Why are some companies so successful? At a fundamental level, the executive mangement are "doing the right things" and everyone "does things right".
Doing the right things
Doing the right thing is about having a business vision and working out how that vision is going to be realised.
- Does your company have a vision?
No matter how expert the crew, if you are sailing the yacht in the wrong direction, you are never going to win the race. Whatever it is, be crystal clear on it. For example, your vision might be to deliver the highest standards of customer service, to a particular segment of the market, that is prepared to pay for it.
- Does your company have a competitive strategy?
This is much more than competing on price. It is strategically focussing on the value that differentiates you from your competitors. "Best Total Cost" for example, incorporates the sum of the price + convenience + risk reduction.
- Does your company have focus?
Do you attempt to be all things to all customers, or are you different and better to a select group? For example, if potential customers do not value convenience and risk reduction, they don't pay the premium - they go somewhere else, where they get less, but pay less.
Doing things right
It's one thing to have a vision, focus and competitive strategy - it's quite another to implement it - that's the hard part. As someone once said - "A vision without a task is but a dream".
- Leadership
I don't just mean leadership at the top, I mean leadership at all levels, where everyone is prepared to take responsibility for servicing the customer, whether that customer is internal or external. Nevertheless, leadership does start at the top and must be the example for others to follow.
- Alignment
This is the key to successful implementation. Everyone understands where the organisation is now; everyone understands the destination and the journey; and everyone understands their role in getting there.
- Teamwork
The fundamentals of teamwork are small groups of highly communicative people, working closely together, to achieve common goals.
- Collaboration
You want your clients to view your company as an extension of their own business. There must be a great deal of transparency, sharing of information - and trust. How do your customers measure your performance? Simple quantitative measures such as quantity and delivery-on-time?
These are "hard" measures that ignore the business relationships between people. You must also manage the "soft" issues which is the glue that holds partnerships together.
- Customer service - IT and people
One of the characteristics of organisations that practice "Best Total Cost" is that they invest heavily in IT and infrastructure. Not only should you have an e-business system that is highly impressive, but a team of people that are just as impressive to complement the system.
Every customer should have an account manager - one single point of contact to whom each of them can turn to answer questions and provide the flexibility that even the best IT systems cannot display.
The account manager should be mainly concerned with day-to-day operational issues, so to complement that role, create a small team of people whose role it is to conduct, in conjunction with the customer decision-makers, regular reviews of every aspect of the business relationship.
Businesses, particularly service businesses, are like the old music hall act of plate spinning. Each plate represents a customer and the role of the supplier is to keep each plate spinning on an even horizontal plane. As a business grows, the ratio of plates to plate spinners increases and it's inevitable that issues will arise that will cause a particular plate to wobble and lose equilibrium.
In companies that do not have the above success factors in place, a domino effect takes place. Resources are diverted from the plates that are spinning well to the plates that have already lost momentum. Denied a regular spin-up, even the former will eventually fall off their canes.
In contrast, companies who employ the above factors can both address the issues of the odd problem plate and keep the vast majority spinning smoothly at the same time.