Are Broken Workflows Holding Back Your Business?

All right, let's talk about when things go wrong, when things break down, when your core processes aren't working, there's real problems. And problems exacerbate, extend and ripple out to other parts of the business. I have a couple of really interesting examples. One with one of my own companies and one with the company that I coached. So in my own company years ago, I came in to run this company and I was not the founder, but the CEO, CEO who took over to scale the business. And when I first came in, I encountered an issue where the sales orders that came out of the major selling trade shows the company did were getting bogged down. And it would be weeks and weeks after a sales trade show that we knew the totals and that production was commencing. And I couldn't figure out what this was wrong. And I talked to my operations director at the time and, and she was like, well listen, that person's working on it, she's doing her best, she's working. And I could look at the person, you could see she was working fast and furiously as she had. But there was a breakdown in something going between the order processing, order entry to accounting review, to production and purchasing, and then ultimately to fulfillment receiving and shipping and invoicing collection. So all of that flow through was breaking down. This is a really common one that many companies have some version of at some point. So I looked at this situation, what was going on and this person doing, and the first thought I had was, let's hire more people like that person so we could just process in parallel. Except they weren't busy doing this every day. So then the next thought was about outsourcing it and there were concerns about that. And then we had this interesting idea, wait, why are we waiting on one person to do this? Why aren't we working in parallel? And so we did a little experiment and with the immediate thing at hand, we made some photocopies we sent around. It seems so like stupid, simple and obvious at this point. We made photocopies, these orders and people could process around, people could work in parallel with each other. It was like mind blowing. The next thing we encountered was that there were certain fields that were entered wrong things that happened wrong at the trade shows that created problems that need solving and the structure of the form sort of invited that. So we had to redesign the form. So we redesigned the form and because it was a physical handwritten thing at trade shows at the time, then we also made it a four part NCR form so that we didn't have to make photocopies we just bring back the form and give copies to the different departments. They could all work in parallel and start to process. So order entry could do it, production could start to tally and get some purchasing going and plan for the production and credit review could do that their job and so on. So now everybody was doing it and we changed the form. The errors were gone, like everything was solved. But we had to look at all those different departments. So what was actually happening with the flow in order to get it right, like sitting back at an executive level wasn't uncovering the core problems. Same situation happened. Very similar has happened many times, but with one fairly large company that had now gone public. The company was quickly running out of cash and yet they were profitable. They weren't sure what was going on. So we looked at a lot of different things. But one of the things that we had covered is that their whole like quote to cash process as a process that handed off from sales to operations and accounting, then to collection was broken. And the problem was sales was doing a great job winning the business. But they were doing it in ways and terms that operations and accounting couldn't do, couldn't fulfill, couldn't work with. They were improvising to win business things that were technically possible, but the rest operationally couldn't get done. So the fix in this case, working with this whole process was for those teams to come together. And ultimately operations and accounting gave the sales team instead of just like do whatever it takes to win the business, they gave them a menu and they said, do whatever it takes to win the business from this menu of things that we can actually do. And if you need something else, please see us before you promise it. Offer it to someone to win any business. They did that changed everything. Now they could start to get things through. They actually were able to execute on invoice, collect things in a timely manner and. And they weren't running out of cash as much or as fast anymore. Fantastic, simple thing to do. You got to actually get in the weeds with people, look at the processes in reality, not the process you think is going on in the business, but what's really happening. And that means bringing in people from different departments to map your process out to look at what's going on and have somebody accountable to work on that particular process, to own that process across multiple functional points. I hope that's helpful. I hope that helps you to grow and scale your business. Keep scaling.

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective, and really well done. I think Doxa Talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talk to doxatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatalent. Com Bill G Again, that's doxatalent. Com Bill G One more time. Doxatalent. Com Bill G Check it out today.