The simple way to blast away business headaches

From the desk of Roy Furr, Monday, January 7th, 2008

Do you ever spend so much time in the day-to-day of your business, that you don’t have any time to think about taking to the next level? It seems like there’s always problems cropping up, critical issues (issues everyone else thinks are critical, at least) — always interruptions!

Nobody respects your time — and nobody besides you will take any responsibility and make their own decisions!

Well let’s take aim at the root cause of that, and blast it out of your business once and for all.

You know your employees, vendors, and clients are part of the problem — and yes, believe it or not, you’re part of the problem too… (Sorry!)

But that’s no problem at all — in fact, you’re not really at fault. It’s can be difficult to see how to change this — especially when you’re neck deep in running your business. It takes an outside voice to come in and help you out. And that’s what I’m going to do right now. So take a deep breath and relax.

First, let’s look at what goes into running a successful business. And for this, we turn to Rich Schefren, of Strategic Profits.

According to Rich, a successful business has these four things:

1. Core competencies
2. Competitive advantage
3. Critical non-essential success factors
4. Clutter

Core competencies: These are the things you need to do well to be in the business you’re in. They’re the foundation of the product or service you deliver.

Competitive advantage: This is linked to your Unique Selling Proposition. It’s what you do that brings more value to your clients than any of your competitors. It’s why clients choose you.

Critical non-essential success factors: This is everything else you need to do to keep your business running. Bookkeeping, product manufacturing, etc. These are things that someone else could do for you and you’d still provide the same value to your clients.

Clutter: This is everything else that eats up your time and makes you non-productive.

So what do you do with this information?

First, you need to define what part of your business fits into each of these categories.

Second, you need to make sure you have the right person working on each. This includes outsourcing if necessary.

Third, you need to create rules for everyone to empower them to solve issues that arise, within a set of instructions you feel comfortable with.

The first part is up to you.

Make a list of everything you do in your business — and everything anyone else does. Then look… What is a core competency? What creates your competitive advantage? What are the critical non-essential success factors? And what’s going on that’s just clutter?

Now decide which work can be done by others — and which needs to be done by you and your team.

As a general rule, your competitive advantage should always stay in house. The core competencies should be performed by you and your employees — or a group of outsourced employees that are with you for the long term. Critical non-essential success factors can usually be outsourced — fulfillment to a fulfillment house, product manufacturing to a capable manufacturer, distribution to a freight company, etc. And clutter — eliminate it!

Next — create rules related to each job task that make it easy for people to solve problems as they come up.

Let’s say you outsourced fulfillment and returns to a fulfillment house. Give them a rule that says, “Make the customer happy, as long as it costs less than $100.” This allows them to give better service because there’s no chain of command that problems have to go up and come back down — they can solve problems on the spot. Clients will be happier and there will be more repeat business. And running your business will be easier and less stressful for you.

Finally — destroy the clutter!

Now that you’ve defined it, it’s easy to identify clutter when it comes up. Let others know that you don’t want them working on it, because it’s not contributing value to the company or your clients. Post rules if you have to. Make sure people understand that they’re getting rid of clutter for the common good.

This will eliminate a huge amount of the problems and issues that come up.

It’s a simple way to blast away many of your business headaches that come from lack of focus and wasting time on unneccessary tasks.

The important thing to remember is to empower your employees and contractors to do the job they’ve been assigned. They’re certainly capable of doing it, if you let them. You don’t hire superstars for nothing, right?

Got it? Good. Now go out there and do it — because it doesn’t matter how much you know until you apply it.

Good luck!

- R

Tags: business, interruptions, employees, vendors, clients, successful business, Rich Schefren, Strategic Profits, Core competencies, Competitive advantage, success factors, Clutter, outsourcing, better service, solve problems, superstars

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