The Johnny.Decimal Small Business System provides a structured, opinionated method to organise everything in a business, creating a universal ‘catalogue’ for all files, tasks, and items.
By assigning each item a unique ID, it simplifies storage, retrieval, and communication, eliminating inefficiency and decision fatigue.
There are places online where people gather to discuss get-rich-quick schemes.
This is not one of them.
This is a place to get real work done. This is a place for people who are executing their idea, not for those who are still dreaming.
Filing things is harder!
The Johnny.Decimal System tackles the chaos of business by bringing order to everything—files, emails, tasks, notes—so you always know where things belong and can stay focused on what matters.
McDonald’s success comes from standardised operations manuals that ensure consistency worldwide.
The Johnny.Decimal Small Business System applies this concept to everyday business tasks, providing clear, shared documentation to streamline routine processes like IT backups, so you can focus on what makes your business unique.
Imagine a library without a catalogue. It’s just a building full of books. Still nice, but not so useful. Now imagine if every library used a different catalogue.1 You could still find a book, but there’d be no common language to guide you.
This is your business without a system like Johnny.Decimal. This is most businesses on Earth.
This is maddeningly inefficient. We can do better.
The Johnny.Decimal Small Business System is a global standard for organising small business administration. It is opinionated,2 and defines a place for everything that you might need to store.
This gives us a common language. Why might that be useful?
Imagine having a well-defined place to store everything. So when you go to save or retrieve something, there’s no decision to make. Just search your index for the appropriate ID: that’s where it goes.
We do this using the Johnny.Decimal system, a simple but powerful way of organising your stuff. It gives you a structure where nothing is more than a few clicks away, and one where most decisions are limited to, at most, 10 things. So it’s much harder to get lost.
“Johnny Noble’s method should be required reading for everyone who is in charge of organising digital assets of any kind. Seriously, if you’ve ever needed the latest version of a file and couldn’t find it within 1–5 minutes, you’ll benefit from getting familiar with Johnny.Decimal.
The Life Admin pack alone is one of the most valuable things I’ve ever purchased.”
Each type of thing in your business gets a unique ID which you can use to refer to it from anywhere. This applies to your files, notes, tasks, email, and physical items. They all share the same system.
At the heart is your index: a central record of everything in your business. You use this to tell yourself specifically where things are stored, and to clear up any ambiguity.
Simplify your life, eliminate clutter, and always know exactly where it all belongs. That’s the power of Johnny.Decimal.
Love them or not, McDonald’s is undeniably successful. Famously, they’re all the same, no matter where in the world you are.
How? Operations manuals.
Imagine if it was up to each store to calculate the oil temperature and cooking time for the fries. That would be horribly inefficient, and the fries would always be different. Instead, McDonald’s has documented the process in an operations (ops) manual that’s shared across the world.
But this is what we’re all doing for, say, our quarterly tax filings. Each one of us has to invent our own process.
So we’ll document this for you, in a standard set of ops manuals.3 For example, where to save those receipts so you can file your returns efficiently. And you’ll create and share your own: how to turn off the salon’s alarm system; how to set up your market stall.
You might worry that I’m trying to homogenise small business: to take away what makes you unique. Quite the opposite: I’m trying to standardise the boring stuff that we all have to do.
Because when you don’t have to think about your backups, you have more time to think about your product and your customers. And so the system will define this process for you. That’s what your ops manuals are. Just follow them, and get on with something more interesting.
With this shared language, we can all help each other much more effectively.
I’m in ‘small business’ forums. They have channels with broad names like ‘finance’ or ‘technology’. And so the conversations in them are broad, and not particularly helpful.
When the community mirrors the structure of the system, we can start to talk specifics. Need help with your backups? Jump in to 14.14 Data storage & backups and hopefully there’s a helpful nerd on hand!
And you can repay the favour. Your speciality might be 11.22 Business insurance, which us nerds typically know little about.
This means that we’re going to keep our channels focused. We’ll be moderating: if you stray off topic, we’ll nudge you back.
The problem with forums and chat channels is that knowledge typically gets lost over time. We all know how painful it is trying to search a chat channel.
So we’ll be actively looking for knowledge that should be persistent, and feeding it back in to the system. That might be improving the descriptions in your index so that you can find things more easily, clarifying ambiguity, or creating and improving your ops manuals.
Either way, that’s our job. Not yours.
