This morning I was reviewing the types of activities I’ve performed in the roles I’ve taken on during my career. I began to notice a pattern.
Situation: Somebody else has a business idea they want help with.
I come on board and:
- Identify what the most important things are to making money.
- Build a minimum viable product and run it by potential customers/users.
- Iterate to find an offer that people buy into.
- Develop and operate a fulfilment system or the product, often with many manual steps
- Scale marketing using direct marketing to grow number of customers.
- Automate fulfilment systems and make them scalable
- Put in place financial controls and reporting
- Recruit staff to assist growth
- Prepare and present training materials to them so they can run the business
- Work myself out of a job. A business is left behind.
What struck me was that I’ve done most of these activities in every role I’ve had yet never seen such a role advertised. Is there a name for this sort of role? Also, I’ve generally found such a role is not well rewarded. For example the people hired and trained in steps 8 and 9 are often better paid then me. What is the best way to structure remuneration?
Finally, as I really enjoy performing the above steps, what would be the most effective way to find other roles like this or continue a career around it?
Rory Ford 