Executives often wrestle with when to support an initiative to improve business. Their staff may not want to push the idea until it's "really serious." Here's a suggestion on how to take a step back and look at "What do you give up if you keep waiting?"

1. Why Wait To Improve Your Business? OR… The Cost Of Doing Nothing
Your company is doing well, making money. It does so in spite of some known, but
ignored, issues. No one really feels pain at present, do they? There is no “burning
platform.”
Sometime in the future, you instinctively know, one or more issues will
become a noticeable pain. Continuing to ignore an issue no longer
works (I call it “taking mental Tylenol”).
Once the “mental Tylenol” effect wears off, people will start to pay
attention. It could take a year or more.
Finally, management will take action to recover. They will call it a step
to improve performance. But, is it? I don’t think so.
Let’s take a look at this scenario:
Today your company is performing at a certain level (profitability, sales volume, net promoter score, etc.).
Let’s index that and say we are at
The problem we ignore for a year drags us down 15% to
Your management team says they can improve by 20% next year, which brings us to
In my books, that’s NOT an improvement, it’s only a recovery (102 v 100).
But, what if we decided not to wait, to get started now?
We’re at the same starting point as above
We implement the same improvement plan (20%), which takes us to
And a year later that continuing improvement gets us to an index of
What did waiting cost you?
By doing nothing until things get worse,
• You’ve incurred further declines in performance (85 v 100)
• You’ve got less ROI to address the issue (and the effort and cost to remediate is likely higher)
• You’ve likely hurt your customers more
• You’re managing by reaction instead of by anticipation.
Isn’t that 42 point difference after 2 years attractive? Even half of it?
For more about Len Green, please visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/len-green-1a676
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85
102
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• Customer complaints rise
• Orders ship late
• Invoicing errors delay DSO
• Quality is declining
• Processes cannot scale
• Staff attrition rises