As business owners, we often hear that we have to work on our business, not just in it. It’s a concept that sounds simple when you say it, but how do you get started?
___
Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss today's topic on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss today's topic on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download___
A lot of entrepreneurs thrive on bending the rules so the starting point isn’t always obvious. You have to create the rules – the operating system – so you will have time to work on your business in the future.
You begin to develop those systems that will make delegation to your future employees more effective. To do that, ask yourself three questions:
- What is your vision of the perfect transaction?
Map out a transaction from beginning to end. Think about what you want your customers to experience during each step of the process. This will include: your advertising, the first interaction, and the closing of the transaction. But don’t forget to include what happens internally to support the transaction and follow-up with the customer.
- What is your customers’ picture of the perfect transaction?
With your vision in mind, you begin discovering exactly what your customers are looking for. You’ll likely find that your customers focus on much smaller things than you do. For example, they may want to have their change counted back in a certain way as we talked about on a recent show.
But here’s the interesting thing when you bring your customers’ perspective in – every customer probably has one or two little things that they really like. If you can gear your organization to make that one customer happy on that one point, you’ll probably thrill the rest of your customers by doing it! They probably want it, too. They just haven’t vocalized it.
- How can you improve one thing one percent?
Take your bigg picture and bring in all the things that your customers have told you and begin working on one at a time.
We have a confession to make … these three questions aren’t ours. They come straight out of Ken Blanchard’s Raving Fans. It highlights these three questions through a great story and we highly recommend that you read his great book.
So these three questions will improve your performance, help you develop your operating systems, and keep you focused on the most important people in your business – your customers.
Putting it to work
Now you want to improve one thing one percent. We saw a great example of this in action. A company had their entire process mapped out on the wall of their conference room.
They had all these sticky notes up on the wall. Each sticky note represented something they wanted to test – something that represented a potential one percent improvement. These suggestions had been made by customers and by employees.
They get on board because they can see that their suggestions are being considered. More than that, they may get tested. The test results may call for full implementation!
It makes your employees feel like they’re a significant part of something bigger. They are valued. That leads to bigg success with your employees.
___
| Get the tips and tools you need to be a BIGG success. Subscribe to the Bigg Success Weekly – it’s FREE! |
|---|
___
Thanks for checking in on us today. Join us next time as we make a special announcement – a new beginning for Bigg Success. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!
Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes.
Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.
Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00354-031909.mp3
Related posts
One-Up Yourself for Bigg Success
How to Get Your Employees to Own Their Job, Not Just Do It
(Image in today's post by tulp)
We had never thought about this until we read the story about Crissy Thompson. Printing coupons is like printing money. Only you won’t go to jail!
