Starting A New Career: From Restaurants to Software — 3
By: Dinner Service To Software As A Service
Tags: Jobs, Careers, Cooking, Restaurant, Career Advice

Starting A New Career: From Restaurants to Software — 3

Step 1 — Design A Simple Solution

Transformation is at the essence of restaurant work. Through numerous physical techniques, like dicing aromatics and herbs chiffonade, or chemical reactions, like the maillard reaction on a ribeye and the caramelization of the natural sugars in onions, or even by putting on a seamless front-of-house performance, transforming a party’s experience, restaurants are places where transformations are common-place and absolutely integral.

Transformation is therefore essential to creativity.

Without the techniques mentioned above, how could a chef create a new dish? How could a wait staff create an incredible atmosphere? And because creativity is at the heart of how software applications effect the businesses who use them, you, as a restaurant person are already, in a way, an expert in the fundamentals of solutioning. Solutioning is a method used in order to solve the pains and satisfy the requirements of a business, by transforming the basic ingredients into something functional and delicious. Ok, maybe delicious is going too far…

But seriously, as a restaurant person, you already have the fundamentals down; you have a creative spirit. Now you just need to get access to the basic ingredients, learn the techniques of transformation of those ingredients and then can create a valuable solution.

So, what the heck am I talking about? Let’s dig in to the processes:

Solutions Processes

1. Basic ingredients for any business include requirements, pain-points, and goals. Gathering this information is the process needed here and doing this well is as important as sourcing your produce or fish from a trustworthy vendor. 2. Techniques of Transformation for any creative solution are your abilities to make connections between the raw ingredients and the software; how do the ingredients relate to the software and its features? This process is essential to enabling creativity. 3. Creating a Valuable Solution is simply using your techniques from #2 to draw up plans for a logical journey or business process that will ultimately satisfy the businesses basic requirements. This process will lead to the implementation and a final product.

Ok, so now it sounds like we’re composing a dish here, right? In business, like in the restaurant, before you can start preparing a dining experience, you need an actual prospective customer to “cook” for. And in order to do that, we need to be sure that your dish is what they are looking for. So let’s build a persona.

Building A Persona-Case

Ingredient Acquisition Process — Challenges

First, you need to have a conversation with someone in a business who actually has a problem. If they don’t have a problem, then their requirements and goals don’t matter, and neither does your software. You might look at low hanging fruit here, like a friend you know with a business or someone you know on Linkedin.

But, since we don’t want to bother any real people with this yet, we’ll have to build a persona-case through our existing resources. Luckily, you already have tons of reviews and case-studies of real businesses that have used your software to build a solution for their business. Choose one, or a few and combine them to write up the basic information about that business.

What is their name?

What’s the industry?

What do they do specifically?

Who do they serve?

Who is your main point-of-contact?

Ok, you’ve got a persona-case outlined. For now that’s enough because we are about to go DEEP with this.

Second, all case-studies and reviews will mention at least 1 problem, related to the software. Here comes the fun stuff. You’ll now be entering the land of make-believe because, you’ll need to do requirements gathering work to ensure you get absolutely all of the basic ingredients necessary to compose this solution.

This is called “elicitation” and in a nutshell, it requires a lot of asking “why” and digging deeper and deeper into the requirements and goals a business will tell you about.

For example. If they have a major problem like: “We are not selling enough of our widget in our on-line shop”, you would ask “Why do you think that is?”

They respond with “we aren’t getting enough traffic to that page”, and your turn, “Are you using your software type, to attract deal seekers?”.

They respond with “No we only use social media to send people to our main website”, and you respond with “What do customers usually do when they get to your site?”

Go down these roads so that you have essentially asked the questions that lead to the results defined in the case-studies and/or reviews you are using. This will give you a good list of ingredients to work with. In a real sale/solution, we would be getting on a call with a real person but for now, we are just trying to get real enough to build something all on our own. This process is not meant to teach you how to be a consultant or an implementation specialist, or a salesperson, but rather, it is meant to give you incredible insight into your software and how it helps people and businesses.

Third, now that we’ve explained the process of solutioning, your next step is to build a solution using the ingredients, transformation techniques, and solutions creation to draw up a plan for yourself. You might use a piece of blank printer paper and a pencil, or a free whiteboard tool like Miro.com. Either way, try to write down all the requirements and actually draw out different entities on your paper.

