new theme design
- Design — using Photoshop to create the look and feel
- Development — taking the PSD and cutting it up to work live on the web, including adding individual features that may involve coding
- Release — marketing the theme to our customers
- Support — this involves building tutorials, answering customer questions and fixing bugs
But that’s just the overall McProcess for Theme Development. We’ve got other smaller McProcesses for almost each aspect of the business.
For instance, our “creative architect” James Dalman has been honing a McProcess for handling customer emails that come in. He’s even developed a copy and paste “cheatsheet” for answering those emails that prospects continually ask (no matter how much we’ve refined our McProcess on our sales site).
Also, throughout the past year, we’ve been honing the McProcess for Support (one facet of the grand business plan, but vitally important). Our forum moderator Ronald van Weerd has been helpful in seeing and anticipating customer requests.
Those are just a couple of areas … and there’s always something to tweak and refine … we’re definitely not where we need to be, but we’re on a path toward greater efficiency and productivity that will allow us to do more and explore innovative areas for our business.
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