Most people who go into business with a dream of building the biggest or the best business in their industry can end up spending years playing the role of an everyday firefighter, I know that because I did it. You cannot always get the right people, and eventually end by giving up your dream by accepting second best, ending up with very little to show for all their hard work.
Luckily for some reason maybe I needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t the stupid child stood in front of that uneducated teacher that in turn had been taught by the authorities that believed a child that could not read was stupid.
So, just a few thoughts for people who want to go into business without too much education.
Don’t go into a business that requires staff to be highly skilled as it’s going to be near impossible to scale.
Such people are at a premium in the marketplace and quite often are the problem solvers that can either make or break you, but you really must know what you are getting into.
Starting from nothing we had an uphill struggle, so we had to have systems and not be dependent on highly skilled staff in the first 20 years.
We needed to create the very easy systems for which good team members could be leveraged to produce extraordinary results.
The question we needed to keep asking ourselves is how we can provide our customers with the service they want, systematically rather than having it attached to whoever is personally attending to them that day.
In the end we found the answer to that question, it was we couldn’t, so, we didn’t try as we conclude that the value that customers put against being served by a knowledgeable caring person was the most valuable resource we had, back in 1977 and I think it is more valuable today than ever.
Because we wanted to be the best every day, we looked for other ways to be more efficient put it another way, how can we shift our business to where our results are systems-dependent rather than people-dependent?
So, we had to develop systems along side people so that the staff could take care of the customers instead of doing other tasks that would take them away from being customer facing.
Although we wanted to build our business on systems rather than employing more people it resulted in the more systems we installed, the more staff we employed, all because the systems worked.
Creating our own systems meant we ended up with more time to create the experience we wanted for the customer ending up building our business into probably the largest independent nursery retailer in the world all by putting the customer first and the systems second.
This process proved to be right on February 14th, 2011, when we sold that one shop for 70 million in cash or 98 million dollars a record price and the business wasn’t even a limited company.
Anyone can duplicate, clone, speed up, or slow down systems. Systems are predictable; people are not so much, so we put training systems in place to overcome any problems.
Creating a risk assessment and then doing a method statement was the way for us to see exactly where the business was in any area at any time.
If staff were taken away from customer facing, there was a risk of the customer being dissatisfied. The method was to create a system that would mitigate the risk.
People are the ones that bring the systems to life. People make it possible for things that are designed to work to produce the intended results now, but that is about to change with the introduction of AI.
In our business we didn’t want just customers we wanted raving fans, and my definition of a raving fan is someone that is so happy with the service that they will tell everyone in the world that they know about us.
And just to confirm, a checklist is a process. An employee handbook is a system, and short videos can be of processes or systems.
If there is room for assumption or interpretation in a process, then a team is going to try and fill that void by making it up as they go along so we developed a system to overcome just that scenario.
In many organisations, people do their jobs however they want, resulting in massive inconsistencies and inefficiencies being embedded into the team, to overcome that, we put systems in place and followed up with systematic training on a timed basis.
It has been said that great companies are not built by extraordinary people but by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And for ordinary people to do extraordinary things, a system is absolutely necessary.
Probably the typical owner of a business prefers highly skilled individuals because they believe it makes the owner’s job easier, but in our case bringing highly skilled people was very rare but sometimes you have no choice if you want to get to a level beyond your competition.
If you hire a few A-players, a few experts, and think you can simply leave the work to them you will be wrong, if it’s your business your dream your life then it’s down to you as no one will replicate those thoughts in your mind as you are unique.
The inconsistencies in finding and hiring these people and the predictability of them leaving you in a hole is high, resulting in the business stumbling forward and backwards then over time disintegrating, this kind of thinking makes the business dependent on the team’s energy, whims, moods, and memory.
Imagine betting on someone else’s memory when it comes to the likelihood that you’ll reach your goals and business dreams if they are in the right mood, the job gets done if not it doesn’t.
The same doesn’t go for the owner, emails get answered as fast as you can type them. New customers get signed up when you go out to make money, corrections only get made when you spot the problems yourself.
You must be in it to win it; this is why many business owners are constantly searching for the answer to how to motivate their team.
It is literally impossible to produce a consistent result in a business that depends on extraordinary people if you are not going to be there on a consistent basis yourself, but if you are then you will have a money-making machine like the one we had that can generate predictable results.