Archer Business Stories

Sven and the Reindeer Rodeo

Sven and his business, 'The Reindeer Rodeo' - are fictional - but their problems are very real and common to many clients with whom we work.

We’ll help Sven and his team do 7 things:

Ask themselves the right questions
Find out what they already know and what they have as tools
Decide what makes sense to do right now and what can be built on the trot
Describe what success looks like individually and as a business
Distil their best assets : skills, products & services, clients & isolate what’s missing from the jigsaw
List the outside influences that can be positive or negative to the business
Build a roadmap starting with the next 30/60/90 days

Olaf's spreadsheet

Sven's sales team was the envy of the valley. Every Monday they knew which coach companies to ring, which hotels were about to fill, and which schools were planning a winter trip. Bookings had risen three years running, and Sven put it down to good people with good instincts.

He was half right.

At the end of the corridor sat Olaf, who looked after the computers and said very little. Years earlier, on his own initiative, Olaf had built a spreadsheet that quietly gathered what was happening beyond the valley: flights arriving at the regional airport, hotel occupancy, school holiday dates in three countries, and the weather forecast. Every Sunday night it produced a list. Every Monday morning the list arrived in the sales team's inboxes.

The sales team thought the list came from head office. Head office thought it came from sales. Sven, when he thought about it at all, assumed the booking system produced it.

Nobody had written down how it worked. It ran on Olaf's own laptop. The passwords lived in Olaf's head.

We found it by asking a dull question: where does Monday's list come from? It took three days and four people to get an answer.

At the Reindeer Rodeo, being run over by a herd of reindeer is not entirely a figure of speech. Had it happened to Olaf, the business would have lost its best source of sales overnight, and nobody would have known why the bookings had stopped.

There was no villain. Olaf had done something clever and generous, and the business had come to depend on it without ever noticing. That is how it nearly always happens.

What Sven did next

– He thanked Olaf properly, in front of the whole team. Olaf had built the engine of their sales, and nobody had known.

– He asked Olaf to teach two colleagues how it worked, and paid him for the time.

– He moved the spreadsheet off Olaf's laptop and onto the company's own systems, with the passwords kept somewhere safe.

– He asked the same question everywhere: what else here does only one person know how to do?

They found two more.

A question for your Monday

Every organisation has an Olaf, usually more than one. They are rarely prominent on the organisation chart, and they almost never think what they do is remarkable.

If your quietest colleague were run over by reindeer tomorrow, what would stop working, and how long would it take you to notice?

Finding the Olafs before the reindeer do is part of what The Outside View is for.