Board Memo Template: Fill & Download for Free

When I’m trying to avoid being a burnt out entrepreneur, or simply want to increase your productivity, automating your business process is how I have consistently gotten it done!I’ve spent a lot of time creating internal processes, but I always had trouble getting my employees to refer to them, let alone remember to update them.This led me on a search to find a better solution that could help simplify the creation, usage, and modification of my company’s SOPs.Over the years I discovered an emerging number of companies that are trying to solve this problem for business owners. At their core, they try to serve as a platform to extract information about the operations of your company in a way that increases transparency and accountability.This was a ground-breaking idea to me, and my ADHD brain made me want to try them all!Here are the ones I’ve tried below. Check a few of them out, they might give you some ideas.SweetProcessOnline Process Documentation with a relatively simple interface and among the cheapest in the group starting off at $39 for up to 8 users.PipefyMy personal favorite as noted below has a free version for up to 5 users but will need the Pro version at about $12/mo per user to take full advantage of its functionality.CleverChecklistIt’s a pretty standard checklist software that works like a form that employees can fill out. Looking at $49/mo for 10 users.ManifestlyIf I weren’t using Pipefy, I’d probably be using Manifestly: A Checklist App for Teams - Never Miss a Thing. The owner is a great guy who has implemented a lot of my feedback and is constantly updating it with new features and integration. Pricing is quite reasonable.Way We DoThis is an interesting software that acts more like a Wikipedia specifically built for hosting processes. It’s among the most expensive on the list but they have interesting features like the ability to require that your team sign-off on new or updated policies.KissFlowI haven’t invested too much time in KissFlow, but it’s largely based on their selection of pre-existing apps (forms) which you can then customize for your business. The ability to design a workflow and create conditional variables makes it probably the closest thing to Pipefy, and slightly cheaper too.My Fav is Pipefy, and here’s whyThink of a Trello board, also known as a Kan-ban board. Now imagine each column is a different phase of a specific process. Then each phase can be configured like an individual form where you can create questions, insert information about the process, automatically email your staff and clients with custom emails and much more.What A Typical Pipe Looks Like. Once The Form On The Right Is Filled Out, It’ll Create A New Card In The Upper Left Column.It comes with a set of pre-made templates you can use to replace whole systems like your CRM, Helpdesk and HR system. Now it’s not good at being any one of those in particular but I find it useful for defining specific processes within those existing systems.For example, we don’t use it to replace our Recruiting software, but we use it to define the onboarding process for new employees. We don’t use it for our CRM but we use it for contract negotiations with a client.Why it’s a Game ChangerNow being able to wrap your head around a system like Pipefy can be a doozy, but here’s why I really like it.Up till now, procedures and SOP’s have been easy to forget and often get relegated to a company folder that your employees might rarely refer to. In this case, Pipefy becomes a part of the very process itself, therefore requiring that your staff use the software in order to complete the process they’re performing.The beauty of this is that it means you don’t have to worry about whether everybody got the memo on a change that was made to a procedure. You can just add a new required question, add extra clarification to a help section or change up the process to automate more aspects of it.By merging the written procedure into the process itself, you can unilaterally increase the overall integrity of your business.

