Happy 1st birthday to the SBS

Today's blog is a guest post by Lucy.

I've been thinking a lot about 'this time last year'. It was a period of upheaval for us, but also of huge productivity.

We were madly selling everything we owned on Gumtree and getting ready to move out of our home of 5 years. And we'd set a hard deadline that the Small Business System (SBS) had to be released by the end of March.

A year ago, I was buried in a looong document. For reasons, this was also a very sad time. And while it sounds cliched (and I'm no workaholic), I was grateful to have work to bury myself in. Johnny was nearby figuring out the code to make a website with a login.¹ I'm pretty sure I saw steam coming out of his laptop from time to time.

Break to stand at the whiteboard and discuss something. Write more words. Break to pack a moving box. Write more code. Break to run outside and help the buyer of our pot plants load them into a trailer. Back to the whiteboard. And so it continued.

In a nutshell, here's how we made it.

The process

We followed our own advice and stuck to the process in the Workbook/Workshop.

Scope

Our scope statement was basically "try to think of everything a small business has to do". We drew on our combined 40+ years of experience and also tested our ideas on a list of about 20 different business types. We defined a small business as fewer than 10 people, roughly.

Discovery

I opened the first of many blank mind maps and started reading different business and tax websites from the Australian Government. I pulled out keywords on anything to do with starting a small business.

Then I reviewed:

• Everything in my archived filesystems from when I was a freelancer (Johnny did the same).
• Everything in the Johnny.Decimal business filesystem and JDex.
• Some filesystems and feedback from real small businesses in the US and New Zealand.²

I wrote down as many things as possible. I sat and thought. I walked and thought. I went down many research rabbit holes. I printed out a 20-page business plan template, stuck it to a wall, and stared at it many times a day. This went on for a few weeks.

Creating areas and categories

Then it was time to start grouping the 'discoveries' into areas and categories. And having Big Discussions with Johnny at the whiteboard. During this time, we also got up at 5am every day for Big Discussion Walks around our neighbourhood with mugs of coffee.

The mind map began to take shape and grow.

Building the system

This was a very collaborative process and Johnny spent a lot of time riding the whiteboard:

• I took notes, photos, and audio recordings of our conversations.
• We named the IDs and wrote the descriptions.
• We numbered the IDs only after much consideration.
• Then I wrote the supporting words for each ID.

ID by ID, we began at the beginning and kept going until we reached the end. There were several rounds of review and feedback on mind maps and my master document.

When the content was 'approved', I pasted it into hundreds of text files to become the website. More rounds of review of the website followed. By the end, we were both quite batty and delirious.

Final stats

A quick review of our archived files shows:

• Our new system had 5 areas, 21 categories, and 344 IDs.³
• There were 13 research and planning mind maps.
• The master document had 342 pages and 46,309 words (written in Markdown).
• Johnny had written 13,000 lines of code.
• The project lasted 6 months, from September 2024 to March 2025.

We also did a sticker mailout to the first 100 people around the world who bought the system before it was released. Thank you for trusting us!

Everything related to this project was made with sweat, tears, and love by two humans.

What now

We're really happy that we made this system. We'd talked about making something for small business for ages, we just weren't sure where to begin. We spend all day in ours and we hope it's helped other businesses feel more organised.

We have ideas for improvements and welcome feedback. In the meantime, there's a new YouTube playlist for videos on how Johnny uses the SBS.

And, finally, a special shoutout to Genesis and the inventor of the martini, without whom this project would not have been possible.