Standardize to Reduce Effort

While some heavy-handed implementations of standards like ISO9001 can seem like a whole lot of extra effort for not much gain, standardizing the daily work can dramatically reduce your daily effort. By deciding in advance the best-known-method for handling a repetitive task, you reduce the time required to figure it out each time. A few simple examples...

1. What do you do with a business card from a new contact? You can just pile them up and then, a few months later, try to figure out who all those people were. Or, you can have a simple, standard handling process that you always do with a new contact. If you have a CRM system that can automate this, or at least automate reminders for this, so much the better, but I've seen people handle this well with no technology other than a set of dated file folders. Perhaps you:
• Add it to your Address Book
• Send a "Nice to meet you email"
• Schedule a "Here's something you might find useful" contact in five weeks
• Make a "Hey, how you doing" phone call four weeks after that.
• Add them to your mailing list for periodic contact after that.
2. How do you decide what kind of advertising and marketing to do? A marketing calendar, that standardizes your message and outlines what you will spend, when, on what, can dramatically reduce the effort required to get the word out. With a standard calendar, you then just need to make it happen, and don't have to waste your time and your mental energy on every opportunity that arises. And, if you measure which methods are producing results over time, you dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to create your marketing plan for the next year too. One small company decided on the following schedule, and successfully built their business for more than seven years with this simple plan:
• six magazine ads a year
• classifieds ads every week
• sponsor one industry golf tournament, and one industry curling bonspiel
• a public speaking engagement each quarter, shared among three business development people, and
• one networking event each month for each of the three business development people.
3. What do you offer your customers? If you can do "anything for anybody", every sale requires starting from scratch. Can you bundle your offerings into a package? Can you calculate standard pricing in advance?  Can you make it easier for your salespeople to tell customers what it is you do? Simple stuff, but these simple things can drive the costs and complexities of each transaction way down.

Whatever you do over and over, look at how you can standardize the work, the individual steps, the information flow, and the output. A little investment in standardization can produce significant reductions in effort, and significant improvements in results. In all areas of your business.