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How come we solved the mystery of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but still can’t read the ones from Crete? For centuries we admired the eagles, lions, tools and human shapes carved in the Egyptian stones. We knew they meant something, but didn’t have the key to understand them. So how can we decipher an unknown language?

The key to understand an unknown language is to find translations. For the hieroglyphs the key was finding the Rosetta stone – a bilingual royal decree written both using hieroglyphs and Greek. It was the bridge between the two ancient worlds, as it used phonetic characters for both foreign and local names. This allowed translating characters, then concepts and finally words.

Some business websites look like written in an ancient, unknown language. To understand the strategy, the products and the philosophy of a business, we need a Rosetta stone of sorts: a one-page prospectus. Here are the main three elements such a document must cover:

1. What’s your story
2. What do you do
3. Who do you work with

1. What’s your story

People love stories. We want to know how Microsoft started and how Steve Jobs fought them. We’re puzzled why Yahoo didn’t buy Google when they were a small team. Start your prospectus with your story. Pick up the most interesting bit about you or your business and get the ball rolling from there.

While starting up in a garage is a common beginning for lots of startups, you could start by telling your reader how did you:
– realize there is a problem specific people have  
– came up with a product idea
– got your fist 2 customers

The story needs to focus the attention on your unique perspective and introduce the context in which you work. Your work is the main focus of the prospectus and comes after your story, in the second part.

2. What do you do

The second part covers your work. Coming after the story paragraphs, it needs to be have a different visual layout. Choose a two or three-column layout to get the attention of the reader. These points cover how you work and what do you do: your products, your guiding principles and your work methods.

If you already have 3 or more products, group them in two or three areas of interest. When starting up you can pick three sides of the problem your business intends to help solving. Or choose three principles you wish to put forward in your business. Let’s see some examples.

For an e-commerce online platform:
Market | Sell | Scale

For a business producing video game textures and compression tools:
Texture | Compression | Basis

While building De Amicis the focus of our articles and products is on:
Empathy | Structure | Energy

The work is done in the context of your customers – people or businesses needing (and paying for) your products. The third part of the prospectus focuses on them.

3. Who do you work with

Who are your customers? Are they companies or are they people like you and me? It is very important to showcase your products through the voice of one or two of your typical customers. Include quotes and testimonials which fit your target profile, the person or the company your products serve best.

Testimonials also suggest to some readers that they may NOT be a good fit for your product, principles or methods of work. That may be as important as getting the best customers. Customers who don’t fit your world-view will tend to fight your strategy and suck your energy. The main goals of the prospectus are attracting the right customers and filtering out the bad ones.

But a one-page prospectus is not enough to sell my products

The prospectus alone won’t sell your products. But it should be an important part of your sales strategy, one tactic you can use in combination with others. It can be part of your cost proposal to establish your history, authority and specificity for any decision makers. It can also be part of your marketing brochure, book or website. Let’s look at some examples.

Prospectus examples

Example 1 – Blugento – online shop
The prospectus for an e-commerce platform could focus on the
Market | Sell | Scale triplet:

Example 2 – Binomial – image/texture compression product
In this example we have a company producing a suite of software tools called Basis. They are used by video games, streaming services, virtual & augmented reality, so the prospectus could focus on
Texture | Compression | Basis

Example 3 – PC PAL – healthcare software components
PC PAL has three product lines, so the prospectus can focus on the three medical areas covered by them:
Growth charts    |    Family trees    | Patient registries

Why not having a one-page prospectus is a mistake

The one-page prospectus clarifies your message and translates it to your customers. Not having one is risking misunderstanding and misalignment with your audience. Use it in your marketing and sales material to present your unique point of view.

Tell your story to explain where do you come from and how did you built your business. What do you do and how do you do it is your selling proposition. Cover products and services, but also your principles and your methods of work. Close the circle by showing who do you work with, who your customers are and what they’re saying about you.

Give your customers a Rosetta Stone and help them understand your business and products using a one-page prospectus.

P.S. Use the bellow gallery to compare the three examples.

Hokusai finished his best-known painting when he was 72 years old – “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”. But this is not the first time he painted the wave. Along the years he painted at least three other versions of the same scene.

