Your business processes are only good enough for today. As soon as you stop improving them, someone will eat your lunch.

Speed Kills?

We’re conditioned from an early age to believe that Speed Kills. Depending on your age, the phrases ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’ or ‘55 Saves Lives’ may be deeply ingrained. While that may be smart thinking on the highway, here’s how slowing down affects your business:

• Slow processes = more staff, less capacity, or both
• Slow processes = having to call your customer back
• Slow processes = losing business to better-managed competition

It’s time to learn a new Mantra.

Speed Wins!

What do you measure in your business? Now how much of that is based on a unit of time? You can analyze those metrics to the point of paralysis. Or take action and pursue this simple goal. Make every part of your business faster.

• Faster processes = more revenue from the same staff
• Faster processes = more responsive to your customers
• Faster processes = beating the competition

How many ways can make your business better, faster, and cheaper to operate? Better software may be part of the solution, but only if it enables you to optimize your processes. Embedding a crappy process in an automated system only makes the software part of the problem.

Keep It Simple Silly

Don’t overthink this. Whether the first thing you need is software, equipment, training or something else, the plan is still the same:

1. Find the bottleneck.
2. Make it faster until something else is the bottleneck.
3. Repeat.

What are you waiting for?