Category Archives: Productivity

Business Failure and Getting Better Results

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In this Business Article we are going to talk about business failure. The reason business failure is so interesting to me is because of what my personal failures have meant to my life and because of the massive profits my failures in business have made. Here is the single reason why they have meant profit to me even though most have found that failure has meant some kind of loss to so many others.

The number one key in turning your business failure into profit is your ability to first mentally frame your failure as a lesson. The challenges we can face in business are truly infinite. You will only experience difference versions of a few of the same key challenges. So when you really learn from the experience, you have an asset that is unique to business success. That asset is the ability to spot the challenge before it becomes a failure so you can correct the course of what is about to happen.

The second most important part to turning business failure into profit is your ability to search out the opportunity that is found in failure. Sometimes failure takes place that creates an opportunity twice the benefits of the challenge that was put in front of you. But you won’t find those benefits if you don’t look for them.

So if you feel like you haven’t got the results you want or if you feel like your in the middle of a business failure, your first job is to find the lesson by asking yourself the right questions about what happened and how you can keep something like that from happening again. Then keep looking for the hidden opportunity because it is there. You might not see it right away but you will find it if you keep looking.

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Do More With Less in 2011

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December is the time of year when companies and organizations review their sales, operations and profits. This is a great opportunity to discover ways to operate better, faster and cheaper than your competition. Thus, creating an environment for a prosperous 2011.

Begin with what is working. I am a firm believer in do not fix what is not broke. If something is working keep it up and fine tune it. This will ensure that you continue to get results in those areas. Now examine what is not working. Use the 5 Whys to get to the root cause, as oppose to the symptoms. When I work with a client I ask “Why do you do it this way?” and the standard response is because we have always done it this way. Then I ask again, “Why have you always done it this way?” The response is because that is how I was trained to do it. Then I ask why again until I get to the root cause of the inefficiency and it usually comes down to the office process was never updated even though new software and staff have entered the picture. So these “resource stealers” permeate the entire back office. In fact, 60 to 80 percent of the costs associated with bringing a service or product to market is administrative.

So where do you start? At the basics – 5S which is “affectionately” referred to as business organizing. 5S encompasses the following:

* Sorting is the first step to making a work area neat and practical. Keep only what is necessary

* Set-In-Order: Identify and label everything. Organize and arrange everything in a work area. Setting-In-Order provides the most efficient means for retrieval and return of items to their proper place.

* Shine: Implement regularly scheduled cleaning practices to shine things up. When a structured system is established and becomes part of the culture, cleaning and inspection (audit) can be done quickly.

* Standardize and Simplify: Continually look for ways to standardize and simplify the work area or process(es).

* Sustain the benefits you derive from your 5S system by creating a formal method of auditing and monitoring results.

This is the foundation for change. Chaos cannot be streamlined. So a base line must be established to build better processes on. Once you have created an atmosphere of organization, now you can asses if your processes support the company objectives.

When you review your goals for 2010 and determine did you obtain them keep in mind your processes. These should always support the company’s goals and objectives. What area or department had the most difficulty obtaining these goals, why? What are your objectives for 2011 and do your office processes support that? If not, this would be a good place to start the discussion on what to address for improvement. What area is going to give you the biggest and quickest return from streamlining?

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Automating Business Processes

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Business Process Automation is the task of taking manual computer tasks necessary for the function of your business and automating them. From the day we started in the IT industry we started Rede Software, we saw the same frustrating pattern over and over again. Businesses were relying on their IT solutions in order to succeed. Yet often it seemed like people were working for their IT instead of their IT working for them.

Here is a list of business processes that in our opinion should be automated:

Process – Description of automation

  • Data entry: Entering data received via an electronic medium into an application
  • Data access & manipulation: Accessing data (e.g. From a database) and using or modifying it as appropriate
  • Information Gathering: Gathering information to be displayed for staff
  • Information Distribution: Distributing gathered information to required stakeholders or clients
  • Report Generation: Generating reports (e.g. end of day results)
  • Report Gathering & Distribution: Collecting generated reports and organising them; then redistributing as required
  • Backup: Backup off-site over the internet
  • Web Crawling: Crawling through known internet sites to collect data
  • Integration: Integrating multiple applications to work together and produce any of the above results and more

The biggest reason to automate tasks that are taking so long to finish is that it allows you to refocus your time and energy on things that are important to your business. Imagine if all the man-hours wasted on mindless & repetitive tasks could instead be used on areas of your business that need it most. Instead of Staff having to click away pointlessly on the screen they can be re-allocated to parts of the business that could use them.

Imagine then a staff member who’s job it is to mindlessly copy data from one application and input it into another, a task that could potentially take hours at a time. How would they feel about their job? How would they feel about their employer? How would they feel about themselves? Imagine if instead of doing that they could click a button and load up a program that does all that work for them. How could this staff member be better utilised? Could they be assigned tasks that improve customer satisfaction or generate more sales? How much better would they feel about themselves for having a more challenging and less repetitive job? Automation software allows people do their actual jobs instead of a task that could, essentially, be assigned to a robot.

On top of that, there would be no need to hire additional people simply to help with these tasks. Instead of spending money on staff that do nothing real and material, money could be spent improving marketing, sales, support or customer service. There would be no more need to hire temps or seasonal staff to take care of sudden influxes of repetitive tasks.

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The Value of Darkness and Light in Your Business

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In the north of Scotland in wintertime, it is dark by 4pm, and not properly light again until after 8am. Many people find this a challenge, but it is of course compensated for by very long summer evenings, when the sun rises about 3am, and doesn’t really set until about 11pm. I reorganise my schedule during the winter so I can easily get out in the daytime. This applies to businesses too, so how much time do you spend in the daylight and nighttime of your business?

Dark and light are functions of a dual universe where there is an opposite for everything, and where if we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t be able to understand positive and negative, light and dark, happy and sad, love and fear, peace and violence and so on. And although you may also subscribe to the idea that we are all One, or that the world of duality is just an illusion, because we inhabit bodies, humans still have to find a way to have a foot in both camps, so to speak.

In business, these opposites show up as clients vs no clients; bank account in credit or debit; inquiries or lack of inquiries. Without one, the other cannot be so easily appreciated, which is why you often find that very successful business people have had so-called failures along the way. This is quite a challenging thing to take on board, as so often the so-called ‘bad’ result is not wanted. In business, no-one wants no clients, little money, and a lack of inquiries. Indeed, without those there is no business!

But sometimes being in the dark times is just what is needed to be able to emerge into the light. In fact, if you are willing to be in the dark (not knowing where you’re going, feeling wobbly, wondering about what on earth is going on; worrying where the next penny is going to come from) then you are well-placed to find the light – simply because you are very heavily motivated to do so. It’s well-known that in a place of pain, the desire to move is strong, but that if you are just a bit uncomfortable, then you are likely to stay in that place – after all, it’s not that bad.

However, imagine you are in a darkened room, and you want to know what is out there in the darkness; you want to find out where you are. Perhaps you’re a bit frightened because you don’t know what might be lurking in the corners; or afraid that if you shine the light in one place, another area will become darker; or there might even be a bit of you that feels relatively comfortable in the dark – so long as you stay still in one place then you will probably be safe. These are the kinds of thought that are easy to say to yourself when you find yourself in a ‘dark’ place in your business.

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