EPISODE 4: How to Prioritise the Opportunities to Improve Your Process

How to Streamline Your Processes - Episode 4/8

The Story So Far

In This Episode (4) We will Look at Prioritising the Opportunities to Improve Your Processes So We Act on the Highest Impact

So far we have looked at

• Why you would want to streamline and what can go wrong (find out here)
• We set out our goals using my Sustainable Profit Model (find it here)
• We used my A.I.D.E. model to understand what is happening in our processes (here)
• And then we built some hypothesis using the IF...THEN... technique (here)
• And now we are ready to prioritise

Hi, I’m Rebecca A business operations adviser helping busy business owners win their time back.

Let's get into it.

How Do You Prioritise the Opportunities You Have Found?

What is the Impact Potential?

We need to understand the impact in terms of our Sustainable Profit Model - what will have an impact on revenue generated, money saved, time saved, client experience enhanced? As much as is possible we want to quantify the impact so we can rank the ideas.

Let's Look at Our Dentist Website Company

Last week we got to a point where we had three hypothesis

1. IF we responded faster to emails and booked more calls THEN we would win a higher volume of jobs
2. IF the sales team cancelled fewer calls THEN we would win a higher volume of jobs
3. IF the sales team didn't spend time on unqualified calls THEN they could spend more time on value-add

IF we responded faster to emails and booked more calls THEN we would win a higher volume of jobs

How many calls do we lose because we don't respond? Let's say the team estimates 2 calls a week. If our conversion rate is 50% we are loosing (50% x 2) 1 deal a week. If our average deal is ￡5000 this is costing us ￡5000/week or ￡260k a year

IF the sales team cancelled fewer calls THEN we would win a higher volume of jobs

Let's look through the calendar and work out how many calls the sales people are cancelling - let's say its 4 per week. Using the same conversion rate that's 2 jobs a week we lose or ￡10,000 which is ￡520k a year.

IF the sales team didn't spend time on unqualified calls THEN they could spend more time on value-add

How many calls are unqualified - say 1 a week per sales person. If there are 2 sales people and they would spend an hour per call that could be a saving of 2 hours a week. If their time in generating revenue is ￡100 per hour then that is ￡200 per week or ￡10.4k

If It's Close, What Do You Do?

You Will Probably See a Lot of Opportunites that are Close in Value - What Do You Do?

If your opportunities are close in value there are a few more lenses you can apply.

Are there other goals?

Usually when you start streamlining you are doing it for a reason beyond the Sustainable Profit Model - you probably did it because you wanted to reduce costs or you wanted to reduce workloads or delighted more customers. You could add this to each idea to help prioritisation.

How Hard Is It?

Different ideas will be harder or easier. If it will involve a huge redesign of your systems for example - go after high impact low hanging fruit!

See you Next Thursday

Next week will will design the solutions!