THE WELL-OILED MACHINE
Earlier, I promised to show you how to visualize your business production process in a way that would allow you to easily spot the places where it needs tweaking, or to continue with our metaphor, where your business engine needs grease. After all, you can’t have a well-oiled machine if you can’t find the squeaky wheels.
If you have followed along from the beginning, you now know how to translate the money, metrics, and people in your business engine into visual models and you know that looking for the red in those models will show you where money is being lost, high friction is being generated, and value is low.
So, at this point, you’re probably wondering, “What do I do now? I can see it, but how do I fix it?”
In this unit, I’ll give you some ideas for how to optimize your business engine, or to speak in visual terms, how to turn your gears, lines, and rectangles from red to yellow, and, eventually, to green.
HOW TO OPTIMIZE…
Up to this point, we’ve been dealing in facts. The way a system works is a fact. The numbers in your business are a fact. Where you have problems in your business… also fact. What I’m going to offer you in the next few sections are not facts, but opinions, my opinions, based on my own experiences and observations. Hopefully, you’ll find them useful. If not, there are plenty of other theories out there about how to achieve the most money, the best quality, and the highest value. There is no single, correct way to optimize a business. You’re free to try other methods. The good news is that, now that you know how to visualize yours, you can quickly tell if other approaches work or not.
- By modeling money, metrics, and people, you can see quickly and easily where your business needs your attention.
- In Business Visualization, the areas that need the most improvement are red.
In the next section you will learn ways to optimize the performance of the people in a business.