A millionaire reader once told me that he had built up his eminently successful business by following these dozen points from my 1980 book, The Business of Winning:
• Improve basic efficiency – all the time
• Think as simply and directly as possible about what you’re doing and why
• Behave towards others as you wish them to behave towards you
• Evaluate each business and business opportunity with all the objective facts and logic you can muster
• Concentrate on what you do well
• Ask questions ceaselessly about your performance, your markets, your objectives
• Make money; if you don’t you can’t do anything else
• Economise, because doing the most with the least is the name of the game
• Flatten the company, so authority is spread over many people
• Admit to your failings and shortcomings, because only then will you be able to improve on them
• Share the benefits of success widely among those who helped to achieve it
• Tighten up the organisation wherever and whenever you can – because success tends to breed slackness
You’ll see that the Clean Dozen form an acronym – IT BECAME FAST. And even after a quarter of a century I wouldn’t change a word or a thought. Follow these precepts, and you have every hope of becoming a fast-moving leader. But I’ve added three more and more modern bullets, as you can see in my The Fusion Manager (published by Profile Books):
• Enable everybody in the business to use their individual powers to the fullest possible extent
• Serve your customers with all their requirements and desires to standards of perceived excellence in quality
• Transform performance by constantly innovating in products and processes – including the ways in which the business is managed
That makes a new acronym: IT BECAME FASTEST. There’s no substitute for being best. Best is simply best.
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I think your checklist is a brilliant blueprint and short enough to keep entrepreneurs focused.
I'd just like to add: get the message out there! If no-one knows about it, it doesn't fly. The real trick is to not only use cost-effective PR but ensure that there's good marketing and sales effort running alongside to convert all the goodwill generated by the publicity into sales - that's why the glitzy launches often fail to follow through with results. And, of course, ensure that all your media coverage grows legs by using it in your marketing and sales campaigns. Maybe you could use: "Tell them about it", making your anagram It Became Fastestt?
Really enjoying this blog: well done for all the great material here.
All the best,
Penny Haywood