Would you like to achieve growth in your business? How do you go about improving your businesses performance? Does sport have it right by coaching people to achieve marginal gains, and can business learn from this?
In business you typically start your career with limited knowledge and therefore learn your skills from more senior people who can guide you in the best ways to do things. Gradually you gain experience and become more senior and maybe you start guiding junior members, but all the while still receiving guidance. Eventually you reach the pinnacle of your career and potentially stop learning from others because now you are the expert and know everything.
Yet, if you look at the sporting world even if you are 5-time Olympic Gold medallist, or world footballer of the year, you will always have a coach. The coach is there to impartially view your performance and shine a light on any areas you can improve – physically and mentally. Nurturing your existing talent and making you better.
So, how can we learn from the sporting world and transfer that across to the business world? Let us think about this.
Do you look for the marginal gains in your business? In other words, can you honestly claim that all your processes and activities are 100% optimised and do not need improvement? Therefore, if every one of your processes increased efficiency by 1%, what growth would your business see? Often it is a challenge to even know where to start, and then how can you really make and demonstrate a tangible difference.
I know our business at FMI can keep improving. Even though the team at FMI are all willing to go into work, identify and express improvements, and be open to making a plan to address them, it will still take time and effort to achieve success. However, as the famous Chinese proverb states though “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. Knowing how and be willing to take that first step can be the initial challenge, and this is where external consultants can help.
A fresh set of eyes. An open mind, free from the politics of the business. Leveraging experiences from other organisations and verticals. Consultants can help guide you and your business to make incremental improvements.
The process doesn’t have to be costly either. Often by engaging with a consultant for just a day or two you can identify and develop a tangible plan of how to address your biggest challenges.
Perhaps think about it another way, what is inaction costing you? You may be wasting more money by not implementing any changes!
At FMI we have a number of consultants with extensive and wide-ranging experiences that will help you improve the performance of your business. Why not contact us and let us know what your biggest challenges are, whether that is marketing, engagement, sales, incentives, rewards, events, or data analysis, we will offer you our insight and then you have then taken your first step to achieving a marginal gain in your business.
Below are a couple of examples of the work we have conducted, and you can find out more on our website.
Mazda engaged with FMI to support in providing clarity of approach on how to enhance employee effectiveness, increase involvement from dealers, and provide a clear approach to communicating their customer service strategy the Mazda blueprint. After a short period of consultancy with FMI, the Mazda Takumi Club platform was conceived which is intended to encourage employees to care about a high level of customer care.
As part of our long-standing relationship with Targus, we completed a strategic consultancy project, identifying both internal and external areas of the business for improvement in order to increase sales and drive brand awareness. Following several workshops and our resultant recommendations, the agreed next steps will be to design and implement their “Partner Promise” and roll-out globally to all employees.
This article is written by Andrew Hulme one of the consultants at FMI. Andrew has over 20 years’ experience working with clients across the globe, helping them achieve their goals.
