When I was Vice President of Creative Services at Conseco, we were always out of literature for key products. In the insurance business literature is all you have to sell, so these outages would cripple our sales team. Our out of stock list was routinely close to 300 different items and climbing. While we had numerous meetings on the subject nothing ever changed.
So I stopped talking about procedures and policy and asked a simple question "If our goal was a back order level of 100 what would we do?"
Defining a specific target, instead of vague "get better" gave a focus to our discussions. Every day we knew exactly how far we were from our target.
As an added incentive, I offered to take the print team to any restaurant in town if we reduced our back orders to 100 by September. 1. The date gave us the sense of urgency we needed to keep this in the forefront of our discussions.
We kicked off every production meeting with a brief conversation about the back-order list and the ideas started flowing. We instituted a "red flag" for any project associated with back order items. Every team, editors, designers, writers and account executives agreed if a red tag landed on their desk it was their first priority.
Slowly the numbers started to improve; We posted the daily results on the way so we could see our progress in real time. On September 1, we went to lunch at Cafe Nora.
There are several important lessons for small business owners in this story:
#731 Vacation-Proof Your Business
#730 What Makes You Remarkable
#729 Buying Journey
#728 Follow Your Passion and Make Money Along the Way
#727 Build Your Super Toolkit
#726 Three Truths of Marketing
#725 Morning Routine
#724 Do You Always Have This Effect on Women?
#723 Full Circle Marketing
#722 Influence Marketing
#721 How To Find The Best Solution
#720 Evergreen Content for Lawyers and Everyone Else
#719 Find Your Story
#717 Grow Your Network with a Podcast
#716 Find the Yin to Your Yang
#715 Simple Steps to Grow A Mastermind Group
#714 Six Figure Freelancer
#713 Transform Business Cards Into Contacts
#712 Networking Animals
#711 Managing Through Chaos
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