A ‘house style’ means a standardised way you content ‘looks’ to the public
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The way we format the blogs and the images on this site is a definable house style. We always have a ‘teaser’ at the top of the blog, which we put in bold italics. Recently, we’ve started putting the title of the article and the URL of the blog in the featured image of every post. Those kinds of details give a consistency and a branded feeling to your content, and they also make it easier for new members of your team to emulate.
A ‘template’ refers to the standardised style of documents you use within your business. For example, on our 7 Graces ethical brother cell phone list marketing courses, we’re still tweaking the templates for our assignment briefs and course materials. When we do a blog tour for our clients, we always create a bespoke template that we use to structure the blog posts for our partners. When we do a book launch, we use web page templates that we made specifically for that function.
Like house style
Templates bring consistency and branding to your work. But they also make your work easier, faster and more effective. Templates are not something you create once and then use ‘as is’ forever. You tweak them; you improve them; you streamline them. But with every improvement, they become a greater resource to your company, making it easier for your company to expand and deliver larger-scale projects.
System 10: Job Tasks
Last but not least, we come to the topic of systematising job tasks. By this I mean systematising the WAY a job is done within your company.
For example, we at 7 Graces support clients with their Twitter accounts using a programme called Tweet Adder. Twice a week, a member of our team (Lucy) goes into each account to follow new people, unfollow dead wood, follow back new followers and search for new people to follow. There are a lot of different ‘tasks’ to do to go through all these variables. The problem is, if you don’t have a systematised order and parameters for working through the tasks, you will end up with very inconsistent (and usually unreliable) results.
To rectify this problem
It was necessary to codify how Lucy goes through all the tasks for each ‘job’ for each client. We broke down all the tasks that had to be done, put them in the most effective order and defined the parameters for each tasks. By ‘parameter’ in this case, I might mean something like ‘how many new people should so-and-so follow this week’ or ‘how many days do we wait before so-and-so unfollows non-followers’.
Putting all of this in writing and making it part of our company systems means that Lucy can get her job done more easily and effectively. It takes out the guesswork and makes things consistent across the board. Furthermore, if we ever need to hire another ‘Lucy’ because the client load has become too big for one person, it will be easier for the new person to understand exactly what they need to do.
