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Yes, I said lowest possible level of skill. Because if your model depends on highly skilled people, it’s going to be impossible to replicate.
By lowest possible level of skill I mean the lowest possible level necessary to fulfill the functions for which each is intended.
create the very best system through which good attorneys and good physicians can be leveraged to produce exquisite results.
How can I give my customer the results he wants systematically rather than personally? Put another way: How can I create a business whose results are systems-dependent rather than people-dependent? Systems-dependent rather than expert-dependent.
How can I create an expert system rather ...
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What would an expert do and why? Understand the recipe, then replicate it and build it into a system.
people who are systems oriented—as all your people must be—learn how to more effectively make things work for your customers and for your business by learning how to improve the systems.
It’s your job—more accurately, the job of your business—to develop those tools and to teach your people how to use them.
It’s your people’s job to use the tools you’ve developed and to recommend improvements based on their experience with them.
the inevitable result of this kind of thinking is that the business also grows to depend on the whims and moods of its people.
Highly skilled people make a business less sustainable
every extraordinary business knows that when you intentionally build your business around the skills of ordinary people, you will be forced to ask the difficult questions about how to produce a result without the extraordinary ones.
You will be forced to do the work of Business Development not as a replacement for people development but as its necessary correlate.
The Operations Manual—the repository of the documentation—is therefore best described as a company’s How-to-Do-It Guide. It designates the purpose of the work, specifies the steps needed to be taken while doing that work, and summarizes the standards associated with both the process and the result.
There was absolutely no consistency to the experience. The expectations created at the first meeting were violated at each subsequent visit.
What you do in your model is not nearly as important as doing what you do the same way, each and every time.
Go to work on your business rather than in it.
Go to work on your business as if it were the pre-production prototype of a mass-produceable product.
How can I get my business to work, but without me? • How can I get my people to work, but without my constant interference? • How can I systematize my business in such a way that it could be replicated 5,000 times, so the 5,000th unit would run as smoothly as the first? • How can I own my business, and still be free of it? • How can I spend my time doing the work I love to do rather than the work I have to do?
you’ll eventually come face-to-face with the real problem: that you don’t know the answers!
now you know that you don’t know.
The problem isn’t your business; it never has been. The problem is you!
has always been you and will always be you. Until you change, that is.
Until you accept the undeniable fact that business, even a very small business like yours, is both an art and a science. And, like art and science, to successfully develop a serious business you need specific information.
Most importantly, to successfully develop a serious business you need a process, a practice, by which to obtain that information and, once obtained, a method with which to put that information to use in your business productively.
Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration.
“Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.”
By recognizing that it is not the commodity that demands Innovation but the process by which it is sold, the franchisor aims his innovative energies at the way in which his business does business.
Soap wasn't innovative. P&Gs systems for effectively producing and delivering soap to customers was.
Where the business is the product, how the business interacts with the consumer is more important than what it sells.
In fact, some of the most powerful Innovations have required little more than the change of a few words, a gesture, the color of clothing.
Innovation is the heart of every exceptional business. Innovation continually poses the question: What is standing in the way of my customer getting what he wants from my business?
By Quantification, I’m talking about the numbers related to the impact an Innovation makes.
These numbers enable you to determine the precise value of your Innovation.
Begin by quantifying everything related to how you do business.
How does each system,step,and process affect the bottom line (or your key profit per x metric)?
Because without the numbers you can’t possibly know where you are, let alone where you’re going. With the numbers, your business will take on a totally new meaning.
Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.
if you haven’t orchestrated it, you don’t own it! And if you don’t own it, you can’t depend on it. And if you can’t depend on it, you haven’t got a franchise. And without a franchise no business can hope to succeed.
understand that I’m talking about a proprietary way of doing business that differentiates your business from everyone else’s.
definition of a franchise is simply your unique way o...
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Then the system must provide the vehicle to facilitate predictability. To do what? To give your customer what he wants every single time.
Orchestration is the glue that holds you fast to your customers’ perceptions.
Orchestration is as simple as doing what you do, saying what you say, looking like you look—being how and who you are—for as long as it works.
For as long as it produces the results you want.
And when it doesn’t work any longe...
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the Business Development Process can be thought of as a metaphor for personal transformation, for coming to grips with real life.
“For developing real skills within a structure of your own design. “For understanding the dynamics of change, of value, of communication, of thought.
before you can determine what that role will be, you must ask yourself these questions: What do I value most? What kind of life do I want? What do I want my life to look like, to feel like? Who do I wish to be?
Your Primary Aim is the answer to all these questions.
You’re telling them the story of your life. How would you like that story to go? That’s your Primary Aim.
What would you like to be able to say about your life after it’s too late to do anything about it? That’s your Primary Aim.
If you were to write a script for the tape to be played for the mourners at your funeral, how would you like it t...
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To actively make your life into the life you wish it to be. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. But absolutely essential if your business is to have any meaning beyond work.
