LDRDocs/Definitions/Craftsman Method.md

---
aliases:
  - craftsman process
---
A Craftsman Method refers to doing work in a way that one person does the whole process from start to finish, usually without any helpers. Any helpers involved typically assist by taking over surrounding tasks like cleaning so the primary worker can focus more of their time on their work.

A Craftsman Method is often the way a new process or project is tested to figure out the basic way to do the job, especially if the work is complicated, involves a lot of critical thinking, or requires a lot of trial and error to figure out how to do the job.

If we decide to continue doing such a job long-term or scale up the project by bringing in more work, we try to move away from using a Craftsman Method because it is harder to scale and more error prone.

Let's talk about some of the reasons we do that.

First of all, a Craftsman Method is often used because a customer has some kind of problem they're willing to spend a lot of money to solve. If we're able to make a profit solving their problem with a Craftsman Method, we start to check how many other people would pay for basically the same thing. Often we find the person who first asked us for a solution is willing to spend more money than most other people. In other words, if we want to expand the solution and offer it to more people, we have to find a way to make it more affordable.

If it doesn't seem like many other people are willing to pay to have the problem solved, that means it's kind of a dead end for the company. It doesn't make sense to keep devoting resources to the project unless it's extremely profitable and we have nothing better to do. We want to focus instead on solving problems that more people will pay for.

Another reason has to do with having a [[single point of failure]]. We are setting ourselves up for failure if only a small group of people understand how to do the work or success depends on the work being done perfectly every time. In the past we've conducted several experiments where we tried having 2 or 3 people use the Craftsman Method on the same project at the same time. What we learned was no matter how much we communicated and tried to standardize, each of the people produced different, inconsistent results. In some of these tests we used people who were otherwise considered top performers in the company. When shown the results of their work, they all agreed the customer would probably be upset or confused by the differences in their work. This is not to mention that the craftsman method makes attendance issues an even larger problem because if one of the people is absent, late, or wants to take a vacation the customer is automatically pissed off.

## What to take away from this article
We place a high value on people who can use a Craftsman Method to explore a new process and then move on to a different problem. People who can do that are frequently promoted, given raises, bonuses, and other rewards. The key indicator of success is that either we quickly figured out the project doesn't make sense to keep doing or we figured out a more repeatable method because lots of people will pay for the same thing if it's more affordable.

On the flip side, people who gravitate towards using the Craftsman Method for a single project long-term are usually a bad fit for our business model. Regardless of their work ethic, personality, or anything like that, such people don't usually thrive with us. They would be better off starting their own small business (and we think they should). The reason is more or less that we don't have the money and resources to gamble that they will eventually figure out how to scale the work and make significant money. However, if they're honest and forthright about their passion for the particular problem they're solving, we are very supportive of them branching out on their own to create their own company.
## Why is a Craftsman Method more error prone?
Mainly because people aren't perfect. As a person grows more tired their own ability to notice how tired they are degrades. With one expert doing the work start to finish without anyone to assist or catch mistakes, errors will *always* happen. That is less of an issue when the work's being done for a customer who has a burning desire for a solution.

Usually, the initial customer(s) for a new project are surprised any solution whatsoever exists. The problem has been driving them nuts for so long they are essentially irrational about finding some kind of solution. Therefore, they're willing to pay top dollar to even test if the problem can be solved, and they are much more forgiving about mistakes or problems.

This is also the reason we avoid offering Craftsman Method solutions to new customers as their first project, unless it's *not* expected to be an ongoing need. It's because if a new customer is asking us for something like that, they are probably irrational and it's a good indicator their business isn't healthy. Many of the times in the past we tried helping a customer like that, they ended up wasting our time, money, and sanity.

Take for example [[long term storage]] customers. Most of the time people asking for long term storage are acting irrationally. They only need LTS because they can't sell their products fast enough. A lot of the time people ask for LTS they have no idea how long they'll need storage because they have no idea how to improve sales of their merchandise. [[Stefan Wingen]] is an example of this. He bought way more inventory than he actually could sell and over the course of 2+ years he hasn't found any real solution. It could be argued we should help him find a way to sell it. However, he doesn't do any other project with us, so we choose to focus on the needs of other paying customers with more repeatable work.