If you are serious about growing your business and creating wealth there are several key steps necessary to achieving your goals. Here are five to get you started.
1. Understand that the purpose of business is to create customers.
2. Ensure that every employee is responsible for quality control.
3. Know your people.
4. Train yourself and your staff.
5. Develop an exit plan.
• Creating customers is the foundation of all businesses. Without customers, you have a hobby. Focus on your customers and post this throughout the company. Not with cheezy signs like “the customer is king” that have no meaning. Say it simply, The Purpose of this Business is to Create and Keep Customers.
• Quality control is more than a spot check along the passage of product to customer. Leegin Creative Leather Products, located in City of Industry, CA, is one of the best run companies I’ve worked with. This progressive firm encourages any of its hundreds of employees to stop production at any time for quality control purposes. As a result every worker understands quality if their personal responsibility.
• People do business with people they like, who act like they want their business, always deliver what they promise, and don’t give them a headache. We are all one another’s customer and your employees deserve excellent customer service. Understand that problem employees are generally the result of bad hiring. Take swift and definitive action to correct staff problems.
• Always recruit the smartest, most skilled people available and make them more valuable through training, continuing education, and developing a career path. Don’t worry about, “If I train them they’ll leave for better pay.” Be loyal to employees and they will be loyal to you.
• Do you have a ‘lifestyle company’ that provides financial support for you and your employees or are you a wealth creator building to sell or go public? What is your succession plan? You have to know where you are going in order to get there. Do this now; today was yesterday’s future.