Colin Jackson took part in a BBC programme recently in which he talked about nutrition and how he organised his life around his running – when he was running of course. It struck me then that not only did he look aerodynamic, but his whole life was shaped to meet the objective of going faster. Here was a man that was optimised for speed in every sense of the word.

The same can probably be said of many top athletes of course and it is why they are top of their game. It’s not just about skill, and practice – what they deliver on the sports field is the product of a highly optimised mix of natural ability coupled with years of practice, focussed exercise, good diet and (often surprising how important this is) a mental attitude that is highly attuned to the winning objective.

 There is a message here that we can all take on board about focus and optimising our lives or businesses towards the end objective. It is all down to components really: looking at each part, fine tuning it, stripping out the waste, finding a leaner and faster way to do things, then returning some time later and doing it all over again. These are the principles of ‘Lean Manufacturing’ and ‘Continuous Improvement’ of course. Massive amounts of consultancy time and money  are still spent on two things that are in principle so simple, they can be explained together in a single sentence.
 
 Can we then make our small businesses highly optimised to meet our business objectives? Yes we can it and it as simple as I have suggested. Look at each part: is your admin is lean at in can be?; are your sales team fully qualifying their visits?; is your project estimating correct?; are all of your fee earning personnel fully utilised? – and so on.
 
Perhaps you should start with your administration and stripping that down as far as it can go. Proquin can be a huge step forward in this regard, removing huge swathes of paperwork and redundant administrative activity. Find out more at http://www.proquin.co.uk.

Whilst the majority may disapprove of this bad behaviour on the tennis court they may nevertheless understand the frustration behind the catch phrase, especially in a modern world so full of frustrating man made obstacles.

What baffles this writer is the number of self inflicted obstacles that people do put in their own way and their continual refusal to do anything about them – even when made aware.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received when starting out in business was from Business Link advisor who advised me to ‘get serious’. he just did not think I was serious enough in my approach because I was trying to do everything on the cheap including the production of my own publicity material. ‘Get a professional in’ he said, ‘be serious and look the part’. Good advice I think, but advice that time and again people refuse to take even when they know they ought to.

Being serious applies to all parts of the business not just sales and presentation, but also administration and management. It means stepping up and away from informal systems of control based on spreadsheets and note pads and towards professional tools such as ProQuin which is designed to assist with business management and remove redundant administrative activity.

Think about it, is it time to get serious about your business management?

Find out more about ProQuin at http://www.proquin.co.uk

One memorable sound-bite, from a philosophical life only recorded in writing by his disciples, is “virtue is knowledge”. By this Socrates meant that if one knows the good, one will always do the good. He, of course, said much more that this and we could run with an examination of what is ‘virtue’ and what he meant by ‘knowledge’ for some while, but that is not what I am driving at today.

Let’s just paraphrase for now and say that if one always knows what is good for one’s business one will always do what is good for one’s business. The big problem of course (as it is with virtue so often) is really knowing what is good for the business. Often accountancy figures are not good enough and we have to fall back on performance ratios to examine how well we are doing. Just having money in the bank may not be good enough in some instances: we always have to ask the question should there have been more money in the bank if we had done something differently over the last year, quarter, month or whatever.

Yes, we may make this examination by using accountancy figures, but they will always be after the fact. Yes we can correct for the coming period, but at that point opportunity has gone.

ProQuin does not take this backward approach, it is always forward looking. Through the Job Costing/Quotation dialogue we can critically appraise every component of a quote or job before we commit to a price to the customer. Our cost assumptions are challenged at every point and we can decide during the quotation process how much cash will be generated for the business by each item or service.

Is ProQuin Socratic software? Well I think I might leave that one to a philosopher to answer. What ProQuin does do is allow the small business owner to ‘know’ the right thing to do at the right time and therefor make it easier to continually do the right thing for the business and in that respect then virtue really is knowledge.

Find out more about ProQuin at http://www.proquin.co.uk

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       
   
 

Why hang around then? What on earth could now be said about this product that could not be said on the website?

Well apart from the shameless promotion stuff, this blog is an attempt to provide an informal discussion about the philosophy behind ProQuin, what we are trying to achieve with the product and some stuff that is up and coming.

You never know  – we might even get a dialogue going.