3 Ways To Simplify Your Business

In this podcast, Rick and Matt discuss 3 ways to simplify your business. Simplification keeps you focused, and it also helps to make your business scalable. As entrepreneurs, we can often be guilty of overcomplicating our businesses by adding layers of complexity that aren’t part of your key business strategy.

“KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid”

The KISS principle stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. It is a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960 and coined by Kelly Johnson, lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works (creators of the Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes). The principle states that most systems work better when they are simple rather than complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

In a previous podcast we discussed Keeping It Simple With Occam’s Razor – The Occam’s razor relates to shaving things down to the simplest solution. Entrepreneurs are always solving problems, but sometimes we make things more complex than they need to be. All things being equal, the simplest solution is the best solution.

Let’s discuss how to keep it simple.

3 Ways to Simplify Your Business

1. Consistency

A study conducted by McKinsey and Company showed how consistency in customer service throughout the life of a brand’s relationship with a customer not only ensures satisfaction, but it also builds trust and loyalty that keeps your customers from venturing elsewhere. They identified that a company doesn’t have to shoot for 100% customer experience all the time, but if they consistently deliver at 50% all the time, they will produce 20% better customer service scores, 20% higher revenues, and 20% less cost of servicing those customers.

Now it is incredibly difficult to reach a high customer experience rating and make it scalable to grow your business without a simple system and process in place to train your employees to deliver that consistent customer experience. So keep your system simple to coach your business to the lowest common denominators and perform at a higher customer experience. Make sure you hit that 50% every single time and all your coaches hit that simple strategy every single time.

2. Focus: Keep The Main Business the Main Thing

Focus on your core revenue model and what your key service offerings are to support your core business. Keep that focus until you have completely achieved your key business and revenue objectives before you add on more complexity with additional revenue streams. In the fitness industry, your principal goal is to build membership and have a high retention rate. At Alloy, we have a 97% retention rate. So we recommend after you get your revenue goal with over 120 or more clients, we focus on consistency and keeping the churn below 3%. We focus on that consistent customer experience. Don’t get sidetracked on other programs that don’t help your primary business focus and might increase the churn rate. Don’t get distracted with other revenue streams and services that don’t support your client’s goals and may affect your main clientele’s customer satisfaction.

Questions to Ask Before Considering Additional Services

Why should I offer this new service?
Will it help all the current customers achieve their goals?
Is it in our core business model and how competent will you be?
How much education, time, energy, and attention will this idea need to make it happen?
Who is going to run it?
How much will it cost to run it?
Have we already maximized our primary business goals?

3. Who Not How

If there is a function in your business that needs your attention, it is best to choose someone that is an expert in the subject rather than teach yourself or someone else to handle it. If you need financial, marketing, software services, hire an expert in those fields rather than try to do them yourself. Keep with your principal business.

For example, if you want to develop an app for your business, hire someone that is in the business of designing apps. It wouldn’t be cost effective to develop an app for one fitness studio. If you’re in the fitness business, that is your core business. Once you try to develop an app, that makes you now in the app business. It is a completely different business model.

Tune in to learn how to keep our business simple and what this looks like in the fitness industry.

Key Takeaways

How to be consistent (03:50)
Why companies that provide a consistent customer experience win (04:47)
Keep the main thing the main thing (09:02)
Don’t add things that add complexity to your business (11:28)
Who not How (16:46)