Business Objectives and Processes: The Three Step Skill to Set your Biz on Course for Success
As home business entrepreneurs it is important for us to really grasp the understanding of successful business and application of the knowledge. How is it possible to do so without knowing or being told? It is said that a lot of home biz fails as the business has no goals or aims to attain to, leaving the owner floundering trying to remember why the business was started when things get outside the comfort zone.
That issue is what it is planned to address within these short simple articles. Each edition you will get the information you need to really see and attack the reasons for failure so that you can grow both in business ability and in the skills needed to produce the business you want, so that it does the part you want it to play in your life.
Set Objectives: Say your objective is to have somewhere to work, so that you can be at home without serving a boss and be close to your family. Your business will be set up a little differently to someone whose goal is to become the number 1 supplier of widgets in the UK, then sell the business and retire to set up the number 2 supplier of widgets in the UK. The end result for each biz owner is different, but both will need to understand where they want to be in order to properly achieve their own objective.
Three Step Skill: It is not easy to succeed, but there is a certain attitude required to ensure a more likely success. This point of view is willing to learn from the mistakes, or better still, to plan ahead so that any actual mistakes can be measured and also the things that go right. Imagine selling shed loads of widgets, then realising that you don't know how to repeat that success next month. Aspiring entrepreneurs should have the basics at hand so that this sort of thing does not happen to them, and that is the purpose of this article.
This particular skill of measuring and applying ideas and results is probably best described as Innovate, Quantify, and Orchestrate, to borrow from Michael E Gerber. As he puts it in his outstanding book, 'The E-Myth Revisited,'
"Innovation is the heart of every exceptional business. Innovation continually poses the question: What is standing in the way of my customer getting what he wants from my business? For the Innovation to be meaningful it must always take the customer's point of view."
He goes on to say, "In that regard, I think of Innovation as the 'Best Way' skill. It produces a high level of energy in every company within which it's nurtured, fed, and stimulated, energy that in turn feeds everyone the company touches - its employees, customers, suppliers and lenders. In an innovative company everyone grows. There's no doubt about it: Innovation is the signature of a bold, imaginative hand."
The next step, Quantify, is the process of measuring and recording the results of an Innovation. As an example ask yourself how many selling opportunities you had yesterday. Back to Gerber, "How would you know that wearing a blue suit had a specific monetary impact on your business unless you quantified that impact and had a specific control against which to measure it? The answer is obvious you wouldn't." Of course, in the readership of this magazine most of us don't need to come face to face with our customers, but the principle of quantification is just as effective in mail order or mlm.
Instead of a blue suit the question would be something like, Did sending letters out at the weekend affect the number of orders I got? Did the wording of this headline pull in more enquiries than that other headline? Once you've asked all the questions about every aspect of your business, you will start to become much more familiar with the way you do things and knowing your biz in these terms will enable more innovation and lead you confidently into the next step, which is Orchestration. Hear what Gerber has to say on this important step,
"Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.
Without Orchestration, nothing could be planned and nothing anticipated- by you or by the customer. If you're doing everything differently each time you do it, if everyone in your company is doing it by their own discretion, their own choice, rather than creating order, you're creating chaos.
As Theodore Levitt says in his stunning book, Marketing for Business Growth, "Discretion is the enemy of order, standardization and quality." [Theodore Levitt, Marketing for Business Growth, p.56] "If 'Hi, have you been in here before?' works better than anything else you've tried, say it every single time you greet a customer," is the rule of the day from the disciples of Orchestration. By every disciple of Orchestration I'm referring to anyone who has ever seriously decided to produce a consistent, predictable result in the world of business, no matter what business they're in."
Conclusion: Sounds a bit harsh doesn't it, taking away our choice and discretion, but if our customers have a choice between a bad service one day and good service the next, the chances are they'll go somewhere else, just because the service is the same every time.
These three simple steps form a skill which is important to all entrepreneurs wishing to succeed and achieve their objectives for what their business is to do for them in life. Providing quality should mean that your customers will want to buy your product of service again and again. That should be a goal for us all, as the cost of retaining a customer as compared to gaining a new customer is much lower.
Things to Do:
Imagine your life, exactly how you would want it to be if you had unlimited time and unlimited money to do what you want. Write it down and imagine how it feels to wake up tomorrow having achieved it and write down what you feel. This is like your objective and gives you a reason for getting your business to succeed.
List questions you can ask about your business like, 'How many enquiries do I get a week?' then extend it, 'How many of those enquiries call back, how many buy something, why, what makes them buy or not?'
Design a questionaire that could be taken over the phone or sent out to your list of customers asking what they like about your service/product.
In the next article, we will look at customer retention and list growing techniques.
