Читать книгу The Game of Inches - Collin Nigel - Страница 7

In every interview I've conducted, without exception, one thing has stood out again and again. If there's such a thing as a silver bullet for business success, this is as close as you're ever going to get.

I started noticing it a while back while travelling through Australia's regions and remote areas on the Ingenious Oz Project. The realisation was a slow burn at first, an isn't that interesting? moment that became steadily more obvious, and more important. Then, when I began interviewing Start Up Australia's 50 top performers, it popped up again, right from the first conversation.

When I looked back over my own career, from my first business 30 years ago, I realised I'd done it myself without being explicitly aware of it or recognising just how vital it had been. In fact, the one time I didn't follow my instinct it bit me on the bum. In the early days of my consulting business I once tried stepping over the necessary intervening stages to jump directly to ‘overnight success'. It didn't work. Once I recognised I had missed something vital and stepped back, things began to take off again.

What is the one thing? Simply this: business is a game of inches.

It's not about a one-off disruptive event or inventing the next iPhone. It's about consistently finding ways to improve everything you do. It's a philosophy to constantly drive towards doing it better than everyone else. It's an obsession with finding the best ways to advance every part of your business, incrementally.

It's more than an obsession – it's a quest. The constant passion that every one of these entrepreneurs demonstrated for playing this game of inches floored me. When I asked John McGrath (who set out to build one of the world's best real estate companies) if this was how he built McGrath, he confirmed that it was.

He started his business with a vision: to be the best real estate company in the world. To make that happen, he focused on doing everything better in every way. He still does. As he said, ‘I recognise incremental improvement on a daily basis'. Business success and profitable growth are not about quantum leaps. They're about moving forward step by step, inch by inch.

At first glance, this idea might seem to contradict thinking big and aiming high. It might appear that playing the game of inches means you're playing small and thinking small. Not so. Siimon Reynolds, who built one the largest marketing companies on the planet, explained to me, ‘We must completely commit to constant improvement', adding, ‘That philosophy, over time, combined with the philosophy of aiming high, is pretty much all you need to succeed in business and in life. The rest is just detail'.

The game of inches is what makes big happen.

In the foothills of the Flinders Ranges is a remarkable business that does this exceptionally well. Kelly Engineering manufactures farm machinery, mainly diamond harrows and prickle chains used for paddock preparation, weeding, tillage, soil management and so on.

It started 40 years ago when farmer Peter Kelly wasn't totally happy with the machinery he had – and decided to make his own. Then he thought it would be a good idea to make a few extra and sell them to his neighbours so his machine would effectively cost him nothing. The word soon got around, and by the time he'd sold 30 units or so he realised he had a viable engineering business on his hands.

The game of inches is what makes big happen.

It wasn't an overnight thing. He didn't wake up one morning and decide to quit farming and take up engineering. Thirty farmers didn't all knock on his door one Sunday morning each with an order. The game of inches takes time, for good reason. But as the momentum slowly built, so did Peter Kelly's ability to meet it.

When I visited Shane Kelly, Peter's son, in 2013 he had a unique process in place that empowers their employees to constantly seek ways of improving every part of the business, so the business advances in every area. It's extremely simple. He asks his workers to come up with ideas that will improve their particular part of the business, and then to apply those ideas. Each week a team leaders' meeting focuses on the most innovative ideas. As Shane said, ‘The team leaders are expected to bring their diary with as many innovations and ideas as the guys have thought of during the week'.

Those ideas spring from practical problems they face in their own tasks. Solving the problems improves both their own daily work and the business. Kelly listed a range of examples: ‘What's holding us up this week? Waiting for the forklift every day because it's always over there, or this jig takes a lot of working because it doesn't load or unload easily, or why don't we shift that rack closer so we're not having to go over there and get stuff all the time. If we had a bigger loader, or two forklifts …' Shane actively encourages them to write down anything they think of and bring it to the weekly meeting.

The problems may not sound earth-shattering and the solutions may not be wildly innovative, but when you add up all of those small improvements, across the different areas of the business, over a year or ten it's massive. And the thinking is so simple, it's brilliant.

Since then Kelly has evolved and formalised the process by learning from and modelling Japanese operational efficiencies. In essence though, he suggested, ‘The same philosophy applies: What problems do you have? What constraints? What opportunities for improvement? Can you fix it yourself? Do you need other resources? Do you need higher input etc.? It's been extremely powerful and allowed us in the last 12 months to achieve world's best practice in employment efficiency'.

