Essential Business Structure
How can you improve the process and performance of your company? Do you want to enhance operational efficiency and boost overall business performance? Are you looking to turn around a company that's currently operating at a loss into a profitable venture? Or perhaps you're considering strategies to rapidly expand the scope and scale of your business operations? If any of these objectives resonate with you, then implementing the 7-step framework can help you achieve these goals.
7-Step Framework to Turnaround your Company
1. Write down your goal statement
Write down your goal statement and convert your dream into a goal statement. Ensure that it is tailored for a timeframe of 1-6 months, as goals within this range are often more effective. When creating a goal statement for your company, department, or an employee, be sure to include specific actions and deadlines. For a company, specify "What I will do by when"; for a department, outline "What the department will do by when"; and for an employee, detail "What he/she will do by when."
It's common to see people spending a significant amount of time contemplating their dreams without taking decisive actions. Many individuals have settling points in their lives where they hesitate to make important decisions. Remember this golden statement: "Don't define your limits. You've got limitless limits."
2. Potential Difficulty
In step 2 of the framework, you need to identify the potential difficulties that may hinder your progress in achieving the goals outlined in step 1. By listing all possible challenges and obstacles, you can better prepare yourself to address and overcome them, ultimately increasing your chances of success.
3. Potential Possibility
In the face of the challenges outlined in step 2, clearly articulate the potential opportunities associated with each challenge. These will serve as specific solutions for overcoming each difficulty encountered.
4. Success Ritual (Converting the Possibility in a Ritual or Rule)
In order to ensure your success, it is important to convert identified possibilities into rituals or rules. By doing so, these rituals can help you stay on track and avoid being derailed by mood swings while working towards your goals. It is also beneficial to communicate these rituals to your employees so that they can follow them as well. By converting every possibility into a ritual, you can create a structured framework for achieving your goals. For instance, if the possibility is that you will exercise in the morning, the corresponding ritual could be something like "6 am to 7 am is the designated exercise time."
5. Measure the Success (here, ritual and result of ritual is measured)
To ensure success, it's important to carefully measure both the rituals and the results of those rituals. Each ritual should be measured to track its effectiveness. For example, if you have a sales team, you might measure the ritual of "how many calls the sales team will do in a day" and the measure of success could be "how many minutes they have talked in a day." To effectively measure success, you can assign expected effort and result scores to your team members. This way, you can track their progress and continuously improve performance.
6. Review Step 4 and 5
Please ensure to thoroughly review Step 4 and Step 5 of the process, which involve examining the effort score and result score. For example, it's important to conduct a comprehensive review of the effort score and result score of our sales employees to gauge their performance accurately.
Take into consideration that you can evaluate the effort score and result score of an employee using a scale of 1-10. This evaluation will serve as a basis for creating the MIS reports for your company. By analyzing the effort and result scores of all employees, you will be able to identify individuals who deserve rewards, recognition, and salary increments.
Moreover, this data will provide valuable insights into the performance of your products and the geographical areas where your business is flourishing. It is imperative to conduct this review on a weekly basis. Failing to regularly review the report may lead to a lack of understanding regarding the trajectory of your team. If the team is heading in the wrong direction, it will hinder achieving the desired outcomes.
7. Improvement cycle (Action Plan)
Remember to follow the improvement cycle (Action Plan) every Monday. During the review, assess what went well and what went wrong in the previous week, and consider what could be improved for the following week (Monday to Saturday). Start by analyzing revenue-linked departments and then move on to the supporting departments. Emphasize identifying ways to increase revenue streams and reduce costs, especially for smaller companies. The goal is to implement this cycle to elevate your organization within 3-6 months.
To implement this plan effectively, remember to:
1. Reiterate what went well in the previous week.
2. Address and improve what went wrong in the previous week.
3. Continuously strategize and implement ways to increase revenue streams and reduce costs.
Additionally, establish a framework to incorporate more revenue streams. This framework will instigate changes within your company based on areas that require improvement. It is crucial to sit down with your team week after week to discuss potential improvements using the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) method.
The PDCA method involves:
- Planning the necessary improvements
- Implementing the improvements
- Checking the successful implementation
- Iteratively improving the implemented changes
How to bring improvements using the 7-step framework?
To achieve improvements using the 7-step framework, it's essential to implement the framework on a weekly basis, focusing on one department at a time. Allocating 30 minutes to 2 hours for the implementation of the framework in each department can ensure thorough and effective application.
Within the framework, when addressing the "what could be improved" segment, it may be necessary to revisit step 4, which involves defining success rituals. This is particularly crucial when new improvements are required, as it may entail establishing new rituals to align with the evolving goals.
For instance, if the goal is weight loss and a ritual of consuming only salads and soups yields no progress after a week, it's important to reassess and identify potential mistakes. Upon investigation, it may be revealed that excessive use of butter in soups and high-calorie ingredients in salads is hindering progress. Consequently, adjusting the approach and rituals becomes necessary. If desired outcomes are still not achieved, evaluating the chosen difficulty and possibility is essential.
The "what could be improved" aspect plays a pivotal role in enhancing results by pinpointing issues across different steps of the framework and facilitating necessary modifications.
For example, if implementing the framework does not lead to revenue growth, delving into step 2 - identifying possible difficulties - becomes imperative to understand the reasons behind the stagnation. Upon analysis, it may become evident that the team's effort is substantial, yet the quality of their conversions is lacking due to inadequate training. Identifying the difficulty as the inability to provide comprehensive training, a ritual of allocating at least an hour daily for training is established. This involves watching educational videos together as a team and assessing the team's performance through tests.
Following this, revisiting the improvement cycle after a week reveals persistent challenges in revenue growth. Further investigation uncovers the issue of fake data entry, indicating a deeper challenge relating to willpower. Addressing this requires creating motivational content, resolving incentive issues, and potentially addressing the manager's behavioral impact on the team through training.
Ultimately, the implementation of this framework is geared towards enhancing speed, scalability, processes, and performance, ultimately transforming a loss-making company into a profitable one.