[Step 4 of 6] – Consistent Delivery

You have earned sufficient trust for your prospective customer to give you the order.  Now you have to keep the trust.  Now your business needs to deliver.   As the saying goes “it takes many acts to build a good reputation and only one act to create a bad reputation”.

Over the last three weeks in my blog I shared the first three steps of ‘The Growth Code’ my business growth system to create predictable business growth:

Step 1: Compelling Vision – build a compelling vision for you and your teams

Step 2: Culture – create a high performance culture

Step 3: Convert – connect and convert

This week I am going to share with you Step 4 in how to create predictable business growth: Consistent Delivery.

There are two key areas where you need to ensure the consistency and quality is where it needs to be:
1. Systems
2. People

1. Systems

As well as saving you stress, time, energy and money systems ensure consistency.

Having clear processes that all can follow ensures that when you buy a Starbucks in Birmingham or Boston you know you are going to experience the same quality of product, the same customer experience in an environment that looks the same.  This builds customer confidence and trust.

As businesses grow and teams grow rapidly the instruction on how things are done is often passed from one employee to another.  Many organisations have clearly written operating procedures to ensure consistent quality of the product or service.  Many do not.

Do you have written procedures for all aspects of customer life cycle from selling, manufacturing, delivering, customer service, finance, HR?  If you do, are your written procedures up to date and providing for a level of service that your market requires?

Which areas of your business are not delivering the right quality of service at the right time to the right quality?

Where can the investment of machinery or equipment improve speed, quality and efficiency?

What can you add into your processes that will ‘wow’ your customer?

2.  People

Clear operating procedures will help the people in your organisation deliver a consistently good product or service.

In addition to standard operating procedures, your team members need to have:

• Clear Roles
  In fast growth businesses teams roles evolve. As a result there can soon be ambiguity around who should be doing what. Review the roles in your team.  Is it clear who is supposed to be doing what?  You may be surprised how many areas of confusion there are.
• Clear Accountabilities
  In step two of ‘The Growth Code” we covered the importance of building a high performance culture. Fundamental to a high performing culture is setting clear targets to team members and who they should be accountable to, to ensure the job gets done.  Set up clear accountabilities so each person knows what they are going to be held accountable for and by whom.
• Training needs identifing and fulfilling
  Set your team up for success. Explore with them on a one to one basis the skills they need for the role. In the areas where they could improve consider training, on the job shadowing of someone is more experienced, what learning resource in terms of books, podcasts, You Tube* clips they could watch to further their learning.
• Regular one to ones with their line manager
  These are essential to monitor progress and performance, provide an opportunity for timely feedback and to keep the communication frequent enough. Depending upon the nature of the work, the size of your team and location of team members you may have these one to ones once a month with quick phone catch ups on a weekly basis.  These meetings are not for general communication relevant to everyone, the focus should be on that member of the team and what they are working on.
• Recognition for doing the job right
  Catch people doing things right. Praise and genuine thanks have a big impact on morale, engagement and performance. It is easy to see what a team member is not doing. Whilst areas for improvement need to be pointed out, so does the things that they are doing well.

Use Step 4 of our Growth Code: Consistent Delivery to develop your people and systems to deliver a predictable and reliable experience for your customers.

For more details about my six step business growth system “The Growth Code” go to www.growthcode.co.uk.

As a helpful resource to add value to business owners who are committed to growing their business, I regularly post short training videos to my You Tube channel – Click here to visit my channel