Artists do many sketches and versions of a subject, at different times, from different points of view, until they understand how to express it. Using different scene setup and focus each time, the painter understood how to capture the wave.

The same happens when you enter a new team: you first need to meet everyone in the team and to understand how they work on their projects. Here are the three main goals for creating an onboarding plan for new members of your team:

1. Present the tools and processes used in the company
2. Introduce each team member and their respective roles
3. Present specific topics in one-on-one sessions with current members

1. Present the tools and processes used in the company

Make a list of processes and tools used to run the company. Development, support or hiring are processes with many steps and split responsibilities.
Some tools are administrative: email, salaries, invoicing. Others help teams manage their work (products, tasks, activity reports).

Adapt the list to different roles: sales use CRM tools, support needs helpdesk tools, developers need … development tools. You don’t need separate lists for each job. Instead, make sure to present all the tools to new employees, with details according to their role.

2. Introduce each team member and their respective roles

Like at a party, you need to chaperone the new guest. Discuss the onboarding plan with the team and make sure the new colleague meets everyone in the process. Present each member of the team to the new colleague, talking about their role and expertise.

The purpose is to open communication bridges, to begin building trust between colleagues. The bridge is not enough though, current and new members of the team need to spend some time together, one-on-one, and discuss a specific subject.

3. Present specific topics in one-on-one sessions with current members

Setting up 1-2-hour meetings between a new developer and a designer can produce astonishing results. Imagine a new developer meeting a seasoned sales rep! Looking back at your previous experience, how many times did you wish to know more about your colleagues in other roles?

The purpose is that for an hour or two the new colleague discusses a project or tool with another colleague. Face to face discussions for two people are very different than team lunch or a company party. Though bigger events allow discussions to flow quicker, only some subjects come up and there is no depth. Spend time to learn more about a tool and a colleague.

But new members meeting everyone is a waste of time for the team!

It may look like wasted time, but it is a critical moment for the team. The way you receive people shows you value them. Or not. It’s your choice. Spending time to show them around and getting them to know everyone is not a waste of time. It shows you trust the new colleague and you want to invest time to better know each other.

How to outline an onboarding plan in 30 minutes

Start making an outline for your onboarding plan by listing the main topics. Each topic, managed by one or two of the existing team members, cover an area such as:

• Company (vision, strategy, products) – CEO, manager
• Administration – management assistant, HR
• Products – product director, project managers
• Operations and support – operations and support managers
• Sales and marketing – sales director, creative director

From this outline go down one level and list tools, projects and products for each area. Assign one person from the team to discuss one specific topic or tool with a new colleague. Split topics further until everyone in the team has one to present. Two people can also present the same topic if needed. Different points of view on the same subject are better than one.

Each one-on-one presentation should take at least 1 hour to allow time for introductions and discussing a specific topic. After such a presentation, the new member should be able to explain the subject, the person presenting it, and who’s in charge of the topic.

Finish the plan by making a list of everyone in the team. Check that each person has at least a subject to introduce to a new member. Companies bigger than 2-3 teams will need to adjust the plan around a specific team. In this case, include all the team members as well as other people supporting the team in different roles.

Oh, and don’t plan more than one meeting per day, as it’s too tiring for the new member and it will affect the learning. It’s better to take 2-3 weeks for the whole plan, or even a month.

Onboarding plan’s purpose is to set up new team members for success

Introduce your new colleague to the company’s vision, products and current members using this 3-step method:
1. Know the projects and tools your company uses
2. Know your new colleagues and their roles
3. Meet each colleague and get introduced to each project

Use an onboarding plan to help your new colleague get a board, speed up and catch the wave along with your team.

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How many times have people told you not to reinvent the wheel? That’s something so obvious! You shouldn’t reinvent something accepted and working well for the last 2000 years. That’s common sense! Yet, that’s exactly what young George Cayley did. 

His purpose to build ever lighter and flying machines made him interested in building lightweight wheels. In 1808 he came up with the idea of using tension instead of compression to build wheels. It was no longer the rim which kept the wheel round and robust. Instead, it was the hub and the wires keeping the rim round and tensioned to absorb the road bumps.

