and admittedly difficult, but finding the “Good
Enough Spot” (GE Spot) is essential if you really want
your business to succeed. Here's how you can use
each of your four roles as a business owner to help
you figure out how you can be "good enough" to
bring in the business.
1. Leadership role.
Your role here is to figure out exactly what your customers value most vs. value least in a relationship
with a business like yours. Not what’s important to you. Not what you think should be important to them. What is important to them. To figure out what aspects of your business offer opportunity to “wow” your customers and give you some sort of competitive advantage—without undue cost, without the paralysis of perfectionism. To be able to communicate this clearly to others. You must arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the “Good Enough Spot” in every aspect of your
business. This is how you finally quantify what so few business owners can ever quantify. How you clear away the fog of uncertainty, confusion and vague ideas from your own thinking, your employees’, your suppliers’ and your customers’. Having a clear and definitive “Good Enough Spot” for every aspect of your business is the most empowering management breakthrough possible. It's up to you to locate your GE-Spots and assemble them into a list of specifics that supports the overall positioning of your business.
2. Marketing role.
For this role, you need to turn your GE-Spots into a
clear, clearly understood and embraced covenant
with your customers. Your positioning, advertising,
marketing, public relations, publicity, sales, physical
environments—your entire presentation of your
business to the marketplace—have to manage
customers’ expectations.
A very visible secret about companies that really
prosper is that they have clearly understood
covenants with their customers. Southwest Airlines is
a great example. I’d describe its covenant as no food,
no frills, kind of an ugly boarding process -- basically
a bus on wings. But they’re kicking butt to take off on
time, get you there on time, and their people will
ease your pain with good humor. Disney’s theme
parks’ covenant is Walt’s original “The Happiest Place
on Earth®.” There’s something going on constantly to
make everybody happy—characters signing
autographs, parades, happy music and every
employee, right down to the store clerks trading
collectible pins with kids and the street sweepers
who initiate helpful conversation with anybody
looking confused. Each highly successful company
has a different kind of clearly understood covenant
with its customers. The people running the company
and the customers all know where the business’s GE-
Spot is. They share a common understanding.
3. Management role.
Your management role is to translate that covenant
into clearly defined standards for how your business
operates; how your products are made, packaged
and delivered; how your employees perform; and
how your salespeople sell. You need to come to grips
with both the need to meet your standards 100
percent of the time without fail but also not to waste
time, energy or money in seeking perfection or
excellence outside or beyond those standards. I
know this contradicts so much of what you read and
hear from all the happy-thought theorists in
creativity, leadership and excellence bailiwicks. The
most famous of all “excellence books” featured
companies that went bankrupt or were otherwise
marketplace losers in the years following the book's
glorifying of them, in part because these companies
wasted resources pursuing celebrated standards of
excellence incongruent with their covenant with their
customers. The reality is, all the most successful,
dominant and profitable companies find their way to
the place I’ve described. They establish a complex
matrix of exact standards and meet them. They don’t
bother trying to “out-excel” the standards they’ve
established. If you now examine and analyze highly
successful companies through this prism, you’ll
quickly see just how right I am.
4. Supervisory role.
This involves enforcing your standards—no
exceptions, no excuses, no creative deviation, no
improv. And I mean “enforce” in every sense of the
word. Not just teach (although you must teach), not
just reward (although you must reward). Enforce.
This is the responsibility nobody likes; just about
everybody neglects it and desperately rationalizes the
neglect.
Unfortunately, there's more B.S. in management
theory about this than any other of the
responsibilities of business ownership. It delivers a
giant guilt trip. There’s the “If you don’t trust your
people, how do you expect them to trust you?” the
“You can’t run a business like a prison,” the “These
are old, outdated ideas that won’t work with the new
worker,” and another hundred or more anti-
enforcement themes woven through books, articles
and seminars. For the business owner already
uncomfortable with police work, desperate to be
liked, deluded about the actual nature of employer-
employee relationships and eager to avoid
enforcement, this blather is cocaine. And it's at least
as dangerous.
The problem is, everything else you might do right is
sabotaged by a lack of supervision and enforcement.
Every investment you make reduced in value. Every
customer you acquire at constant, high risk of loss.
Every grand idea, every noble policy, every clever
marketing strategy castrated.
thanks for reading
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