Sometimes there is a business message to learn from reality TV. The Holy Grail is the late Sir John Harvey Jones’s brilliant ‘Trouble Shooter’ series, but all these programmes have a common thread – going back to check that the basics are right.
It sounds blindingly obvious, doesn’t it? If the foundations aren’t right the building could fall over.
But things don’t start that way.
What happens is that strategies and processes get ‘Improved’ as time goes by.
And that’s where the trouble often starts. The ‘Improvement’ often makes things less efficient, either financially or through increasing time – subtle changes that all add up. Because very few businesses actually measure the minutiae of what they do and prefer to look outwards, rather than inwards, the effects of these ‘Stealth’ changes creep in unnoticed, but the impact is there.
And if that’s happened to your business or organisation, it’s going to cost.
Hand on heart, have you held this kind of review within the last six months to a year, to make sure that you are running at 100% efficiency?
If you haven’t or you are in the retail consumer business now’s the time to take a long hard look at what you do. With VAT due to go up by 2.5% in the New Year, savings achieved now, will prepare the way for the consumer bun fight that’s inevitably about to happen when budgets come under pressure.
I introduced ‘Check-it’ two years ago. If you like the idea of taking an inward look at your organisation or business, to check that the basics are right – then do take a look, download a FREE copy of our e-book here.
If, on the other hand, you’d prefer an unbiased third party, without the rose tinted spectacles, to tell it like it is in a positive and constructive manner, then three days consultancy would be a good investment for you to make.