Short answer: unschooled fish, numbers game, and the fact that the law firm structure is essentially stupid and outdated.Unschooled fish: When you graduate from law school, you think you are completely qualified to practice law, but really you are only qualified to go to the bathroom in a law firm. You know absolutely nothing about practicing law. Why? Because the people who teach law school are rarely the same people as those who practice. In fact, at the top tier schools (and second tier), most professors have gone straight from a top law school to a top LLM program, to teaching. You're lucky if they even took the bar exam. They love the academic environment, and they've published many papers on the topic on which they opine...er...teach. However, many have never spent a single day in practice. That's for the adjunct professors - the ones with the great stories, who start classes with titles like: Confessions and Beer, and never get tenure because they were too busy practicing to publish anything.I sat on my school's hiring committee and its curriculum committee, and argued until I was hoarse about the idiocy of teaching what is essentially a trade as if it were a liberal arts graduate program. What use is "Jurisprudential Theory from 1820 to Today" when you've got 3 contracts to revise and no idea how to use track changes? And for Christ's sake, please hire people who can actually tell us what different professions are like in practice. No luck. But these people are old and in cushy jobs and see no reason to change. I think the only reason they even had meetings was for the spectacular catering (thank you, Sutton Place, if you still exist!).So you have a bunch of squeaky new, off-the-shelf, still in the box 1st years who think they have "experience" because they summered at the firm and wrote 3 memos in between expensed trips to Cuba Libre (4 courses, please), the customary golf outing, and tossing back shots at the Lower East Side dive du jour. They can't do anything legal on their own. They can do some basic research (time consuming), and read documents (but not necessarily knowing what they're looking for). They've got massive debt, and despite all of the other advertised options happily sallied forth by law schools, career counselors, and parents - no real possibilities other than practicing law (which, statistically, 90% of them will no longer want to do in 5 years).So, what do we do with these eager young fish? We have to turn them into lawyers somehow. And we really have no idea who will be useful and who won't be. We have to take them all and figure it out later. So, voila - enter the law firm structure.Numbers game: So this flood of fish wash in, and the firms need to do something with them. They basically do some simple weeding based on very basic things like GPA, school, how professional you look, your name (not kidding - there are studies about this), your age (more studies), blah blah - none really have any bearing on how good you are, but more about how well you play a system. Essentially, if you were really good at high school, you'll be good at a big firm. High school not so great? Go back before the loans come due.It's a pyramid structure, with the highest volume at the base (the first years), and essentially a lock-step progression with key weed-out years (called "up or out") in years 4, 7 (the year before Partnership), and during the Junior to Senior Partnership split. It used to be that once you were a partner you were golden, but no longer. That pie is getting smaller, and the partners getting hungrier.The biggest weed-out is year 4 - when your manual labor is used up, and you don't justify the higher brain cost of a 4th year, which is generally running your own deal/case (with oversight). Lots of lateral moves at this point. Lots are starting to move this to year 3, which just makes those loan payments even worse (and you look so much worse to prospective future employers, because they know why you didn't last).If you make it to year 7, then you're great to run deals, you've got the brain for it - but you can't bring in clients, or they just don't think you're worth a piece of the action. Only in this business do you put 7 to 8 years of sweat equity in and walk away with basically nothing (except the clients you wrest away).So, why do year 1s, who can't do ANY of this, get over $100K? Well, blame Latham and Watkins. 1st years used to get paid according to their location - based on size of firm, value of business and cost of living. So, you could be working at SuperMegaFirm Skadden Arps (secretly building the Death Star, I'm pretty sure) in Nashville, and you'd be making about 2/3 the salary of someone in Skadden's NYC office. That's cost of living difference.Then, around 1996, Latham decided to do across the board salaries based on their NYC salaries. WHAAAA???! you say? Exactly. So you live in Charlotte, NC, spend less than 2/3 on cost of living, and make NYC bling? SCORE!!! How many people were lining up at Latham's door that year AT EVERY OFFICE (which never happens)? I think the lines all joined somewhere in St. Louis. Chaos ensued. Suddenly, all major firms, like the lemming conformists they are, followed suit. Across the board pay increase. Which, of course, increase the pay for all other attorneys (lock-step pay, remember?). New lawyers cheer. Applications flood into law schools. And then....partner profits decline. Who saw that coming? Wait, you need to understand financials to run a business? (Didn't someone write a blog about that? (Re: see, e.g., mine:http://businessgonewrong.quora.com/Do-you-need-to-understand-finances-to-run-a-business)) :) Partners start getting brutal, and there's no longer partner tenure, partners start defecting, bringing key attorneys (and clients) with them. New firms form.Firms