Striving for excellence in your business is absolutely critical in this environment. There are too many average companies out there. They are struggling. Excellence is hard to execute, but if you do execute - it becomes a huge competitive advantage. Here are some of my thoughts for creating and sustaining an excellent company:
1) Operational Excellence. Transparency is key. Do you have a dashboard? Do you know what’s going on in your business day-to-day, each hour? Do you know your key performance indicators? What constitutes success this year, this quarter, this month, today? You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Get that dashboard built and automate it so you know what’s going on and act on the data. For our business we track uniques, pageviews, repeat visits, registered users, popular pages, revenue, and other key metrics everyday. Whatever your business is, don’t fly blind.
2) Service Excellence. How do you measure customer satisfaction? Is it improving? What is your process for training customer service personnel? How do you build-in service that is cost-effective, that’s wanted by the customer, and exceeds their expectations? What is your customer retention plan? In this environment, we can ill-afford to lose any customers because of service.
3) HR/Cultural Excellence. What is the culture of your company? Are people hungry? Are they willing to go above and beyond the call of duty for the company’s success? Do they feel passionate about your vision and mission? Are you setting the tempo and serving your staff? Are you enabling your people to succeed? Servant-leadership is key. Company vision and mission where everyone is pointed in the same direction is also critical for success. If you asked every person on your staff what the company’s mission is, do you think you’ll get the same answer? You should.
4) Product Excellence. Does your product really stand out from the crowd? Is it really easy to use? It’s easy to get lazy and not put in the extra time to get the product right for the customer. We’ve been working on a new product for BuddyTV for what seems to be a terribly long time, but we’re committed to making sure that it is excellent product launch with minimal bugs (we can’t squash all of them) and that it can be easily used.
5) Communication Excellence. One of the most underestimated centers of excellence a company must have is communication. I’m personally working hard at this as it’s not easy to maintain a rhythm of communicating when you’re very busy. Are you communicating well with your employees especially in these turbulent times? Are you communicating with your clients, investors, your board? I’m not surprised to learn that most companies struggle with this, it takes time and effort. Transparency garners respect and generates more energy as people understand the rationale behind decisions. Generally, people don’t like surprises, so keep the communication lines very open and you’ll be rewarded for doing so.
What are your centers of excellence? How do you ensure that everyone on your team is bought into excellence?
“don’t fly blind” is a cool advice for me. Thanks!
seems obvious, but easy to put to on the backburner
Yeah “Dont fly blind” and “You cant improve what you cant measure.” These are good. Thanks again Andy
Thanks for sharing this. My company brings usability excellence to our customers and to me the best way to attract other customers is through the referrals of my existing customers.
referrals are more important now as a key to survival - you’re absolutely right…
It’s interesting. I strive for excellence every day, and have since I started my company. It increased demand to such an insane level that it affected our customer service. We’re still recovering, but once we get our feet on the ground, I’m sure we will be the best again.
You are right, AGAIN, Andy. It’s times like this that excellence is more important than ever before. When Company A continues to make more money than Company B, C and all the others, despite the so-called recession, than obviously Company A is doing something better - they are portraying more excellence than the other companies. And the other companies aren’t because as you said, Andy, “Excellence is hard to execute, but if you do execute - it becomes a huge competitive advantage.” Thanks for sharing.
Good, very good search for excellence.
Andy, indeed excellence takes a ton of work to maintain. Mentioned in a recent post the idea of not spreading your self too thin and committing to too many projects at once. That you need to focus on your main business if you want it to do well. I would add that you need this to maintain excellence as well, since it takes vigilant leadership. I have seen founders of companies let their businesses spin out of control because they were too buys dealing with side businesses and investment stuff. This is a valuable lesson for me.
Thanks Andy. I was fortunate enough to work in an establishment who’s core function to always strive to achieve excellence (not perfection) and I learned a lot about life and business ethics from it. Since I moved and no longer work there I hope to maintain what I have learned and apply it to my own small business.
I think what happens is that we all start off with lofty goals (well, most of us lol) but we are easily distracted by lots of things. Before we know it, the calendar says it’s July and we’ve lost track of the goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year. It’s ultra important to always keep tabs on what you want to accomplish, and the vehicles that get you there.
Excellent post. I might add Partnering Excellence as many companies can achieve a great deal of growth, brand equity and maturity through healthy partnerships. So, are you set up to partner easily & efficiently? Do you have a partner offering (tailored to the use case). I’ve seen companies do this very well and I’ve seen them completely miss the boat.
Thanks for this post Andy. Ive read it, gone away and came back to re-read it (twice). I’m still thinking about what this means for me. I really liked the point you made about flying Blind. Im also wondering how to determine what to keep track of, what are reasonable goals and where the bulk of my attention should go. Nothing like a trial by fire I suppose.
It’s always good to hear great advice and then recall things you’ve learned in the past - keeping them in center focus is what’s given me trouble in the past.
Andy could you write a post on working with new employees and if you’ve had experience in the past, how to keep them motivated and productive - Thanks!
Excellence is key. in business and in life i look at it this way you will have a point when you will reach a platuea… when you reach that point you have a choice to try to drive your company to the next plateau or stay where you are are the key is never get complacent and satisfied but always drive for the next peak.
I noticed that many people don’t pay a great deal of attention to excellence in communication mostly because we all feel we CAN communicate but not all communication is excellent communication. So, you are right there, Andy, about the need for Communication Excellence!
Andy,
Would appreciate more in-depth writing and discussion on every factor to be measured on excellence.
Thanks for this post.
I like this post a lot. Excelling in anything you do is what gets one overall success.