Case Study: How ChestnutSG reduced owner involvement by 75%

ChestnutSG was struggling to grow. It was a small community newsletter for dog owners and was taking too much of the owner's time.

Writing the newsletter took 4 hours a week. Finding new subscribers took another 4 hours.

The owner wanted to reduce the amount of time he spent working on the newsletter without sacrificing the quality.

With Build Procedures in hand, the owner came up with a two-step plan to remove himself from the business (while retaining the revenue by the way):

• Stage 1: Setup Standard Operating Procedures that were clear and repeatable - reducing his mental load and automating his tasks
• Stage 2: Outsource the work to a freelancer, using the Standard Operating Procedures to ensure quality

Build Procedures helped him define his Standard Operating Procedures quickly and share them consistently with the freelancer.

How Standard Operating Procedures helped

Defining Standard Operating Procedures helped the business owner to:

• Stop wasting time on decision-making (by pre-defining inputs and outcomes)
• Identify gaps that were consuming a lot of his time
• Prepare for outsourcing by having a clear definition of the steps to be followed to get the quality outcome

When preparing for outsourcing, I typically see business owners sit at either side of a spectrum: They are either too involved (micromanager) or too hands off (absent owner) and quality suffers.

(insert picture of business owners at each of a spectrum of involvement)

Defining the Standard Operating Procedures puts the owner in a balanced middle ground - their involvement is now forever preserved in writing (and they don't have to keep answering clarifying questions) while they can be 'hands-off' from the day-to-day running of the business.

Why Build Procedures

There were three problems the business owner was having that Build Procedures could help with over other solutions:

1. Guidance - Build Procedures is opinionated
2. Communication - Build Procedures is consistent
3. Time - Build Procedures is quick

Being opinionated helps to overcome the "I'm staring at a blank document and don't know where to start" problem. I borrow the term "opinionated" from software development; in short, I wrote in to Build Procedures guidance to help business owners define their procedures, and I included templates to help get started quickly.

Communication is often not consistent for business owners - there's iMessages, WhatsApp, email, phone calls... everything's scattered. Build Procedures gives a single link that houses all the procedures that a business has so that staff (or freelancers in this case) can refer to a single-source-of-truth.

No business owner has time to write down procedures. This is where our voice notes feature came in. The owner simply hit record on their phone, spoke about how they wanted the work done, and the freelancer could listen to the recording in their own time to understand it.

How much time Build Procedures saved