Speed is your friend
One of the funniest movies I ever saw was “The Jerk”, starring Steve Martin.
I remember seeing it at a theatre in Coos Bay, Oregon on New Year’s Eve,
1980. I thought it was hilarious. I didn’t watch it again for
over twenty-five years, when I rented it to show my kids. I had been
telling them how funny it was for several years, and was looking forward to
sharing the hilarity.
Needless to say they were disappointed. It’s not that the jokes
weren’t funny anymore; it was that the pace of the movie was far too slow,
especially for kids raised on video games and MTV. We have become
addicted to speed.
Everything in life is faster today. We drive faster, we have information fed
to us faster and we expect results faster. If you are in business and
want not only to succeed but also to excel, you need to take this into
account.
Customers expect you to act faster and to get them results, proposals and
information faster. In today’s world the fast truly do eat the slow.
Which brings me back to the point of this article, “Speed is your Friend”.
It is the business that can deliver its product or service fast that in most
situations will win the project.
In a lot of sales situations it is the fast that eats the slow. Just
recently I received a lead via e-mail from a commercial customer. It
was not the only lead I had and there was plenty of other work to do so I
put off following up on it until the next day. When I called I found
that my competitor had already been there and had gotten the job.
That got me to thinking about my systems. We all have a sales system
we operate under, even if you work alone. Your system is how you
organize your time and plan your day. My business systems at the time
we set up to handle my current level of activity. Still, working
within my system framework had allowed a customer to fall through the
cracks. It wasn’t the biggest job in the world, but it might have
been, and I had to be prepared for that.
So how about your business systems? Have you looked at them lately? As
of this writing the economy appears to be either going into a recession or
is already in one. All of us need to capture as much work as we
possibly can and few of us can afford to lose jobs because we fail to get
back to them.
As a result of losing that job I reengineered my approach to work. I
found a way to better prioritize the leads coming into me and to delegate
certain functions to others. I may still be losing the occasional job but at
least I am getting a chance at them.
Another lesson that was driven home to me was the importance of regularly
reviewing both my progress and how I approach my work. We all fall
into bad habits over time. If we don’t notice them and take action to
eliminate them early they can become ingrained and permanent. By
regularly reviewing your business and business habits you can be assured
that you are staying on the cutting edge and keeping your customers happy.
