In This Chapter

Let’s assume you come across a best practice—either in this book or from another source—that you want to put into practice. How do you go about doing so? What are the most common implementation mistakes, and how can you avoid them?

Let’s look at an example. Your business sells magazine subscriptions to other businesses. You have read that one of the ways a large magazine subscription service retains new customers is by adding a free six-month subscription to a magazine with the purchase of a full-year subscription at a discounted rate—effectively giving six additional months to new customers at no cost. You have read that the large company has been very successful at this initiative and, in fact, has increased its annual retention rate by 20 percent after adopting this practice. This is certainly a best practice for them, but will it work for your smaller business?

You really do not know what your potential customers want—you haven’t asked them yet! Additionally, the margins associated with implementing such an initiative might not work for your smaller business. Can you really afford to offer this service?

A bit of research on your part—in this case a survey out to potential customers of your product—will give you a better idea of what will (and won’t) work for your business.

This chapter shows you how to implement a best practice successfully within your business, and also shows you how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls.

Driving best practices throughout any business is a difficult task that requires significant planning. But rather than thinking of planning as extra work, frame it as managing an important project on which your business’s success depends. In fact, that is just what you are doing. Best practices have the potential to take your business to the next level … or hold it back. Which outcome you experience depends on your ability to communicate the ideas effectively, win buy-in from your staff, consider the risks, and help employees adjust to the inevitable changes they will face in doing their jobs.

During the initial planning stages of implementing any best practice, you must think about these questions:

There are likely many areas where you can improve your business. You can’t do everything at once, though, so you must prioritize by focusing on those areas that will have the most positive impact on your business in the short term—in other words, where you will get the biggest bang for your buck.

Once you have addressed these questions, develop a project plan that includes these key components:

As the business owner, you need to ensure not only that you have set up the right plan, but also that you have chosen the right people to help you implement that plan. In some cases, you might find that the best people to implement a change are those who are actually doing the work on a daily basis. More often, you will provide the strategy and oversee the employees who implement the best practice plan you initiate.

Think of yourself as the cheerleader for this effort, not the quarterback! You need to draw the broad outlines of the plan, delegate appropriate authority to the right people, hold them accountable, inspire them, and check in regularly to assess the team’s progress. Your own list of responsibilities is already quite long. It includes …

While you will be relying on others to do some of the work, it is important that you, as the business owner, assume the ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of this effort. Let’s look at an example of a business owner’s responsibility in such an initiative.

Suppose you own a small business that creates custom gift baskets. Last holiday season you had a difficult time keeping up with orders and, out of 100 baskets shipped, 25 of them did not arrive on time, which meant that you had to issue full refunds to those customers. This has occurred two years in a row, and you don’t want to have the same problem this year. Let’s walk through your responsibilities as a business owner in improving the process of shipping your product during busy seasons.

First, you have determined that the process in need of improvement is the delivery of your products to your customers. Currently, 25 percent of your shipments during the holiday season are late. That is the baseline you are measuring against.

You appoint a team leader to head up a small group of employees to research shipping practices of other small local businesses, such as bookstores, gift shops, and flower shops. Additionally, you ask them to research how larger organizations such as Amazon. com, PC Connection, and other larger companies manage their shipping of product to customers. They do this research by reviewing websites where information on shipping is included and making telephone calls to local businesses to talk with the business owners.

Using the information they found, you and the team then start brainstorming ways to adapt it to your situation, market position, and available resources. Here are the initiatives you and the team come up with:

Notice that you do this brainstorming with the input of the employees who will actually be doing the work.

You and the team have also learned that many of the smaller businesses that ship products have staff who are specifically responsible for shipping rather than relying on all employees to help do the job. To help ensure success on the best practice being implemented for shipping during the busy season, you set up a department devoted to the task.

Your next step is to measure the success of your new practice for shipping with the goal of improving upon your late shipment rate of 25 percent.

As you can see in the example, by focusing on improving shipping, a vital component to this particular business’s growth has been identified. By improving shipment of product, this business will increase profits (no refunding customers for late shipments) and increase customer satisfaction overall.

Of key importance in any best practice initiative is ensuring that the relevant employees are involved in the process from the start. Whether you are adapting a best practice from this book, from a competitor in your industry, or from someone operating outside your industry, you must bear in mind that whatever changes are eventually made will affect how someone in your organization performs his or her job and interacts with your customers. Happy employees really do lead you to happy customers, so be sure you involve and engage all the members of the team that your new initiative will affect.

Involving employees is not optional. You must get your employees on board with the process of reviewing practices and making changes. You need to engage them—or at the very least, consult them—about everything connected to the best practice that will affect them.

One way to bring employees on board is to ask for their input on how the business is performing today and to identify opportunities for improvement. Ask your employees what resources they need to better perform in their roles and provide improved service to customers. What are some ways they have thought of to improve how they work? No doubt they have some ideas and may already be implementing some of those ideas individually.

Employees need to feel that they are part of the business and invested in its success. By encouraging them to find ways to improve how work is done, and carefully listening to their ideas, you will find that they are more committed to the plans you propose and that they have a greater stake in the business and its success.

Depending on the size of the effort you are undertaking, you may want to get consultants involved in the process. There are many such experts whose specialty is implementing best practices within a given field.

Many (perhaps most) small businesses do not have the budget necessary to bring in outside consultants. In fact, it’s likely that you bought this book because it represented a cost-effective alternative to developing a customized best practices plan with the help of a consultant.

