I didn’t come up with this one, but isn’t it right?
Think of all the “stuff” you are doing in your business right now, today.
There’s a whole pile of conflict between customers, employees, suppliers. All fighting for a piece of time – phone calls, voice mails, emails….. the list is almost endless.
It’s been our experience that to fix a problem costs 3 times the cost of doing it right the first time. A lot of businesses seem to like putting out fires. You’ll often hear them say that one of their strengths is they will do whatever it takes to get the job done.
If you can learn anything from the best run businesses is that they do indeed have fires to put out, but they rarely have a repeat offence, so they never have a recurrence of a problem. They invest time and effort understanding what really caused the problem and they then “fix” the cause so it does not happen again. Almost all other businesses appear to be putting out the same fires over and over again. They never have enough time, it seems, to do it right first time. The employees use language like “things will never change”.
The challenge we have in business is that there is never enough time or money to do the right thing first time, but we always have time, money and resources to “fix” the problems created. If you spent time understanding the real cause of the problems and fixed those causes you will have more time, money and resources making your business a highly productive and profitable machine.
