Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement

As the CEO of an SME, you’re already spending a large amount of time trying to improve your business. Long hours spent writing goals and objectives, setting timelines, educating management and employees, and prioritizing your endless list of daily, weekly, and monthly obligations only seem to keep you running on the treadmill but effectively staying in the same place.

 You need to ask yourself:

• With all your effort and heroic endurance, why aren’t things any different?
• Why are some other businesses steadily achieving their goals and meeting their financial benchmarks when you have been struggling so long and so hard?
• What is the difference between your business and a high-performing business, one that is regarded as excellent and highly successful? 

It’s in your approach.

It’s not always what you do, but the way you do it. Let’s say that again. The WAY you introduce your improvement initiatives is the key difference between success and continuing struggles through the mud of inertia.

To build and maintain a high performing business, you need to implement improvements based on a management system that supports the changes and maximizes their effectiveness. Once implementing change is accepted by all as the new way of doing things, the compounding effects of steady and permanent improvements result in high performance.

Our approach does just that.  It addresses the 5 prerequisites for excellence that form the basis of the MBE Framework. It is holistic and systematically addresses the key requirements for high performance. And it does this in a way that is achievable for small to medium businesses. SMEs cannot simply be treated as small versions of large businesses because they have unique characteristics. Here are some of them:

1. They often have limited financial resources to invest in new ways of doing things.
2. Most employee training is unstructured, ad-hoc, and in-house, delivered with little or no professional support staff.
3. Owners / CEOs / Managers often spend most of their time working IN the business, with little time to work ON the business.
4. Owners / CEOs / Managers often try to control every aspect of the business and fail to delegate enough.
5. Immature or irrelevant processes and ineffective IT support systems often result in reactive firefighting when things go wrong.
6. A top-down, hierarchical approach to strategy deployment is often limited by the inability to allocate resources flexibly and swiftly across organizational unit boundaries to where they are needed most.

 The My Business Excellence approach is designed for your SME business. The step by step sequence sets out what you need to do and when. It all starts with the 3-month FOUNDATION phase. Here you will…

• Identify and agree the Key Processes that RUN your business
• Create accountability through Key Process Managers
• Formulate your strategic Objectives
• Set up KPIs to track only the right strategic and operational things
• Put in place Knowledge Management processes and infrastructure 
• Begin delivering improvements through quarterly projects aligned with your strategy