There are many reasons speed is important for businesses but the focus below is 1) our customers expect it, and 2) our team controls it.
We are in a time where patience is low, and almost near-instantaneous gratification is a requirement for customer satisfaction.
Each time we meet customer expectations, customer standards rise. Which in turn is great for company credibility. This makes speed even more necessary.
The company.
Our business is a little different. We run gymnastics fundamental programming in multiple facilities and are expected to service close to 5,000 individual members this year.
For context, Gymnastics is now the second most participated sport for girls in Australia and fifth for boys. However, we can also argue our company is considered niche. Our sport hasn’t changed much in over 100 years. It’s also not going anywhere in the next 100 years. This is great for our accelerated growth strategy to franchise in Australia and New Zealand later this year.
Although results are generally understood by our customers (parents) to be developed over time, there is also an obvious expectation for children to be continually progressing somewhat quickly.
Even if children are ready to progress, we must forecast the management of class occupancy and resource requirements (workforce) with speedy timetable adjustments. This includes having benchwarmers ready to be scheduled for new classes.
So, what if our participants (children) are not progressing quick enough? Parents are not so patient, and they leave. Fair enough. This happened recently as we experienced a 6% growth in membership over about a month. Subsequently, the rapid growth and lack of foresight resulted in wait lists for classes. It might seem like a great problem to have, but for us we have miscalculated and laid an egg.
We can’t afford to have participant roadblocks or bottle necks in the program. We need to anticipate program occupancy challenges four or more weeks ahead, minimum. It’s also critical to ensure speed in service-based business should never compromise safety, and service delivery.
Typically, a business needs to leverage, pivot, diversify, innovate, and evolve to maintain a competitive advantage and ultimately survive.
So how do you do this in a niche business with no major changes in the last 100 years? Your company needs to become a leading provider of choice.
How does your company become a leader? It can be over complicated, but I’ll make it simple.
You need to make many consistent, incremental improvements with speed.
In our case, these swift improvements need to be initiated in a sport that doesn’t change a whole lot. All while providing the highest levels of service and additional attributes your competition finds difficult to match.
The people.
If our employees are not changing and growing at a quicker rate than we are as a company, we are already losing.
Firstly, we must ensure our company leaders work with speed as their advantage. Our recent CEO appointment is creating a culture of speed. Let me tell you, it’s a game changer. If you want to increase market share you can’t deny swift execution of tasks heavily contributes to this result.
I once thought being a perfectionist was an advantage. It’s not.
Those who overthink business decisions to make sure it’s ‘perfect’ are wasting progression time.
I also know from my own experience, those who are taking longer on tasks seeking perfection, are just covering insecurities about others judgement. Completely exposing this is knowing It’s not about being a perfectionist, it’s about lacking confidence in execution and simply procrastination until they are ‘ready.’
As the company owner, I’m not seeking perfection from our senior team. When company leaders move quickly a culture of speed organically forms. Standards for speed are just as high - if not higher - than our customers. Then we are winning.
Move forward with speed and experience innovation and efficiency improvements too. You will overwhelm your competition.
The benefits are obvious, but they can be overlooked. No company in any industry can expect to get ahead with a slow culture.
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