Over time, the wire wheel came into common use on bicycles, cars and many other vehicles. Radial wires pulling from the rim to the hub, like an office attractive to the people going there every day. Why would you choose your next office by comparing prices? Instead, compare the attractiveness of the new office to your team, your customers or both.

You can use these three strategies to choose your next office location:
1. Position your office to shorten your team’s commute time
2. Pick your next office location to get closer to your customers
3. Use distributed offices closer to your customers AND to your employees

1. Position your new offices to shorten your team’s commute

Your colleagues are leaving in a large or busy area, making commutes long and difficult for some. They have to shift working hours when possible, or loose time and energy otherwise. You need to take this into consideration before choosing your next office.

Look at the area where your employees live and calculate the closest office location for their commute. This method of choosing an office location gives everyone more time and energy. As a result, your customers will get a better service and your company a lower employee turnover.

2. Pick your next office location to get closer to your customers

Placing an office in locations accessible for your customers attracts them in a similar way the wire brings tension between the rim and the hub. Choose an area where your customers are already concentrated or an area they often visit. A city center comes to mind, a downtown, or a port, depending on your business.

Placing the next office in such locations and providing parkings, social events, or competent employees attracts customers and put you in a position to grow your business. It’s no longer you calling them, they’re coming to you instead. This strategy is even better with distributed offices.

3. Use distributed offices closer to your customers AND to your employees

Why not trying to get closer to your customers, while at the same time placing an office close to a part of your team? In some businesses it makes sense to open multiple, smaller offices accessible to customers. To complete the strategy, assign to each office the employees living close by, as much as possible.

When your employees live around a big city they can be travel quite far to get to the office. Grouping them in smaller offices where your customers concentrate is a win-win-win strategy for your company. Don’t focus on the cheapest office space!

But the cheapest office space is the best choice!

Yes, for your business it might look like the cheapest the better. But you have other costs, not only for the offices. How much does it cost you to visit customers or prospects from a central office?

Your employees take time from their workday to visit your customers, time when they cannot work and when they get tired. It also takes time for your customers to visit your office, so they visit you less often.

What kind of organizations use distributed office locations?

Agencies like the French URSSAF have implemented a strategy to open up quite a few smaller offices in somewhat unexpected areas: startup accelerators, co-working spaces and near exhibition centers. This strategy allows them to be present and help creating new businesses, which is part of their mission.

Banks and real estate agencies open offices in the closest office location to their target customers: young and middle-class neighborhoods, business centers or very busy places (like shopping malls).

When this kind of institutions put in place a distributed office strategy they can also work on the internal relocations. They can try to assign their employees to the nearest office, when possible and when appropriate for the job.

How to prevent loosing money by choosing the closest office location

Loose your team or your core people and your business will suffer or even perish. Keep in mind that good people and good customers are not easy to find and to grow. Try to have at east one of the two happy, if not both.

Instead, open your new office close to your customers and your employees. Your team is running your business since a few years. If the team members live around a big city, you want to place your new office close to most of them.

You can also distribute your offices to target areas your customers often visit. If you can do both, then you keep happy both your team and your customers.

That’s not reinventing the wheel, it’s a better way to organize your offices. Instead of using a central office, rigid like a rim, use smaller offices, closer for your employees and for your customers (like wires keeping the hub in tension and the wheel turning).

We are building a tool to help you compare your team’s commute to a new office with your current location.

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Long routes from home to work take energy, physical and mental, and after weeks and months (or years) leave you without enough energy for a productive day. That means quality work is a low priority.

As you slog along day after day, with just enough strength to do the high priority tasks, you take less times to discuss important topics. You don’t try to be creative and pick the first possible solution. Quality becomes a luxury and customer satisfaction a fata morgana, impossible to reach.

Noise in the office is another culprit. It takes energy and makes concentration difficult, leaving you with less for what you’re working on. Open spaces are usually more noisy, but small and crowded offices can also be difficult to work on.

Unfinished projects, lots of issues to handle, unreasonable clients consume your energy even if you don’t handle the problems. Actually because you don’t handle the problems you have even less energy for the ones you do handle.

There are three things you can do to start saving energy for your team:

• Build momentum
• Plan for breaks
• Reduce high energy tasks

How to build momentum?

