Do You Know the Sum of Actions for your Business?

A business boils down to the SUM OF THE ACTIONS of the people in it. Period.

Logical enough…right!? My experience is that many business leaders don’t have a clue.

All actions of the individuals associated with a business contribute to it, whether positively or negatively. When every action of every team member is molded to optimum performance, then you get the optimal business execution. The outcome of a business will always be the product of the system of the business. If you don’t like the outcome of your business, then change the system.

The real challenge is that business systems are typically large, complex, and have this huge variable component called humans. With this in mind, we have to focus on having the highest quality inputs -- the humans -- in a well-defined system where the most important actions are done efficiently and the negative impacts are minimized. At the end of the day, every business needs to be sure all customer-interacting actions are executed optimally since a business only exists to serve their customers.

While this is common sense, you can easily find the opposite is true when you call a company to place an order and get the lowest paid, sometimes even temporary, employee answering the phone that does not have any training or expectations as to how to handle all of the inputs into the business system. Or one of my favorites is when the poorly-trained cashier is trying to take my money at the counter and clearly does not care or treat me as if I am allowing him to take home his paycheck while the managers hide in the back doing “more important work”. Any leader allowing these type situations in their system will cause their business to crumble and then try to blame it on the economy as to why their business failed.

Do you know the actions that drive your prospects, quotes, customer orders, revenue, and profits?

This is an excellent foundation for your strategic planning that will provide much more value than having a consultant write a bunch of words in a plan for you to not look at until next year.

What do you think?