5 Principles Succesful Businesses Follow

If you are leading change in your organisation, there are a number of strategies you can employ to motivate your team so they are focused, productive and maintain a positive mindset.

01 Plan, Do, Check Act

Imagine a workplace where everybody looks for ways to become more effective and more efficient. A workplace where improvements are not only implemented by the business owner or management, but by everybody. An organisation where every employee wants to make the process of meeting customer needs much quicker, cheaper and easier.

• PLAN – Human nature actually encourages all people to solve problems, provided there’s a way forward. By establishing a performance measure and a target. the team can be motivated to strive towards it.
• DO – Now that you have collected a number of improvement ideas, you need to select the one idea that has the potential for the greatest overall outcome. This is best completed with group involvement.
• CHECK – If your teams don’t have meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), don’t be surprised if they are not motivated to improve.
• ACT – Processes are locked in by creating Standard Operating Procedures. If this is not done, negative old habits will creep in and the process will revert to the previous way of doing things.

02 Understanding what your customer values

Whenever you think your business has reached a pinnacle in performance, review the strategy and create a new set of tasks. The pinnacle will eventually become a plateau. Now you are ready to climb the next peak.

03 Continuous Improvement is a journey, not a destination

A common mistake is to produce a product or service that meets your personal needs and not those of the customer. Many talented engineers have gone broke because the device they created is too high-tech or of such high quality that nobody could afford it.

04 Knowing where the money goes

The sell price is determined by market conditions, i.e supply and demand, therefore the business cannot control the sell price. You are at the mercy of the market! Consequently, the only capacity to control the gross profit of the business is to control the ‘cost of production’ or ‘cost of goods sold’.

05 Ensuring there is a standard defined

By standardising tasks you define how the task should be completed. When the process deviates from the standard, you know a defect has been made.

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