19 Business Optimisation Strategies

Your business culture or philosophy is the

ultimate key to your productivity and success. It
will either enable or disable everything else you
do.
When working with clients we soon discovered that if
the culture of an organisation was wrong, the impact of
even the best business growth techniques would be
severely limited or crippled.
Too many organisations only pay lipservice to these
factors and as a result they constantly struggle to make
real progress.
Develop the right business culture is key to your
success as everything you do hinges around this
fundamental aspect of your business.
1. Understand your higher business purpose
Contrary to popular belief, people don’t buy products
or services. Instead they buy outcomes; results,
solutions, benefits, answers, value, advantages,
improvements, time saving, avoidance of pain,
protection, pleasure, fulfilment, enjoyment, prestige etc.
Your higher purpose for being in business should be to
turn those positive outcomes into reality by promoting,
selling and delivering the specific outcomes your
customer is actually buying. When you start to look at
what you do in terms of the positive outcomes you can
deliver to your clients, you can feel justifiably proud of
the contribution you’re making to your client, whatever
your business. And when you do that consistently you
profit handsomely.
2. Operate with integrity
Taking an ethical approach to your business, performing
as promised, and operating in a sound manner. Your
philosophy and policies toward your employees and
your customers must be based on fairness and a
sincere belief that your customers deserve to be well
served at all times. It’s having the attitude that if it’s
good for the customer it’s good for the company, and
vice versa. It’s putting the customer’s interests ahead of
your own.
3. Optimisation
No longer being content to accept lesser results than
you’re entitled to for your efforts. Instead you demand
and accept nothing less than the highest and best
outcome for every action you ever take and every
activity you ever engage in. You do this by integrating
and leveraging all your successful marketing
approaches to achieve the optimum outcome and
getting the greatest return for the least expenditure of
time, effort, manpower and money, at the lowest
possible risk to you while reducing stress, freeing you
up, and providing for consistent control and total
predictability.
4. Genuinely appreciate your team
Some of the most profitable companies in the world
owe a large part of their success to having a happy
contented workforce, because those people KNOW they
are sincerely appreciated. This will save you money in
many ways. Your staff turnover will go down. You’ll
save a fortune on training and recruitment. You’ll suffer
less abseteeism. It’s less likely that things will “go
missing”. And having an experienced workforce that
isn’t always leaving and having to be retrained — one
that really cares about your company and about
looking after your customers — will result in fewer
customer complaints, more satisfaction and customers
who spend more money with you more often and stay
with you longer.
5. Genuinely appreciate your clients
Viewing your clients as long term friends. Redefining
your business from the customer’s perspective as the
basis of your philosophy, so that you protect and
benefit them at the highest level possible.
6. Become passionate about your customers
Passion and enthusiasm are contagious … and all too
rare. People are more inspired to do business with you
if you display conviction and enthusiasm for what you
do and the way that you do it than any other factor. If
you genuinely burn with an overwhelming desire to
enrich the lives of everyone you do business with,
people will be attracted to you like metal filings to a
magnet.
7. Build a balanced team
Recruitment is often seen almost exclusively as a search
for individuals with the right qualifications, experience,
and achievement. Yet they’re rarely found because of
the requirement for more conflicting characteristics
than can normally exist in any one person. But if no
individual can combine all these qualities, a team of
individuals can contain all the conflicting requirements
that cannot be found in a single individual. In a
perfectly balanced team there is always someone who
can deal naturally and effectively with any set of
responsibilities. Each person just slots naturally into
playing their part in growing and developing the
business.
8. Empower your staff
When companies consistently refuse to deviate from
policy, they say to customers, in effect, “Our policy is
more important than doing business with you.”
Empowerment is the process of moving the decision-
making process to the customer interface. Giving your
team at the customer interface the power to do
whatever it reasonably takes to delight the customer.
Truly empowered employees invariably recognise and
appreciate the authority they have been given and are
more likely to use their initiative and good judgment to
come up with better and less expensive solutions to a
problem than that dictated by rigid policy manuals.
9. Adopt proven success practices
The moment you start adapting and applying success
practices that have already been tested and refined by
other industries you save yourself a massive learning
curve. If you can take advantage of £ millions or £ tens
of millions or £ hundreds of millions worth of success-
proven, profit-certain business practices that other
industries have already validated, you’ve given yourself
and your business an incredible edge over all your
competitors and your level of success can’t help but
increase.
10. Have fun in the workplace
Some of the world’s most successful companies
attribute a large part of their success to the use of
laughter, fun and play in the workplace to build morale,
participation, and involvement. Recognition and
appreciation can play a vital role in boosting morale
and productivity among hard-worked employees. You
can easily implement a step-by-step plan for building an
enthusiastic, high-performance team using hundreds of
tried-and-tested techniques for enhancing employee
satisfaction and personal pride, improving employee
morale, heightening productivity, creating a more
people-centered corporate culture, and, ultimately,
increasing your profitability.
11. Growth through perpetual training
The growth of your business is the aggregate of the
growth of your individual team members. By constantly
training everyone in your business to perform at higher
levels than your competitors, you’re investing in the
future, while improving your business today. The better
your training, the better everything works in your
business. It radically improves your team’s
understanding of your objectives; helps set standards of
performance; produces predictable results; leads to
consistent answers to each question or problem; results
in customers being treated in a similar manner no
matter who they deal with … and makes a big
difference to how everything functions.
12. Recruit the right people
Most of us choose our life partner and raise our
children with care, nurturing and compassionate
attention. Yet we tend to select the people who will join
our company on the basis of an interview or two, and
once they’ve joined, they often discover they must fend
for themselves. This contrast illustrates the disparity
between the family and work environments. But since
around 75% of our adult waking time is devoted to
work related activities, it makes sense to take as much
care in recruiting the right people—people who care
and who want to be the best. If you look for genuinely
pleasant people who have the right attitude and human
values, the rest will usually fall into place. You can’t
teach people to be nice. Caring must be inherent in
people’s natures—they have to feel it in their hearts.
And if they do, their colleagues and clients will feel it
too, and you’ll achieve more success with less hassle
and hard work.
13. Run a suggestion scheme
A good suggestion scheme is like having an oil well in
your back garden. There is no more important tool for
management. Suggestion schemes can be made to work
extraordinarily well in any business and can be the
cornerstone of constant and never ending
improvement. If you and your team ask yourselves
relentlessly each day, “How can we do this better?” or
“What more can we do to …”, you’re bound to find
ways to improve. Whether large or small, these
improvements can lead to regular discoveries that can
transform your business.
14. Measure staff motivation
How do you know if your staff are well motivated? This
is where most businesses are amazingly primitive. Their
skills in measuring motivation are under-developed or
non-existent. Methods of measuring motivation include:
1) Staff turnover, 2) Absenteeism, 3) Theft, 4) Customer
Service, 5) Attitude surveys. Motivation does not have
to be left to chance. Every business can introduce
systems for motivating its employees better. The
benefits are enormous, and once you start measuring
the payback on your investment in the workforce, you
will see real results.
Other Business Optimisation Strategies Include:
1. Articulating your core values
2. Coaching for performance
3. Doing everything with passion
4. Doing whatever it takes to serve or add value to
your clients
5. Systematise every aspect of your business