start getting risky in order to grow and gain clients - they start taking profits and equity in clients in order to grow. The market collapses. Firms fold as they realize they cannot sustain the salaries with new online options, inside self-destruction (read about the collapse of famed firms Brobeck and Wolf Block - both epic). Lawyers start flooding the market - entire classes lose their promised positions, lawyers with no real experience try to start their own firms (3rd year at a big firm is not actual experience). Mass failure. Firms get bought up cheap. Lawyers start advertising themselves for jobs on craigslist (seriously). Chaos reigns. Great job, Latham. And, uh, you other lemming firms, too.What do 1st -3rd years do? Basically, grunt work. They are learning to be lawyers on the client's dime. That's what law firms are - giant sweat factories that teach lawyers the actual trade of law. But the clients are paying for it. A chunk of that charge for whatever service goes to "overhead," and that overhead isn't the office, the location, the computers, etc (well, it is that, but not just that) - it's the salaries of those grunts, who are spending 2-4x longer doing everything than the senior people, and doing it wrong, and getting corrected. That's part of what clients pay for. And to the last point...Law firm is stupid and outdated: Law firms were originally designed to be places of apprenticeship and practice. Ok, check. Apprenticeship happening (sort of, with lots of tears in bathroom stalls, rampant gossip, and some random sex with people who are way less ugly at 3 am). Legal practice happening. But the 3 years of law school didn't happen - the training happened in the firm. (Side note: in California, there's a remnant of this in a small loophole in the bar exam requirements - it's one of the only states that doesn't require applicants to graduate from an accredited law school. Apprenticing at a law firm, among other things, is a suitable substitute.) Accordingly, the need to earn scads of money to pay of $100K or more in debt was not an issue. (Trust me - when you have this much in debt, your decisions are completely different, especially if you have or want to start a family.) Hours were more reasonable, as were client expectations. It was simply a business. Salaries, however, were closer to $60K on average, which would make many attorneys throw up on their mortgage envelopes.However, now the costs are much higher. Salaries, beginning with the first years, are enormous. That increases with each year, and partners expect a payoff. That is the opposite of every other business, in which owners get what is left over, and hope for a bonus year. Partners EXPECT a payoff in partnership years. They worked for it, they brought x, y and/or z client in, and dammit, if they don't get the payout, they are taking x, y, z, and a-d with them. They have options, you know..!I bring you the Triangle of Failure - the reason law firms are designed to fail. They have oppositional interests among the parties involved. Por ejemplo:Side 1: the Firm itself (well, really, the Partners). They are hungry for productivity and money, they want revenue. Money money money MUH-NAY - MUUUH-NAAAY. (It's that song from the O-Jays. Sounds better in my head.)Side 2 is the Workers. They want time off. Seriously. However much they're getting, it gets old, and it's not enough. I worked 20 hour days 10 days in a row at one point, until it slowed down to 16 hour days. I knew my shower much better than my bed (for which I'm sure my colleagues were grateful). But that's everyone. The requirement of face time in the firm, poor management of time on the part of partners and clients, ridiculous deadlines (there are no corporate law emergencies that are not completely made up. ever. period.), and the "hurry up and wait" environment that make long hours a standard instead of an aberration. They did not sign up to live like minions indefinitely - but they need to in order to make it to year 8. This is how so many female attorneys find themselves 40 and single, and wondering what the hell happened to their fertility. And men find themselves miserable and 40 and divorced. No matter how much you say "I could do that, no problem" - could you really? It's not something to consider lightly. Their 30s are calling, and 2 or 3 hours here or there is tough to call a life. Their incentive is do things as quickly as possible, but say it took longer. Yes, that's fraud. And it's everywhere. Billable hours are a bitch.Side 3 are the Clients. They want good work at the lowest possible price (wouldn't you?) - generally what they're sold, incidentally. They believe they are hiring a firm because they are hiring specialists, which means efficiency. But look at what they're actually hiring. A built-in sweatshop paying US dollars, which they never knew they were paying for, Side 1's constant demand for more money from the clients (upsell, find out what else we can do for them, get more money from them however you can, INCREASE REVENUES, NOT EFFICIENCY), and Side 2's need to avoid merging into some Borg-like form of the Firm, which may mean increasing efficiency, but not workload - which may mean increasing fraud. So who gets screwed? The clients. Every time.I have redlined every single legal bill I've gotten. Every one. I have caught fraud several times, including paralegals billing me when I was a closed file. That firm, incidentally, did not thank me. I turned a $15K legal bill into a $3K one - more than once. I regularly need to chop 40% or more off the bills I receive. I have fired more attorneys as an entrepreneur than I did heading a practice or running my own. I have seen more people try to copy work as their own and try to bill it as if they had drafted it from scratch - once it was a document I had written! (Several have become templates on the internet. Nothing I can do about it. But I'm not paying someone for it.)There's a much better way to do this, but this one persists. Why? Because it's still making money for some rich white men who control a lot of things that powerful people care about. Eventually they'll die. They eat pretty fatty foods, overall. So there's that.Then we can discuss modifying the law firm and the legal industry.Thanks for the opportunity to discuss this.Kind regards,Alexandra

