Sep 02 2007
Six Simple Steps Guaranteed to Improve Any Business
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I would love a dollar for every time I have heard the excuse “I tried that once before, and it didn’t work…”
The owners of businesses that use this excuse are really saying… I’m the boss around here and I’m the only one allowed to have good ideas and, right now, I don’t have any. It is an excuse made so they don’t have to risk what they consider failure.
Whenever I hear this, I immediately ask these four questions:
1. What measurable outcome were you trying achieve last time you tried it?
2. What solutions (with strong influence on the plural) did you and your team think might solve this problem.?
3. How did you measure the results?
4. What did you try next?
I have never had a specific answer, not once.
The six steps essential to improving the results of any business activity are:
1. What is the current performance?
2. What measurable result do you want?
3. What are all the ways this result could be achieved?
4. Which of all the ideas, offers the best chance of achieving the result you want?
5. How well is it working?
6. Try the next best idea. (go back to step 1)
Constant improvement of any process is achieved by repeating these six essential steps on every key facet of your business.
Let’s pretend for a moment you want to sell increase your sales of entrees.
1. What is your current performance?
Or in this case, how many do you sell each evening now?
We cannot improve our sales until we know exactly how many we are selling now.
2. What do you want to achieve?
Realistically, how many more do you want to sell?
3. What are all the ways this result could be achieved?
Now this is THE KEY STEP, this is the one most business owners get wrong.
They think because they are the boss, they have to, or are, the only person that can have a good idea.
Step three should be a collaborative process; it is a time to collect every possible solution from everybody in your organisation.
4. Which of all the ideas, offers the best chance of achieving the result you want?
Now you can play boss, now you can make a “big kid” decision, and it doesn’t matter if you are wrong, because this is all about running a continual process of ongoing tests.
5. How well is it working?
Did you sell more entrees this week, than last week? This is real difficult stuff isn’t it!
6. Try the next best idea. (go back to step 1)
If the results in step 5 improved sales, then add the next best idea to the first and go back to step 1 and see if you can get even better results.
If the results didn’t improve, then try the next best idea by itself.
Look, this constant improvement stuff is not rocket science, it’s not hard, it just takes a little discipline to define precisely what it is you want to achieve and measure the results, have the courage to realize that you cannot and should not have all the good ideas.
I guarantee, you can improve any business by applying these six simple steps.
This six step process is a simplified version of Deming’s Quality Control System, the system that was responsible for rebuilding the entire Japanese car industry after the war.
