William Edwards Deming

William Edwards Deming



One person who has affected me in business has been William Edward Deming.  He has a quote that says "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you are doing"  

I think this also goes along with another popular business quotes "What gets documented gets improved"

Most investment funds and family offices that I have worked with do not have an investor cultivation process or pipeline drawn out as a process. They do not have their ongoing investor communication strategy documented, and in many places the only documentation of their investment process is at a very high level within their marketing materials.  I think many hedge funds, portfolio managers and capital raisers could benefit from using PowerPoint or a free program such as Bubbl to document their processes.

This documenting of critical processes takes little time and costs nothing to do but allows you to step back from the process and evaluate it, improve it, or delegate where appropriate.  Our firm recently used Bubbl and PowerPoint together to describe a business process we were completing ourselves and we were able to not only use this internally but also externally as we trained a third party that we decided to outsource some of this work to.

The processes I have found to be valuable to document are:

  • Investor Acquisition Process
  • Current Investor Communication Strategy
  • Hiring New Employees
  • Managing your portfolio on an ongoing basis

Related to You Don't Know What You are Doing

Tags: William Edwards Deming Quotes, Quote by Edward Deming, W. Edward Deming, Quality Management and process improvement tips, documenting business processes for improvement