Clear Core Values and Mission: If you have a clear purpose and you can explain it succinctly to your customers, your employees, and your partners, you are more like to achieve a higher level of success. You can trace all sound business decisions and cutting-edge changes in service to most companies serving the core vision directly with every move they make.
Treating Suppliers and Customers like Partners: You can run a business with nothing to sell and no one to sell it to. Don’t hide behind secrecy curtains or divorce a part of your supply chain from the thought processes of the business. Treat everyone involved in your business with care and respect. You will gain loyalty, support, and honest feedback integral to a healthy business.
Measure Performance by Customer Satisfaction: If your customers are happy, they will come back to you. They will tell others. You will not lose your base, and you can continue to grow. If you lose sight of this by measuring in revenue over satisfaction you will lose sight of what makes your company stand out.
Problem Solving as Method: There will always be problems to solve in a business. Having a process and standards for how to approach a problem leads to much greater success rates than companies with on-the-fly problem solving methods.
Process Mapping, Benchmarking, and Visual Aids: These are all key to continuous improvement and training. Visual systems and comprehensive analytics help employees to see and process data quickly, to understand goals and performance data easily, and to understand what success in a role and for the company looks like.
Employee Empowerment: The most high performing companies have a systematic way to gather ideas from all levels of the organization. Supporting, training and fully utilizing the strengths of a diverse workforce are proven to help grow companies.
Manage Processes, not People: Focus not on what people are doing, but how they are doing it. Inefficiencies can be carried along through generations of employees like genetics. Work on the errors in your system versus the errors in your people.
Introduce New Products Faster than the Competition: This is not the easiest to do, but it is one of the biggest defining factors in the success of companies. Do not lay dormant with one successful product or service. You may stagnate there. Once you achieve a success, immediately follow it up with an improvement or an additional problem-solving product.