Operations, bug killing, and growth

We have been expanding over the last year as a company. New products, HQ IDX plugin, custom website design, expanding M Realty to Seattle and Orange County CA, etc. One of the biggest challenges has become balancing new development, maintaining existing product and scaling.

We have come up with a simple model for evaluating our organization and its components.

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The first priority is to establish stable operation of whats working and generating revenue. The components are placed into the “Operational Mode” section. Thankfully we have very good operations people.

After operations we focus on New ideas, Bugs and Scaling.

Ideas – New ideas and enhancements. We have no lack of ideas. we work to collect them and spend a fair amount of time playing and brainstorming. The good ones hopefully end up getting focused effort on our whiteboards and then some turned into tasks that become new features and/or product.

Bugs – Identification and killing of bugs. Must kill the bugs and make sure the number of bugs are stable or decreasing over time.  Bugs are not limited to software, they are everywhere. For example, our cool metal M Realty signs keep breaking zip ties and the metal s hooks don’t work when it gets windy. We have a bug in our signs that needs killing. Who is responsible for killing it? Done!

Scale – The most difficult piece especially if it is personnel related. For example we are scaling the design portion of our company to increase the number of custom agent website we can deliver per month. We have a baseline for our current output. The medium term goal is to increase this 5X.

So in conclusion, our current best guess at how to run a company =

Weekly Review of what’s working. Cultivate ideas with a path to operations, identify bugs and how to kill each one, identify opportunities to scale and work on the bottlenecks. Repeat each week with talented team that give a shit.

That is our plan and we are sticking to it…for now

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