How to Stop Stupid Business Mistakes

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Stopping stupid business mistakes is as simple as ABC! In fact, the solution for stopping mistakes is so obvious, most business owners and managers simply dismiss it.

For this reason, production and service mistakes reoccur, resulting in high employee turnover and low morale; not to mention, low customer retention and shrinking profits.

Folks, there is only one guaranteed way to stop stupid — yes, stupid — business mistakes.

By way of a prompt!

Solutions for Stupid Business Mistakes

With the prompt in mind, imagine someone micro-managing every process — warning and prompting employees to ensure work is error-free. Now, everyone knows that the method of continual prompting is impractical to compete in today’s business climate.

Surprisingly, that’s exactly what occurs in many small businesses. The business owner is the “go-to person,” who is really the prompter for the business’ workflow. Truth is, when the “prompter” is away, or distracted doing their own work, costly business mistakes can happen.

Again, with the prompt in mind, imagine an “all-seeing AI robot” observing production and service, ensuring zero errors on all workflow tasks. This would be paradise; however, it’s not yet practical.

To be clear, computers aid in stopping many stupid business mistakes by having “required fields” that employees must fill out before performing the next step, spell-checkers, etc.

The fact is, robots perform better than humans do in repetitive workflow processes. However, we all know, in most businesses, human performance is still critical, albeit aided by computers and machinery. Ensuring an error-free performance requires relying on human brains to remember all the correct steps in all processes.

Sadly, that’s where "stupid" happens, and the “blame-game” begins!

You may be surprised to learn that a study, known as the "Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve," was done by Hermann Ebbinghaus, who documented the rate of human forgetfulness. It’s a shocking study that should be a wake-up call for any business owner or manager relying on human memory for quality service and production.

Practical Solution for Stupid Business Mistakes

Since relying on human memory is critical for most business, there is a simple, low-cost solution to reduce errors to almost zero. It is an interactive, self-reporting, customizable, continually improving checklist.

Moreover, there should be checklists for service, production, daily routines of all employees, and maintenance.

If the work process is important to the business, those steps to complete any process should not be left to chance. In fact, we recommend SYSTEMS CZAR to oversee these checklists. Yes, the Systems Czar is human!

Did I mention here? Great systems work!