For example, I built a quick funnel in the Clickfunnels platform, as explained with the questions and answers I wrote above. In the example below:

The customer is a circle at the beginning (left side). Draw an arrow from them to the digital ad that leads to the landing page you will build. Then draw an arrow from the landing page to the emails you’ll send the customer. Then draw a line from the customer to the webpage the business really needs help getting traffic to. Then draw your “exit pop” which will make sure the customer buys the product after you offered them a 50% off discount before leaving the page. If the customer still leaves the page and doesn’t buy, create a shape for that and draw a cyclical line back to the FB ad, as you should always retarget warm and hot leads! Then draw that line to dollars.

Problem solved, at least theoretically. If this were implemented with excellent design and copywriting, the requirements would be fulfilled, the solution complete, and the client will very likely see positive results.

Basic Solution Diagram To Solve Business’s Problem

Obviously, there is quite a bit of complexity here that you’ll need to really learn to fully understand and, this is a simple example of a solution. However, for the purposes of today’s step, this is ALL we need. Your diagram may look different, but ultimately it should serve the same purpose. A step-by-step process that your software can enable or facilitate. Use a shape for each customer or team member touchpoint, and draw lines out of those shapes to the other shapes where it makes sense, in order to satisfy the basic requirements of the customer.

Step 2 — Implement

Ok, here’s where I am going to basically shut-up and let you roll.

This is your chance to actually build something in the software you’ve spent all this time learning. Build your solution as you drew it out. Take your time and be sure to use as many features as are needed. Sometimes you can even go deeper and use MORE features, just for the sake of learning. After all, this is for learning, not for selling.

Chances are, your first solution and implementation will not be perfect, or even good. Like me, it may stink! But, if it does, that’s where the cycle of learning kicks into high-gear.

RINSE AND REPEAT.

What did I do after my wife totally picked apart my first project? Well, as I mentioned in the last post, I almost gave up. But ultimately, I recognized my desire to quit was really fear, driving me away from success. So, I started over and built another.

After that, I started the entire Part I over again (check my main page for Part I and all the other content) to learn about, study, gain access to, and build a solution on the second software on my list. For me, that was Hubspot, and then after that, it was Lead Pages.

This was really important because it allowed me to use my experience on these platforms on my resume and talk in depth about those experiences during my interviews. If you can do this “name dropping”, it will impress the heck out of your interviewers, since most entry-level applicant don’t have any valuable experience in the market.

For you, I recommend to do the same. Rinse and repeat. Do it again, and then again with the next app. Part 1, Part 1.5 and Part 2 (that’s this one), at least 3 times, and then as many more as you want. The more you do, the more confidence you will rightly gain.

For great feedback, look into the customer communities for these apps. You will always be able to find someone who would be willing to help you in some way. Sometimes, they will even jump on a screen-share to go through your solutions and give you their feedback. This is valuable to understand how to improve and whether your confidence is too high, or too low. For example, ClickFunnels has an awesome Facebook community. Salesforce has the most robust community I’ve ever seen at trailhead.salesforce.com.

Once you’ve gotten this done, you’ll be able to move forward on to Part III where we will discuss how to apply this experience to your job search. Firstly, what types of jobs will we look for? Next, how to write a good resumé highlighting the correct items. Lastly, how to interview properly and land a solid remote job.

By Part IV we will skill-up. You will have a job and you will begin your career in SaaS. During that time, not only will you be making fairly good money, but you’ll also have a lot of flexibility working from home, down-time, and most importantly, freedom to skill-up so you can move on to Part V… Getting your dream job!

It is possible that you will crush your entry level job so hard that you’ll be promoted and on your way to a dream job within the same company as you began with. That will all be up in the air! But skilling-up is the indicator to yourself and to your boss, that you are not the average employee. You are a BEAST and you have an amazing future in SaaS.

Your Fishbowl Should Provide Space For Growth

Doing all of this may feel like you’re a fish out of water (perhaps jumping into a frying pan?), but in fact, you’ll be jumping to a fishbowl that has way more room for growth. Alright! Until next time…

Time To Move.

Chef Matt — Signing Off