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:
#918 Live Life By Design
#917 You Can Not Be All Things to All People
#916 Buy, Don’t Build
#915 Dance withTime
#914 Seven Figure Sales Teams
#913 - Creating Content for People With Short Attention Spans
#912 Lessons from Retail
#911 Building Community
#910 - Smats, Guts, Luck and Friends
#909 Use AI for Your Home Page
#908 - Do You Have a Peer Group? You Should
#907 Evaluate and Embrace New Technology
#906 Let AI Tell Your Story
#905 I Love Evergreen Content
#904 Navigating Growth Amid Economic Uncertainty
#903 Learn to Harness Chaos
#902 A Different Perspective
#901 The Key to Success is in the Implementation
#900 Go to The Gym
#899 Managing Good and Bad Stress
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