Lessons Your Company Can Learn For Success

The prognosticators have spoken. If you and your company are going to make this year better than last year, you're going to have to work for it.

Here are three suggestions that may help you do just that.

1. Don’t overuse your greatest strength, it can become your greatest weakness.

For years, one of America’s most customer-friendly carriers was the airline everybody loved because they onboarded people quickly, departed on time and didn’t nickel and dime customers with add-on fees. Using the same aircraft for all flights meant pilots and maintenance could be deployed efficiently.

What could go wrong? The company created a good thing, what analysts call a cash cow. Cash cows work profitably in the moment but are on a clock because without continued investment (such as upgrading their operations system) the cash cow will at some point become inefficient, irrelevant, or both.

Here’s what to do: Make sure your annual budget has line items for innovation (trying new things that may or may not work) and deferred maintenance.

Plan for things such as technology upgrades and end-of-life expenses and stay current with vehicle and facility upkeep that’s needed every year. When you think about avoiding or delaying these initiatives remember this and get it done.

2. Do less forecasting and more testing.

Many times, the opportunity to improve your company isn’t changing what you do, it’s changing how you do it.

While waiting to board a flight at a major airport recently, passengers noticed gate agents for B12 and B14 were struggling with the mechanics of their respective gates. They each had experience with the other team’s gate, shouting advice back and forth until both gates were cleared. They then said, “We should keep a log on specific gate issues and report them to management or at least leave tips for the next team.”

Those were good ideas, but you can bet that in the busyness of the day the issues didn’t get passed up the channel.

Improving your company also depends on how much you do.

When was the last time you made a process improvement, and you deemed it successful because it was better than what you’d done before? That kind of thinking isn’t wrong, but it is insufficient.

Here’s an example: In banking we try to open accounts as quickly as possible. If we reduce that process from 15 to 10 minutes that’s good. But if other banks can do it in five minutes, it’s not good enough.

Stop assuming and start examining. From inventory management to invoicing, to customer satisfaction, measure what’s really happening before you forecast how much you think you can make happen.

3. Hard work works.

In a world where AI writes essays and a drone delivers your supplies from a large retailer, it’s hard to keep up. But don’t let today’s question marks and competitive pressures detour or convince you to give up on your big ideas, your goals and your dreams.

In 2021, a young football quarterback from a Midwestern university broke all the school’s quarterback records. He graduated and was chosen dead last in the professional football draft, inheriting the title Mr. Irrelevant. In 2022, due to injuries, this third string QB on the professional football team won all of his seven starts, including two playoff games.

The lesson here is clear. You didn’t get where you are by accident, and the VeraBank Business Team knows and respects that.

Put us on your team and together with you we’ll work hard – and smart – to help your company prosper.

This article has been republished with permission. View the original article: 3 Lessons Your Company Can Learn For Success