There’s a reason many of us don’t have good backups, or that we haven’t confirmed that they actually work. It’s because it’s really boring! Let’s not pretend that it isn’t.
But we can help each other by doing it together. We’ll coordinate the community to keep you on track. There’s already a World Backup Day, 31st March. So let’s use that and spend an hour or so making sure that everything’s working.
There are forums on the internet full of ‘tech bros’ looking for their next get-rich-quick idea.
This isn’t one of them.
If you don’t already have a business idea, this is not the place to find one. This is a place for people who are executing, or for those who have an idea and are just starting.
It’s a place for the doers, not the dreamers.
Of course, there’s always a place for idle chitchat. So there’s a channel, #water-cooler🚰, for those of you that want to catch up on weekend plans, favourite shows, or the latest sports news.
I remember the workplace of 2000. We had computers, sure. But they did far less. They were much slower. And we didn’t all carry one around in our pocket.4
Twenty-five short years later and everything you do depends on a computer. You might have the most analogue business in the world—maybe you make furniture by hand—but your entire business is still on the computer.
Fortunately, we all got that three-month training course to bring us up to spee– oh, wait… that’s right. None of us got any training!
The result? Inefficiency. My least favourite thing. So you can think of this system as the IT training you never got. We’ll show you how to do it right: how to save things, how to name things, what’s safe to duplicate, what isn’t.
All the basic stuff that nobody ever told you, neatly documented. You can’t go wrong.
That doesn’t sound like much, and honestly I think the number will be higher. But let’s stick with 1%.
1% of an hour is 36 seconds. I’m confident that I can save you 36 seconds every time you go to save or retrieve a thing.
1% of a week is 24 minutes. So that’s half an hour a week I’m giving you back. You should knock off early on Friday.
1% of a year is 2.4 days.5 A nice long weekend.
But let’s say that the system actually saves you 2 minutes an hour. Everything multiplies by ~4. Now I’m saving you 10 days a year.
Enjoy your holiday.
The system is currently in development. You are invited to join us in the lounge while you wait.
Both membership tiers include instant access to all existing Johnny.Decimal products.
Platinum membership gets you everything we do, for life.
With Gold, you get access to anything we release while your membership is current.
Prices in US dollars. Choose your local currency at checkout. I don't do Black Friday.
This has been a vision of mine for at least a decade: to create a framework for small business. To give you a sane place for all of the day-to-day stuff, allowing you to focus on your dream. To bring some much-needed efficiency to your world.
The first record I have is note 25.15 Business in a box, dated 9th December 2014. That was so early that it scarcely even mentions the then-three-year-old idea of Johnny.Decimal.
Reviewing that note, it’s remarkable how much of the original vision remains.
And now I’m lucky enough to have Lucy to help me create it.
We are pouring our hearts in to this product. And we will continue to do so: we imagine that we will both spend most of the next few years working on this full-time.
Being a member is like having us on your staff. If you need something that we haven’t listed here: just ask. We will do everything in our power to make you successful.
Grab your Platinum or Gold membership while they’re on sale. And we’ll see you in the lounge.
—j & l, aka. jucy
When released, the system will be:
10-19 Company administration and 20-29 Product, as a downloadable folder structure.I have plans to write an app to help you manage all of this, but that’s a mid-2025 project.
We’re still building the Small Business System. We’re working on it 6 days a week. It’s taking a while—500 hours and counting. We want it to be right when we release it: updating the core of a system that you’ve already implemented isn’t ideal.
If you sign up today you get:
As an added benefit, Platinum members receive free enrolment to Learn with Lucy, our beginner-to-expert Excel course. Every small business owner needs to be proficient in Excel, and we honestly believe there’s no better course out there.
You’ll need to confirm with your accountant, but you should be able to claim this as a business expense, yes. You’ll receive a tax invoice. If you’re in Australia, GST is included in the price.
You’ll never, ever lose access to a Johnny.Decimal system that you’re using. For one, that’s impossible. Your system is folders, files, and notes on your computer. I couldn’t take it away if I wanted to.
If your membership expires, you lose:
Yes, that’s how we do things. There’s an email in your inbox.
There will be, but not until we launch. The monthly plan won’t include access to the workshop, workbook, etc.
One year after the system release date: not one year after your purchase. Annually thereafter as long as you remain a member.
Note that your initial purchase is not technically a subscription: it is a one-off. I haven’t built the subscription service yet; when I do, I’ll transition your membership.
