Nine Drivers of Upside Leverage & Exponential Business Growth - Driver #8

YOUR PROCESSES, YOUR PROCEDURES, YOUR SYSTEMS

Most people don’t have any systems, any procedures, any processes. I had the good fortune of being trained and collaborating and consulting with W. Edwards Deming’s organization. I also got to work with a company who was the leading force in the whole field of multi-variable testing. Here’s what I learned in a nutshell:

Every business mechanism can be broken down into its driving processes and sub processes. Once you figure out what the processes driving an activity are, they can be measured, they can be quantified, and they can be vastly improved. Each process in a various activity (and there usually are fifteen to twenty processes in a given activity) revenue generating activity, production activity, operational activity, financial activity, and personnel activity can be improved between a low of 3%-4% all the way to a high improvement of 2100%.

If you can get 3%-2100% improvement in as many as ten different processes and in as many as fifty or more different elements of your business, that translates to enormous and significant and massive geometric growth possibilities!

Deming was the man who turned the Japanese industrial organization from Schlockmeisters to the most formidable industrial performance might in the world -- just by teaching them this science of process improvement.

He showed the Japanese that in any area, a process occurs whenever you do anything. This occurs when you run an ad, do a sales approach, produce a product, process inventory, manufacture something, shift something, deal on the phone, handle a complaint, perform a service or take an order. And there is massive room in that process for improvement. There are activities that can be vastly improved -- always!

When you figure out how your given processes currently perform, (which is nothing more than a function of analysis, monitoring and measurement), you can then find other people in your organization or other people in your industry or other people doing the same function outside the industry who are doing it much better, faster, easier, safer, more productive, more effective, more profitably.

All you’ve got to do then is currently figure what they do that you don’t, the strategy they use and the tactics. What drives their strategies, what is the mindset that sustains it, the key lessons you must know to maximize the model or borrow their higher performing success methods. Then all you’ve got to do is put it together into a simple application, add it to what you’re doing, (or replace or enhance what you’re doing with it) and that process will perform tremendously better.

You may also want to look at processes that you have knowingly or unknowingly perfected that are higher, far superior performing than anything, anyone else in your industry or any related industry use. Because you can take your successful processes and once you can quantify and measure them, you can sell them, license them, or joint venture their use for a share of the improved result they produce for other companies.

For example:

I had a lumber mill client who had a process for kiln drying lumber that was two times more effective and saved 40% more energy and reduced waste by 80% more than 90% of all the other lumber mills were experiencing. They were able to sell $2 million a year in training and licensing of this process to other lumber mills who wanted it.

I’ve had real estate agents who could list four times as many homes as most agents be able to make $1 million a year teaching other agents how to list homes outside of their competitive market.

I’ve had car washes who developed a technique for getting four times as many people to buy a hot wax upgrade teach 2,000 other car washes how they did it and make more money teaching other car wash operators their process than they did from their own car wash activities.

I’ve had dry cleaners who’ve created great ads license them to 5,000 other dry cleaners.

Ask Yourself:

• What do you do in marketing?
• What do you do in selling?
• What do you do in operations?
• What do you do in effectiveness?
• What do you do in management that’s greater than 90% of the other people doing it?
• What do you do in money managing?
• What do you do in achieving high productivity?
• What do you do in any other measurable, impactful and quantifiable element of your business that can be done better, that you can learn from others or that you do at the top of the line that you could teach others and get paid for?

Answer them by looking outside, looking inside and measuring how well things do or don’t perform and you can make yourself a fortune.