Rinse, Repeat
Co-founder Mallory Ulaszek details how repetition leads to efficiency — and a healthy dose of sanity.
As someone who tries — and frequently fails — to maintain work-life boundaries, I’m always thinking about how automation can cut down on administrative or repeatable work so I can find pockets of oh-so-elusive free time. However, when Kelsey and I began Week of the Website, it wasn’t initially clear that creating a process would do more than just provide structure and systems to build a business. It would also create templates and guidelines for our team to work efficiently, freeing up time and also-elusive brain space to focus on other essential tasks, or — however unlikely — maybe read a book. (We just liked having the option, anyway.)
The primary goal of WOTW was to make website design and development more efficient and easier to understand for our clients. When we wrote down the initial process for WOTW, we knew a few things: we wanted to build websites in one week, we wanted the client to feel supported instead of overwhelmed, and we wanted to encourage future autonomy over their own sites. From these goals, a workflow was born, built from the top down rather than the ground up. Everything about our process was created through the lens of the original three goals, keeping us on mission and simplifying the decision-making process.
Once we got into the grind of repeating the same process on a weekly basis, we found commonalities between projects — namely industry-specific solutions to common issues, and better ways to communicate with our clients. We grew smarter, more efficient, and more effective. The idea that specialization is key to a focused team isn’t new. By prioritizing specialization, it allowed our teams to go deeper into industry operations and understand common pain points. Yet I found my team spending less time on normal work tasks related to design and more time finding creative solutions to problems, ultimately leading to far happier clients. The repeatable process not only made it easy to execute our projects, but allowed us to dig deeper into areas of site functionality and specialized third-party platforms to help automate client businesses as well.
At WOTW we do a decently high volume of websites every month, so we find ourselves working with a lot of the same verticals. Some months we work with a lot of lawyers; sometimes it’s real estate developers. Each time we take on a new industry, we learn more about the very distinct issues they face. Like how nonprofits can best solicit donations that also seamlessly integrate with CRM systems, or the best way to create and streamline shipping for an ecommerce store. As we work with more clients in each industry, we are able to research and find solutions that work best for our client’s distinct operational needs, as well as keep an eye out for new service or platform launches that may help. Having that insider-y knowledge in our back pocket allows for a deeper level of creative license, and soon our team began launching sites that went well beyond simply providing a digital presence. We were helping our clients work smarter and more effectively as well.
This also enhanced our ability to troubleshoot potential issues and call those out for our clients, allowing us to get ahead of these occasional red flags and address them sooner, helping us stay on deadline. Our project managers are better equipped to inform the client of their options and how things work in general, empowering them to reconsider their belief that website upkeep is complex.
After working on, developing, and painstakingly tweaking our process whenever we find something to fix, I found that it’s good to be patient; get some work completed and keep an eye on how your team works best. This is, of course, easier said than done. It’s the “how” of building repeatable systems that is complicated and takes research and time. But at the end of the day, the more time and attention to detail you spend when building a process is directly proportional to your sanity. And hopefully gets you back some time to read that book.
— Mallory Ulaszek, co-founder and lead project manager