My reference:http://www.gatesfoundation.org/All of our strategies—more than two dozen across the foundation—have emerged through this process of identifying what we want to accomplish for people and where we can have the greatest impact. Once we commit to an area of need, we define our major goals and identify a clear path to achieving them.Our approach to grantmaking in all four areas emphasizes collaboration, innovation, risk-taking, and, most importantly, results.Phase 1: Concept Development. Our program officers work to identify ideas that support our strategic priorities, in consultation with foundation colleagues, researchers, policymakers, and other partners in the field. This phase concludes with an internal decision that a concept is aligned to a strategy, and we should proceed with development work.Phase 2: Pre-Proposal. We use a variety of ways to explore and refine concepts, with the help of organizations in the field. Regardless of the approach, we remain committed to understanding the perspective of others, in order to further shape the proposed body of work. This phase ends with the decision to solicit a grant or contract proposal.-Direct solicitation. When we know that an organization is well-suited to perform the work, we directly solicit an early phase concept memo or proposal.-Discussion. In some cases, we invite one or more organizations to discuss the concept with us and explore their interest and their capacity to undertake the work. If the organization has the expertise, capacity, and interest, we will invite them to submit a concept memo or proposal.-Request for proposal (RFP): When we want to broaden our network or fund multiple organizations for a project, we may issue an RFP. Public RFPs are posted on our website; private RFPs are directed to specific organizations.Phase 3: Investment Development.We give applicants guidelines and templates for developing a proposal, a budget, and a results framework and tracker. A program officer reviews submitted materials with internal and, at times, external experts and works with the applicant to integrate recommended changes. We also complete our due diligence, confirm the applicant organization’s tax status, determine how to structure the transaction, and assess risk. Our legal and financial analysis teams may also participate during this phase.Investment proposals are reviewed at various levels, with more levels of review for grants and contracts that are more complex. A foundation executive makes the final decision about whether to fund the proposed grant or contract. Before funded activities can commence, the foundation and the partner organization sign an agreement that includes intended results, targets, milestones or reporting deliverables, and a payment schedule.Phase 4: Management and Close. During the life of an investment, the program officer and partner discuss how they will work together and keep in close communication to understand progress and challenges of ongoing work. By maintaining quality interactions and clear and consistent communication, they are able to share feedback early and often. Occasionally a program officer or foundation staff member will participate on advisory committees, and occasionally take a seat on the board of the organization.At the end of the project, the partner will work with the program officer to submit a final report that summarizes the results achieved and lessons learned.HOW WE MEASURE AND EVALUATE RESULTSFrom the outset of the grantmaking process, we work with partners to define the overall results we hope to achieve and the data needed to measure those results. We call this approach outcome investing.To give our partners flexibility in how they achieve results, we do not require them to report on all of their activities. Instead, we focus on purposefully measuring the most critical metrics of progress that support continued learning, adjustment, and alignment. However, the nature and frequency of measurement depends on the type of work. For example, scientific research projects may be measured differently than efforts to expand vaccine coverage.Evaluation is another collaborative learning tool that provides us and our partners with feedback so we can improve, adjust, and decide how best to achieve outcomes. We work to ensure that our partners have the capacity and support to generate quality evidence.Our foundation evaluation policy sets out parameters for evaluation and explains how and why we use evaluation and where variation is warranted. We acknowledge the ongoing debate about evaluation methods in many fields in which we work. We avoid one-size-fits-all prescriptions and strive to make selective, high-quality evaluation an integral part of how we carry out our work.Examples of areas the foundation does not fund:Direct donations or grants to individualsProjects addressing health problems in developed countriesPolitical campaigns and legislative lobbying effortsBuilding or capital campaignsProjects that exclusively serve religious purposesThis was copied from their website, link at the top.Side note: They tend to work with people who are working on the problems in question then see how they can help out from there. Though they have built up their own solutions. It an amazing organisation its hard not to be impressed.