Would you like to save time and money running your business? What if you could serve more customers without sacrificing quality?
In his book Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, Jay Abraham shares powerful advice on how to make a business more efficient. He explains that greater efficiency allows you to handle more customers while maintaining quality, ultimately leading to increased sales and profits.
Keep reading to discover ways to review your processes, test improvements, and leverage automation that can transform your operations.
Make Your Business More Efficient
Abraham explains that, the more efficient your operations, the more time and money you save running your business. This allows you to serve more customers without compromising quality or customer satisfaction—resulting in more sales and increased profits. Abraham provides advice on how to make a business more efficient, offering three specific strategies.
(Shortform note: Why is efficiency key to customer satisfaction and increased profits? As Blanchard and Bowles explain in Raving Fans, customers form expectations based on their past transactions with a business—and they expect future transactions to be just as good, if not better. So, when you scale up and serve more customers, you must maintain the level of service that initially won them over. Efficiency helps you accomplish this by ensuring your resources aren’t too overextended for you to deliver quality service. In contrast, if your operations are inefficient, you risk disappointing and losing your customers—and the revenue they generate.)
Strategy #1: Review Your Processes
First, review your processes to identify areas to improve. This involves examining each step in your workflow, paying attention to delays and errors that slow you down or reduce quality. For example, analyze your course creation process from topic selection to publication to identify which steps take the longest and where quality issues typically arise. (Shortform note: According to Jeff Sutherland (Scrum), one way to identify process inefficiencies is to seek out tasks or activities that cost more than they are worth. For example, having multiple instructors review the same lesson might cost more in time and effort than the few additional improvements it yields.)
Strategy #2: Test Potential Improvements
Abraham’s second strategy for optimizing operations is to test potential improvements. This involves comparing alternative methods to address the problems you identified, measuring their results, and implementing those that perform best. For example, say you’ve been using one lengthy process to build and test entire courses. You might find it helpful to test a new approach—like breaking the course into smaller sections and building and testing one section at a time.
(Shortform note: Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking) recommends using random control trials (RCTs) to run tests. To run an RCT, establish a control and introduce a variable to measure its impact against that of the control. For example, randomly assign half your lessons to be developed with the new approach while creating the other half with your current method. Then, compare the development times and lesson quality between the two groups to quantify the impact of the new process.)
Strategy #3: Automate and Outsource
Abraham’s third strategy for optimizing operations is to take advantage of automation and outsourcing. This involves identifying routine tasks that technology can handle more consistently and specialized work that experts can complete more efficiently than your team. For example, you may be able to use software to standardize course formatting and deployment, and outsource specialized topics to industry experts.
(Shortform note: While automating and outsourcing tasks can increase efficiency, they also present risks. Don Norman (The Design of Everyday Things) cautions that poorly designed automation systems can introduce errors. This occurs when automated processes are confusing, provide little feedback, or don’t work as users expect them to—for example, an automated system that assigns users to the wrong skill level groups. Meanwhile, other experts note that outsourcing can reduce quality control since it makes it harder to monitor work standards. Additionally, it can negatively impact company culture if employees feel like they are being replaced.)
