Small business owners can sidestep recessions by ruthlessly focusing on their core activity, the one thing that keeps customers coming back. FedEx prioritizes logistics over truck-cleaning because logistics is the heartbeat of their promise. Identify your queen bee role and build everything else around it.
Yeah, I think all indicators are we're going into a recession. This inflation that's happening now, we may be approaching, hopefully not, but hyperinflation. And the only way to get in front of it is by being proactive. Now, I believe, and I truly do believe this, that we as small business owners can make a choice not to participate in a recession. Meaning you don't just have to roll over and take the punch. Large corporations kind of forced into it when they're serving a mass community, they can't, they can't retain all those customers, they're going to lose a percentage. But a small business, they may lose some customers, but there's opportunities to gain those. One or two or 10 or 20, you lose. We're talking about smaller numbers, which in this case is to our advantage. But one of the things that we need to do to not participate in a recession is to build efficiency. The more you can get done with less resources translates to greater sustainability, translates to greater profitability. So one of the things I tackled, actually maybe I'll start right in the heart of it, is the concept of the qbr. And we were talking offline about this, but the QBR is the queen bee role. Essentially, it is the essence, the heartbeat of a company. What I mean by this, it's the activity within a company that most supports its promise to its consumers. So how I wrote about before I did this kind of reverse logic thing, you what all your QBRs could be and then you kind of hone in on it, but it actually caused confusion. So I'm approaching it from a different angle. And we're starting off with what I call the big promise. What is of all the promises we make to our clients, what's the most important? And an example with FedEx, we promise to deliver your packages on time. You know, if it absolutely, positively needs to be delivered overnight. Now, FedEx has a lot of other things. They have a packaging department, they have large shipment containers, and they can manage large shipments that are outside the ordinary. They have print shops. They acquired Kinko's long time ago. Those are all things they do. Those are all promises they deliver on. But of all the things, they are staking their reputation mostly on their ability to deliver overnight. So once we know what our promise is, and if you don't know your promise, it's real simple. Call your customers and say, what do you think of us? What's the most important thing we do for you? Why do you hire us? And look for the common thread that's likely the big Promise. Now, you can choose to change that if you wish, but that's what the customer seeing you. So I would lean into it. And then once we know the promise, the big commitment we make to our customers, that one thing we ask ourselves. Of all the activities, what single activity is the most important in delivering that? Now, you may do many things, like FedEx does many things to deliver packages overnight. They have people driving trucks, they gotta fuel the trucks. So fueling trucks is important. They have to figure out the routes, they have to do all these things, including they have logistical software, software that manages and tracks all packages of all those things. They prioritize at what most delivers on delivering packages on time. And it's logistics, it's knowing where packages are going to be at certain times so they can continue on their route. So that's the most important. All those things are important, but that's the most important. Then what FedEx needs to do and what we need to do is once we know what our QBR is, the queen B roll heart of the business, we always must make sure that's humming along. It must always be served. You can't say, you know what? Today we're not going to worry about logistics. We're just going to worry about cleaning our trucks and making more shiny. Today, no, we got to focus and ensure that the core activity is always working. And just to put a little ribbon on this, if FedEx says tomorrow, you know what, we're just going to clean our trucks. That's all we're going to do. Let's stop doing logistics. All the people that support that division, let's move into truck cleaning because we want the shiniest trucks in the world. What will happen probably a week from now is the headlines in New York Times will say FedEx has the shiniest trucks in the industry, but they don't know where an effing package is. It's all lost. Now, conversely, FedEx could say, let's take the people who are polishing those trucks, excuse me, and let's move them to the logistics department and help out. Now, the headline a week from now says FedEx has the dirtiest trucks in the world. But gosh darn it, every single package has been delivered. In the first scenario where they ignore logistics, the mighty FedEx that's worth billions and billions of dollars goes out of business pretty quickly. In the second scenario where they stop polishing and cleaning the trucks, it may hurt them, it may injure them, but their core competency of logistics stays in place and they continue to.
