The Secret Sauce for Business Success

Celebrating our 30th year in quality, my view of ‘business success’ has matured from trying to be all things to all people, to focusing on delivering our unique strengths. However, the key is to achieve this while balancing good business with personal integrity. With this in mind, I share with you my ‘secret sauce’ for actualising this: a pinch of codes, a measure of great habits, a dose of differentiating yourself, and a dash of passion.

Codes to live (and work) by

Miguel Ruiz’s book “The Four Agreements”, I developed my own list of codes to guide me through my business - although I ended up with more than four. These form the very DNA of my business and include:

• Nothing is impossible
• Work hard now
• Help others and let others win
• Fixed broken agreements now
• Personal development every day
• Physical development every day
• Celebrate all wins
• Deal direct
• Speak supportively
• Correct the system quality
• Focus on what works
• Never give up
• Give support unconditionally
• Never make assumptions
• Never prejudge
• Tell the truth
• Do my very best
• Don't seek or ask for sympathy or acknowledgement.

?I invite everyone to create something similar for their own business. Then use your codes as guideposts when making important decisions and strategic plans.?

Habits to support your codes

?The key to integrating codes into the heart of your business is creating the habits that directly support them. As discussed by John Di Lemme in his book “Find Your Why and Fly”, a habit is a recurrent, often unconscious, pattern of behaviour acquired through frequent repetition.?

In most aspects of life, we can assume that successful people do all of the time what others only do occasionally. So, decide which habits you want to develop and consciously commit to doing them every single day until they become automatic for you. Remember, when it comes to habits - consistency beats brilliance every time.

?Differentiating yourself in a useful way

?It's not enough in business to have good habits because most good businesses claim best practice. You can't just differentiate yourself by claiming to be ‘the best’. Instead, you must find ways to stand out and be remarkable in ways that make a meaningful difference to your client.?

One of the tools we use is ‘secret shopping’. This is where we regularly assess what our competitors are doing and find the gaps in our industry. We used to try and do everything for everyone - to be the ‘one-stop’. Because quality assurance is not seen as sexy, like all our competitors, we tried to make it more attractive by bringing in additional layers, such as integrated management systems.

?While we still offer all those services and more, we quickly realised that our core business – that our passion and experience make us second to none in delivering – is in quality assurance itself.

?Others in our industry take 6 to 12 months for certification, which is incredibly disruptive to the client’s business. We focus on completing our process within 12 weeks, guaranteed. Even though this isn’t sexy, it's certainly different in a useful way.

?Passion is the finishing touch

?We do what we do with great insight built on years of solid experience. This is where our passion comes from. In fact, I love the topic of quality certification and systems so much that I’ve written two books about it.

?Codes, habits, differentiating yourself, and sharing your passion for what you do will outshine all the marketing gimmicks out there. This approach makes the sales process and the conversations around your services heartfelt.?

?And we all prefer to deal with people who like what they do and do their best for us.

Links:?

See the comments for links to our blogs and the books referenced above.