If you do decide to use a consultant or other external best practice expert, we recommend you follow these best practices:

Most of all, remember that you are the expert on your business, not the consultant. The consultant will bring expertise in researching and implementing best practices, but you will need to partner with the consultant to bring the expertise about your particular business and its goals.

Be willing to think outside the box when it comes to getting outside help. Do you have any friends or family members who also run small businesses? Have they recently implemented best practices within their business? What are their lessons learned?

Don’t stop there. If you have friends and family members working for large corporations or nonprofit organizations, see how much of their expertise is relevant to your business. What are some of their best practices in areas you are looking to improve, such as manufacturing your product, shipping, customer service, selecting vendors, and so on? What can you learn from how larger organizations get the work done?

In every best practice implementation initiative, internal communication is a critical factor in your success. You cannot over-communicate with your employees.

Failure to communicate early and often as you implement best practices increases your chances of wasting your company’s valuable resources.

There are a variety of ways to ensure you are getting your message across and that your employees are willing to participate in the discussion and offer their opinions and suggestions. Certainly consider any or all of the following communication methods:

Don’t pick just one way to communicate; use a variety of methods. You’ll find you get increasingly more information as individuals become more willing to share information. You’ll also learn which employees are not quite on board or are worried about changes, which will give you an opportunity to follow up with them individually in a casual conversation.

Change management is a key issue in best practice implementation. Most of us are uncomfortable with sudden change, especially when we feel it is thrust upon us. Unanticipated change often makes us afraid of what the future holds—and makes us wonder whether or not we can be a part of that future.

When employees are fully prepared for an impending change, they are more relaxed and accepting of that change. When anxiety levels are lower, you are more likely to experience a successful transition from “the way we were” to the way things need to be.

When planning a best practice implementation and considering the change management implications, think about these questions:

By answering these questions, you have a better understanding of who on your staff can help to lead the charge of implementing best practices and who needs more handholding to be comfortable with the changes ahead.

Once you have some employees who support your initiative, use those individuals to help you get the others on board with the changes that are underway. Employees may feel more comfortable with change when they know other employees support it.

Take the time necessary to ensure that all employees are comfortable with the changes and confident in their abilities to do the job as it will now need to be done. This includes providing the training for any new software or technology that might now be required for their job and ensuring they have support as they begin using new best practices and processes. Ideally, you should provide your people with the time to learn all the new components of their job before you hold them accountable for attaining major new goals.

Staged implementation enables you to roll out the new best practices and processes slowly throughout the business. Using such an approach enables you to work out kinks that may arise and make adjustments and modifications before everyone in the business is affected. Staged implementation also enables you to keep the rest of the business running smoothly when you are planning a particularly large best practice implementation process.

Let’s look at an example. Your business is a local winery. You want to change your wine production process to expand your operation. By changing your process, you’ll be able to bottle more wine to meet increasing customer demand. You currently have two production lines.

Rather than convert both production lines for the new process, you decide to take a staged approach and convert one line to work with the new process and keep one line running under the old process. This enables you to keep production running to meet customer demand for your product while trying out the new process for production on the second manufacturing line. This gives you an opportunity to work out any potential issues and ensure a successful implementation when you roll out the new process for production throughout your business.

When contemplating a staged implementation approach, consider these best practices:

Use these best practices to ensure a smooth transition to the new way of getting things done in your business.

Best practices change as business needs and objectives change. Changes in competition for a product or service, changing demands of the customer, or a combination of the two, are likely to create the need for you to change the way your business operates and the best practices that make your business a success.

For example, if you find that competitors are coming out with new products regularly and significantly ahead of your introduction of new products, you should look at your development practices and processes and revise them to decrease the time it takes your business to introduce new products.

Of critical importance in any best practice implementation is consistently evaluating how well the best practice is working for your business and making revisions as necessary to keep working toward perfection.

Don’t hesitate to adopt the recommendations and suggestions of those doing the job. The employees who are using the new best practice day in and day out will have the best insight on how to improve upon what is being done.

Evaluate your best practices on a regular basis. Depending on your business that may be monthly, quarterly, twice a year, or annually. The more changes you make in your business, the more frequently you will want to evaluate your practices for getting work done.

Of course, you need to ensure that any best practices are aligned to your specific objectives. Set metrics to measure your progress. For example, if you want to increase your potential sales leads by 20 percent quarterly and have put new practices in place to meet that objective, you’ll want to evaluate monthly how you are progressing toward the objective. If, after the second month, you only see a 1 or 2 percent increase in leads, you’ll want to look at how you might adjust your new practices to get closer to meeting your goal.

When evaluating your new best practices, don’t forget to take into consideration the comments of those who are using those new practices on a daily basis to perform their roles. Ask for their input on how things are going, what’s working, and what’s not. What additional changes might be made to continue to improve their job performance?

Consider conducting business impact and return-on-investment (ROI) studies of best practices within key areas of your business. This will help you to understand the effectiveness of the best practice by showing the monetary value of what was implemented and rolled out.

Your best practices need to be updated as your business grows, the economy changes, new industry regulations are adopted, and new competitors enter the marketplace. When you experience any of these changes, you need to review your practices to determine whether you need to update them to remain competitive.

When you are ready to update your best practices, look again at what others are doing around you. What changes have they made to remain successful? Select a team of your best employees from a variety of areas throughout the business to help in updating your best practices.