Improve My Business

Process Mapping should be the foundation for any initiative to increase the performance of your company. Whether you are trying to achieve cost reductions, increased quality, higher employee satisfaction, increased efficiency, decreased wastes, or improvements in any other company performance metric, you should start your initiative with process mapping. To show the importance of process mapping let’s start with an example we can all relate to, writing a paper.

If you were asked to write a report drawing conclusions about the value of a particular niche in a subject that you weren’t familiar with you wouldn’t start your research with a laser focus on the niche. If you did you would inevitably wind up writing a sub par paper. You wouldn’t have an understanding of the greater context of the subject and your paper would be lacking the depth of understanding that a well written report requires. Sure you may learn everything there is to know about that niche, but how could you draw an accurate conclusion about its value without first understanding how it fits into the overall subject. Most of us, if asked to write this kind of report, would begin by looking at the overall subject and seeing how it fits into everything else around it, then exploring the interactions between the different parts of the subject, then exploring our particular niche. This way, when we draw a conclusion about the value of the niche we have been exploring, we know that the conclusion takes into account how this niche interacts with the broader picture.

Trying to take on an initiative to improve the performance of you company without first going through a process mapping exercise is like trying to write the paper by taking a laser focus on the niche. Before you can try to improve the performance of any one particular area of your company, you first have to understand how each area of your company operates internally and how the different areas interact with one another. This is why process mapping is  invaluable for company performance improvement projects. With a good process map you will understand the ins and outs of each part of your company and how the work that makes your company run gets done. With this understanding you can then focus on improving particular metrics with an understanding of everything that affects that metric and is affected by it.

Targeting a performance metric and taking steps to improve it without having the context of a good process map will inevitably have negative consequences for your business. While you may be able to achieve increased performance in that area you won’t see or understand the organizational cost of those achievements. The goal of improving a performance metric is always to make the company as a whole better, and to do this you have to start from an understanding of how the company as a whole operates, which is precisely what a good process map gives you. Staring with good process mapping gives you the foundation you need to insure that your efforts to improve the performance of you company are achieved and sustained.

Technorati Tags: Business, eliminating defects, improvement, process improvement, process mapping, quality, Streamlining

My last blog post was about the importance of follow through in regards to our strategic plans, in this post I want to talk about another area of our business where follow through is incredibly important, or maybe I should say follow up. Follow up is just follow through for marketing. By now everyone has heard that it takes six touches to make and the value of constant contact, but for some of us we still don’t do as much as we could to stay in touch with our clients and potential clients. I am not going to go on and on about the importance of following up, we’ve all heard it before, instead I am going to focus on some tips for making it happen.

1. Make it a priority. This sounds simple enough but can go a long way to actually making us better about following up  with contacts. Too often we forget just how important following up with both clients and potential clients really is, it becomes         one of those things that we do when we have time or can get around to it, but by then it’s usually too late. The truth about        following up, is that timeliness is of the utmost importance, so if you want to be better about following up, you have to make it a priority.
2. Put it on your calendar. This goes hand in hand with making follow up a priority; scheduling time to follow up with specific     contacts on your calendar will make sure you remember to do it. Next time you go to a networking event, before you go add  some time into your calendar for the week after the event to follow up with the people you meet there. If someone tells you to contact them in a month, put that on your calendar, if someone says they will contact you in a month put that on your         calendar too, that way if they forget you can send them a friendly reminder. The more specific you can be in calendaring          your follow up the better it will be, I even go so far as to put individual follow up calls into my calendar.
3. View every follow up as an opportunity. I find myself from time to time dreading following up with someone for one                 reason or another, but the main thing we have to remember is that every follow up is an opportunity to further that person along the road to becoming a client. There are dangers in not having this attitude too. Have you ever just gone through the motions of following up without adding any personal touch to your message? You wind up coming across as a robot. If you view every follow up as an opportunity you will avoid robot syndrome because you will care about every person you are contacting. You will automatically include those personal touches that communicate to your potential clients that you remember them and care about their problems, which will go a long way towards building trust and converting people to clients.

I have found that for me at least adopting these strategies and mindsets, while they may seem simple, can really make a difference in whether or not I follow through on my follow ups. Give them a shot and let me know if they help you, or share the tips you use to make sure you follow up with all your contacts.

Technorati Tags: communication, follow up, managing your time

First off I would like to welcome everyone to the 2010 edition of the Improve My Business Now blog. I hope you all had a restful holidays and are ready to get to work making our businesses better. Now let’s get going on the good stuff.

If your business is like ours you probably spent the last several weeks wrapping things up from 2009, getting caught up on the things that inevitably fall through the cracks, and perhaps most important of all, thinking about what you were going to do in 2010. Well 2010 is here now, are you doing the things you thought about and planned for?

Whether you went through a formal strategic planning session in the latter part of the year or not, the holidays always provide a break from the frenetic pace of business and allow us to slow down and take a critical look at where we are, how we got here, and where we want to go next. Usually this comes in the form of setting goals for the New Year then coming up with plans to help us meet those goals. I am sure you are all already familiar with the importance of setting goals and planning how to meet them, but in case you need a reminder there is a good article about the importance of strategic planning here. If you didn’t get an opportunity to do some strategic planning in 2009 it’s never too late to put a plan in place.

However, this post isn’t about strategic planning, it’s about follow through. For most of us, we probably have our plan for 2010 at least in mind, if not actually written out somewhere, but what are you doing to put it into action? The truth of the matter is that strategic planning is only as good as the follow through. Your goal to grow sales by 40% over the next year is tremendous and your plan to accomplish it through increased marketing efforts, development of your sales funnel, and increasing return business sounds like a surefire way to make your goal a reality, but at the end of 2010, what is really going to matter is not the goal and the plan, but what you actually did.

Take a look at 2009 or any other year that has already come to a close. What were your goals for that year? Did you meet those goals? Why or why not? It is just as critical to review your old strategic plans and compare them to your actual results as it is to make new plans. Even if you don’t have a written plan, think about what you wanted to accomplish last year. Did you get it done? These reviews are a great way to judge follow through and goal setting. You can look at your previous goals and plans and determine whether you were able to effectively set reasonable goals, come up with actionable plans that meet those goals, and follow through on those plans. The point of these reviews is not to point fingers and establish blame if the strategic plan failed, they are about information. If you were able to put your plan into action and meet your goal that is great, if not, that is great too, by reviewing you can discover where the break down occurred and make sure you do better this year.

What I find most often when I look back at old strategic plans is that as soon as the pace of business and life picks back up in the beginning of the new year we make a couple attempts to start the ball rolling on our plan, then the plan gets forgotten in a cloud of dust and finds its way into a filing cabinet somewhere never to be touched again. Part of my plan in 2010 is to make sure that I stick to the plan, follow through on what I have said I am going to do, and make sure that, when I review my strategic plan at the end of this year, if I haven’t met my goals, it isn’t because of a lack of follow through. Until you have adequate follow through on your plan, you will never be able to tell if your goals are reasonable and if you plans are adequate to meet them. When looking forward, the plan is the key, but in review, it’s your follow through that really counts. If you didn’t follow through, nothing else matters.

Technorati Tags: Business, Follow Through, goals, Planning, Plans, Strategic Planning