John McKown, President and Founder, Delaware.Net

It's E-Myth week at ISP-Planet, and today we interview the founder and president of a medium sized regional ISP and webhost.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 31, 2006]

ISP-Planet readers, ISP-Lists members, and ISPCON attendees know John McKown, the president and founder of Delaware.Net. Last year, we interviewed McKown (see How To Grow, How To Change) and the company was featured in one of the first ISP profiles ever published here on ISP-Planet (see 'Going Against the Grain' Proves a Winning Strategy from July of 1999).

During the past eight months, McKown has been implementing two of Michael Gerber's books, using the ideas in The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It and the detailed system described in E-Myth Mastery: The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company.

With 15 employees, McKown's is exactly the kind of company the system is designed for. Although McKown has already overcome many problems Gerber warns small business owners to be ready for, he is finding the system very valuable. "Over the past eight months, my thinking has been as a result of the book," says McKown. "I also keep meeting people who have read and used the book."

As we start talking over the phone, he immediately opens his copy of E-Myth Revisited to page 105, where the book says that a company's system must provide "uniformly predictable service to the customer."

Like many business owners, McKown has thought about many details, but has not always stepped back to look at the big picture. "I had never really thought about consistency in the customer experience," he tells us. "Once I started thinking about how and why customer transactions take place—it may seem kind of crazy, but I started to standardize how we do basic hospitality, how we greet visitors and run meetings."

Here's a simple example: when a customer takes a tour of the Delaware.Net data center, McKown makes sure that not just the receptionist but everyone in the company knows the name of the customer and of the people in the team being sent to do the data center tour.

He's taken the lesson so deeply to heart that he's put the idea of consistent service into the heart of the company's mission statement:

Delaware.Net, Inc.'s mission is to provide profitable Internet business applications, creative services, and IT consulting that helps our customers solve problems and increase productivity in their businesses. Our goal is to deliver these high quality technology products and services in a customer-focused, friendly manner with consistent results every time.

Of course, the business already has a great deal of standardization on the technical side. Websites are certainly standardized.

A mature business
Gerber talks about the three life stages of a business. The three stages can be described in simplified terms, but the detail provided by the book is useful. In its infancy, the company is run by one person who pays personal attention to every detail. In its adolescence, the founder starts hiring people. A business that reaches maturity knows how to hire people, how to train them in its ethos, and is so well run that if it wished to, it could teach other people how to set up franchises of itself.

"Now, there's no one employee in the system where if they left, the company would go down the tubes," says McKown. "We've taken the advice in the book to build operations manuals for each job, manuals that define every step. For example, we're looking at how many steps it takes to set up a website. When you look at the things you take for granted, when you do that industrial engineering, you find a lot you can automate. It's been great for us."

To build the operations manuals, McKown takes the person whose job it is and pairs them up with someone from a different area of the business who knows nothing about the job. The document the pair produce is thorough, accurate, and easy to understand. When we tell Gerber about this system, he says, "that guy really understands it."

McKown has the purpose of the operations manuals honed to a single sentence. "What I've been trying to do is to build redundancy into our business process like we have in our data center."

The operations manuals don't just describe how to do things; They also describe the minimum acceptable level of service for each product. "We say how long it should take to set up a website. It's like McDonald's saying how many seconds fries should sit in grease."

Of course, the goals vary depending on the job, and setting the goals is large part of McKown's job. The other part is to inspire innovation from employees. "I say this all the time in our company meetings. If we do things the same way, we'll be here in this meeting a year from now, maybe a little bigger, maybe a little smaller, but facing the same problems."

The toughest part for McKown is mastering the balance between innovation and daily work. "The biggest challenge I see is balancing R&D and production. We have to pay the bills while we're making the company better. When we have an employee or group of employees doing too much in one area, such as answering the phone all day and not learning, then there's a problem. We used to have a meeting every other month, then it was every month, and now it's every week."

McKown has a clear idea of what his job is. "I have three team leaders. Direct supervision is their job. My job is to steer the ship and balance R&D and production. I'm always looking at where we're at. I'm making sure everybody is aware. I'm not just talking about high tech. Things change very quickly."

If you go back and read that ISP-Planet profile of Delaware.Net from July of 1999, 'Going Against the Grain' Proves a Winning Strategy, you'll see that the company knew it had to leave dialup and become a provider of business services.

Now Delaware.Net is taking charge again, increasing automation. As executives across the nation and around the world wonder how to make change part of their culture, wonder how to teach people to allow machines to do the repetitive, routine parts of their jobs, Delaware.Net is building a system that will deliver all of it. We expect the industry to follow.

— End