You’re not in a sprint. You’re not alone. You’re in a group marathon. Handle your group’s energy if you want the team to go the whole distance. An african proverb says: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Breaks can recharge your team’s batteries and build momentum. Coming back to work next week you can use inside jokes and funny things you’ve learned with the group. This helps going over tough moments, diffusing tension and improving relations between team members.

Take the time to listen, no matter who you’re talking with. Feedback can come from management, colleagues, or customers. Try to see things from someone else’s perspective. It will change how you see things yourself and allow you do better work. Apply your learning to push the team further.

Planning for breaks

Now that’s a strange and unproductive idea, right? Why would you do that, aren’t people supposed to work all the time they’re payed for? But ask yourself this question: If they do that, working continuously from 9 to 5, when will they recharge?

When will they learn something about your product, maybe from another team or from the customers? When will they take feedback on what they’re doing?

This need highly depends on the nature of the job, but creative people, product people, strategic people need breaks to think. To take different perspectives. To learn.

Reduce high energy tasks

High energy tasks are like huge deserts, you want to eat them but can’t. Or you feel tired and maybe sick afterwards. What you really need to do is split the cake in smaller bites, eat just one small bite after lunch and leaving the rest for the next day. The same way you need to split huge tasks in smaller ones.

One system is to estimate a task’s difficulty by using t-shirt sizes: XS is very easy, S is easy, M is a bit difficult, L is quite a piece. Stop there. Take all the XL and XXL and bigger tasks and split them in tasks of smaller sizes. It doesn’t matter which length they’ll have, as long as the biggest task is less than a week, ideally less than 2 days of work.

Try sports, learning groups and brainstorming

You could recharge your batteries by playing a sport with team mates or friends after your lunch break or in the evening. You could start a reading group at work, planning to read a chapter individually over the week and discussing it on Friday at a coffee. It could be technical, marketing, business strategy or cooking.

As long as the group is engaged with the subject a good way to build a momentum and improve communication is to have these discussions. The subject can be made to fit a work problem, if needed, but even the existence of the group is very important for your team.

Another productive break can be participating in the marketing team for the product being developed and understanding how the marketing team works, what do they need and maybe even help them. Coming back to your team, you’ll have new perspectives and better understanding for other business aspects.

The goal is to save energy and recharge the team

To do this you can start here:
– build and sustain momentum
– plan for regular breaks for learning and getting feedback
– save energy by splitting work in smaller tasks

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Rent increase is making you consider renting new offices?
Prices falling while you’re trapped in an office that became expensive, and it’s not even so great anymore? Tough year, less money or bad economy make you consider moving to a smaller office?

Before moving to a new location, would you say keeping your colleagues and employees happy with the office location important? Then read on.

Keep your team in mind while searching for a new office
You begin your search by having someone looking for new locations, maybe near to the old one, or more comfortable for you. But did you think about other team members, some very important for your business or who won’t be able to go to a farther location?

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to compare how the new offices compare to the old ones from the point of view of the employees? At least to make sure you won’t worsen the daily commute for most of them.

Make a map of your team commute
Wouldn’t be nice if you could look up in Google Maps to see how your team goes every day to the office? Like the globe maps that focus on Russia or China, showing the world upside-down (from our point of view), things will also look different from your new point of view.

Because after an office move things will change.  Some will have to go later to work to avoid longer commute, so they will also be going home later and might need to delay some evening activities, like taking kids from school. Or skip others altogether, like the regular walk or jogging.

Accepting a longer commute doesn’t mean people are happy
For those that just have to accept spending more time on longer commutes, getting more tired every day will accumulate and stress them out, make them more irritated and less productive. Family issues may occur because they’re no longer able to be there for kids or unexpected events.

Do something about it before it’s too late
If you’re a team lead, manager or in charge of the office move, you could do something to prevent these problems, or minimize their impact, as much you can, as your position allows it.

You could buy a city map and have an assistant try to pin all employees addresses on that map and evaluate the impact of the move. Or use Google Maps in the same way. There are also online platforms and software that can help you calculating commute distances especially in big cities around the world – MapZen, TimeTravel, BaseMap, MobilityLabel and others.

Our plan is to look at different ways to estimate the office location’s impact on employees, while building an easy to use and simple service.

Sign up to our newsletter if you want to estimate your team commute!