stores step-by-step instructions for anyone in the team to carry out repeatable tasks;
logs and tracks our evolving mission and the targets to meet that mission;
serves as an easily accessible and updatable store of company-wide information;
codifies the finer points across teams, including guidelines on how we work remotely;
onboards new staff and encourages cooperation between team members; and
ensures consistency and high quality in the running of TCLA.

Writing instructions anytime I carry out a task that is repeatable; and
Recording information that could be useful to the team at a later date (i.e. common customer services responses).

I wish I could see inside other businesses. I want the details: what platforms do they use? What systems and processes do they have in place? How do they structure meetings? The founder interviews I read talk about the big picture stuff, but I want to know all about the day-to-day.

If I was designing the optimal journey to launching a business, I think I’d spend several months working at a later stage start-up first. The goal would be to learn how a business organises itself at an early stage of its lifecycle. If it worked well, I’d have a shortcut to understanding the best and worst practices to running an efficient business. I’d learn the operations of a start-up without the risk.

For today, I want to give you the first peek behind-the-scenes as to how we operate at TCLA. We still have a very long way to go, but I’m going to show you where we are up to and where we are looking to improve. Next year, I’m hoping to look back on this post and see how far things have progressed 🙏🏽.

Basecamp

At TCLA, we’re fully remote - we were before the pandemic and we expect to be over the next few years. To manage the teams within TCLA, we use Basecamp for day-to-day communication, documentation, task management and scheduling.

I actually chose Basecamp because I loved the founders' philosophies about building a profitable startup. With a sea of choices, it felt right to go for a tool where I felt most connected to the company’s mission.

So, here is what Basecamp looks like when I first log in. I get a top down view of all the teams at TCLA.

Each team at TCLA uses Basecamp differently. Here is an example from our Operations Team: The Message Board is for our notices, To-Do’s for assigning and discussing tasks, Docs & Files for the management of documents and Campfire for day-to-day chat.

There are also more unique features like Basecamp’s Automatic Check-Ins, which allows individual team members to reflect on their day/week and keep everyone else updated on what they have been working on.

Because we’re a remote team, we heavily rely on asynchronous, written communication. Basecamp really helps to keep this volume of written information stored in one place in an easily-accessible format. If I click on any particular task, I can see all the previous discussions we have had about that task.

Google Workspace

Outside of Basecamp, we generally try to use Google’s suite of tools to collaborate when creating documents. This is because of the ease of sharing and editing documents within a team.

When it comes to meeting notes, we make sure there is always an agenda before a virtual meeting. This makes our meetings purposeful as we discuss the most important points for discussion in a given meeting.

Outgrowing Basecamp

As much as I love Basecamp, as you saw above, it’s a catch-all tool. It does a lot of things well and it helps to have everything in one place, but it’s not specialised enough to master one particular function. Campfire, for example, is useful for accessible chat, but it’s no Slack.

This year, as you know, I am trying to correct a three year habit of locking information in my head. By making TCLA process-driven, the goal is to ensure the rest of the team can operate TCLA without me. I then have the space, time and freedom to work on the areas that have the most impact. (I’ll write about this next week, but I have set a far-too-ambitious target to contact 50 law firms by next Friday.)

What I want to do is build a knowledge base that:

Just a few asks 😅

The problem I have at the moment is that a) I feel I have so much to log and b) my sense of productivity is still skewed. When things are busy, I move onto the next project as soon as I’m finished with an existing task, rather than taking the time to document my process.

So why do I keep mentioning the importance of ‘systems’ and ‘processes’ if it’s still an ongoing problem? Deep down, I think I’m hoping if I say it enough times, it’ll become part of my behaviour. I know how important it is, it’s just hard to retrain habits.

Thankfully, we are starting to make some initial progress. One of our excellent team members is helping me to remove the friction of documentation through Notion, which is likely to be the next tool we use to fix what we’re missing with Basecamp.

And, this week, here is my public declaration to you guys. I commit to:

I will keep you updated :)