Revising reality in a business becomes necessary when the real truth of function prompts cover-up.
Especially, if it operates like most small businesses.
Reality, for most small business owners, is a never-ending struggle to maintain control of operations by instinctual, brute force of mind.
The reason for that is, most owners keep all the information for how their business operates in their own head.
Consequently, interruptions by employees, customers, and vendors seeking information are non-stop. Make no mistake; this will NOT change until the owner changes his or her modus operandi, regarding operations.
Why? For the mere fact that they have NO written policies, NO written procedures, NO written anything.
Yep, it’s all in the boss’s head! That’s their reality!
BAD SYSTEM.
How to Spot an Owner Running Business on Pure Instinct
- Their cell phone is rarely out of their ear.
- When busted, by not meeting promised delivery dates for jobs and services, their masterful art of storytelling is on full display.
- Twelve to fourteen hours a day is not enough time to keep up with their business operations.
- When mistakes occur (and they always occur), a red-faced person appears spewing profanities.
- When they schedule meetings upon meetings to solve the chaos, but reality is, nothing ever changes and chaos remains.
Time for a REALITY Checklist
All serious small business owners should take a tour of a well-systematized organization. More importantly, while touring, they should take notes.
Unfortunately, there are imposters of “order” with big marketing budgets, claiming great service and high-quality products. In other words, they revise reality about the fact that their quality and service is sub-standard.
The truth is, they should spend more time on their company’s operations and less time on marketing, until they can back up their claims of “great everything” with real data.
Not surprisingly, in today’s culture, truth-bending is all too common.
Due to my childhood training — that the truth and nothing but the truth matters — the following system was our way of proving quality and service, before we advertised untruths concerning our quality.
For this reason, we implemented a tracking method in our former printing business that identified and documented every occurrence of non-conformance.
More importantly, we fixed all non-conformance by updating current WRITTEN systems, or implementing new systems. Thus, assuring that identified non-conformance never repeated.
We called this non-conformance tracker the System Buster Locator, aka CAPA, a tool for measuring quality.
Enabling us to practice what we preached by fully utilizing this system, year after year. Whereby, we were able to pull monthly reports and post the results so everyone in our business could bear witness.
In fact, even visiting clients and vendors noticed these posted reports, as they could see them on our large screen monitors.
Due to our commitment to customer satisfaction, our delivery of quality product and service was 99.8% on-time, every time.
That was reality for us, but also for our clients!
It may be time for revising realty in your business. Thankfully, there is no need to start from scratch, we can help.
Did I mention, great systems work?
Philip Beyer, founder/president of Ebiz Products LLC and founder of Beyer Printing Inc. in Nashville Tenn., is a chronic entrepreneur, business systems analyst and consultant. Author of "System Busters: How to Stop Them in Your Business" and recipient of an InterTech Technology Award for the design and development of System100 business process management software. Beyer speaks to business owners across the country on how to bring lean, sustainable order to their businesses. Contact him at (615) 425-2652.