Today is Valentine’s day of course and no doubt there will be many reflections on that today.
It is worth considering that love often extends beyond the purely personal and just as being in love with someone who is driving you crazy can lead to unclear thought, then being excessively in love with something can equally cloud the mind.
Sir John Harvey Jones, the well respected and popular industrialist who died recently, once said “don’t fall in love with with your product or service”. In other words be prepared to ditch something that is not paying, don’t keep plugging at something that repeatedly fails to prove any worth.
Can we also be too much in love with our business? I think the answer to that is clearly yes. One in every three startups will fail and if you spoke to the owners a large proportion would tell you that it completely took over their lives in the time leading up to the end.
Equally, many marriages have been sacrificed on the altar of business success, whether or not success does, in the end, come to fruition.
February 14th is Valentines Day, but it is also the day that in 1914 Henry Ford introduced the assembly line for his model T cars – beginning a revolution in standardised production systems. Ford saw that the way forward was to put control into the business and standardise outputs through the standardisation of both inputs and all conversion processes.
This is big stuff, but can it be applied to small business? Yes it can, but to understand how you have to fall out of love with the business for a little while. If you can just lose the passion and step back you might see that working harder and harder and longer and longer hours to make the business a success isn’t the only way to make it succeed and in many ways may be building in the seeds of failure.
Let’s just imagine you could standardise everything that happens in the business in such a way that you would never have to intervene, that it would always be right – could that ever be possible? Well probably not, but it mighty be 90% possible. Perhaps not today, but it could be something to work towards couldn’t it?
Think about this. If you have to intervene in everything that is happening in your business every day, then you can never take a holiday and never sell the business. You could never sell the business because the business is you – you would always have to tag along after the sale. If there are control and standardisation mechanisms in the business you can begin to put real trust in your employees and the thing can be sold and you can walk away cash in hand with a clear conscience.
ProQuin can help you get that control and introduce that standardisation. For more information see www.proquin.co.uk