If you visit Kelly Engineering today and look at their big international business – they export their IP (intellectual property) to both North America and Europe, with plans for expanding into South America and Africa – you could easily think things have always been this way. But if you backtrack over the decades you'll see the evolution of a simple idea to solve a simple problem, which caught the attention of a few early adopters. You'll see the progression of that idea over many years, through many simple ideas to solve small problems, and the steady growth of a viable engineering business within Australian borders. You'll see the seemingly chance meeting with a potential American distributor, leading to international expansion. And throughout this evolution, you'll also see the constant improvement not just in their products but also in how they conduct business. Step by step, inch by inch.

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Kristy-Lee Billett is the founder of the Footprint Group, a recruitment and HR consulting business. It took her just seven days to set up her business, move into serviced offices, and be up and running. It sounds like an overnight success, yet her story started well before that.

In Billett's words, she fell into recruitment soon after studying forensic psychiatry at university. Floating around, unsure what to do for work, she went to see a recruitment agency and was offered a job. A little later, in 2006, she was working for one of the world's biggest recruiters when she had the impulse to start her own business. At the time she was heading up the organisation's newly launched commercial division. Just three weeks into her new role, however, her employers decided they didn't want to play in the commercial space after all. She recalls going home and thinking, I'm not happy with that. She resigned the next day.

The strange thing was that over the three weeks she headed up the commercial division they had been flooded with work. So she simply decided to do it herself, and over the next seven days she set up shop. Certainly she saw an opportunity in the market and homed in on it, but in reality it had taken years of experience and work to get her to that point.

Seven years later, the Footprint Group consists of a number of businesses in recruitment, HR services and SMSF (self-managed super fund) recruitment. Having started as a local operation on the Central Coast, about an hour north of Sydney, today the Footprint Group serves clients through the region and nationally. Billett won the Young Entrepreneur award in 2013, seven years after she launched the business.

As with Kelly Engineering, you could easily look at the Footprint Group and see only the success, rather than the gradual evolution and the years of experience behind it.

One of the major challenges businesses and entrepreneurs face is having an unrealistic expectation of how quickly a business will grow and become profitable. For about 90 per cent of those I interviewed it took between three and eight years to become profitable and successful. Not one of them saw overnight success. And yet we're bombarded with stories of the ‘instant' fortunes won by the very few. It's easy to look at the Facebooks of this world and imagine that all it takes is one brilliant idea and, voilà, you're a billionaire.

Australian actor Shane Jacobson, whose meteoric rise to success was on the back of the mockumentary movie Kenny, sums it up beautifully in his book title: The Long Road to Overnight Success. Perfect.

Think about it. The Footprint Group wasn't kick-started by a catalytic quantum leap, a sudden stroke of genius, but by a strong desire to do things differently and better. Billett's first tagline was ‘a fresh approach'. Over time, she has been very good at two things in particular that are vital in the game of inches: finding gaps in the market and finding ways of doing things better. For Footprint the game of inches is about constant, everyday disruption and reinvention.

Talking about this, Billett made a crucial point: ‘Over time, we really kept an eye on that market disruption mentality and some of the stuff we're developing at the moment is more along the lines of reinventing how things are done in the market'. This illustrates that disruption isn't always big, completely new or totally out there; it's disruptive because it's different. It's disruptive because no-one has done it before in that way, that well or in that market.

The game of inches is about constant, everyday disruption and reinvention.

As Siimon Reynolds put it, ‘Disruption is a moment, a tactic, a shift, and we must continually improve the disruption'. The game of inches also serves disruption – those breakthrough, Eureka ideas, big or small, behind business success. Yet success doesn't depend on being disruptive, because, as Siimon added, many successful businesses may actually never have had a disruptive moment, but will ‘endlessly improve until they were the best in their industry. You don't need to be disruptive but you do need to constantly improve'.

Constant improvement isn't just about improving a particular product or service. It's about improving your processes, your skills, your business model, your personal development, your vision, your mindset … If you want to be the best at what you do, you need to work consistently at improving everything you do.

The game of inches permeates every part of a business and every action you take. This is one of the greatest revelations you will ever have in business, because it's about changing what you do rather than changing who you are.