Is the Process Repeatable?

Michael Killen: Hey there and welcome back. Is the process repeatable? Driving efficiency, increasing margin and standardizing our practice. In this video, I’m going to talk about how products and services only become profitable when they are repeatable. It helps us standardize pricing, reduce costs and increasing efficiency. So even if you ignored everything else in this course, everything else in this video series, you have to have a standardized approach even if you’re still delivering the results. Even if you are . . . decide that you don’t want to go down the course route or the products route or the scalability route or any of that, you still have to have a standardized process that you deliver to your customers.

This is the biggest thing that eats into your costs. This is the biggest thing as a consultant, as a designer, as a developer, as a marketing consultant, as a single person entrepreneur and micro business. If you don’t standardize your product and delivery and if you make everything bespoke, you will constantly be searching for new customers because your margins will be razor-thin. Is the process repeatable? We’re going to talk about the delivery of the product. We’re going to look at the actual product service itself. Sticking to the process and are you better than McDonald’s? Which is one of my favorite kind of frameworks for looking at a repeatable product.

So delivery of the product is kind of like thinking does every customer reach a sale and a payment in the same way? When we deliver work to customers, in the previous module and video, we talked about having a standardized payment platform where all of you customers can go to and you can take credit payments really simply and easily without you having to change it up. If you’re having to manually create those invoices and manually send them out, all of your customers are reaching that payment in a slightly different way and you want to standardize that process as much as possible. You want to standardize where they go and how they reach a sales page, for example, as much as possible or how they get in contact with you as much as possible.

Also, the delivery time needs to be standardized. A lot of people, again, they struggle with standardizing other aspects of their business, so when their customer says, “Yeah, I want to work with you,” it’s, “oh, okay, well, I’ll deal with you in mid-October,” or it’ll be two weeks or, “yes, I can come around tomorrow.” The more standardized your delivery time, the more likely you are to find margin and profit because you are able to say to the customer, “This is the result. This is the timeframe that you’re get.” And it also helps with like your branding and your trust because that’s what professionals do. Does each customer receive the same of level of service? This is a huge bar to set and it’s possibly-, possibly one of the most important ones because we’re saying even though we’re going to standardize our product and standardize our service and standardize our delivery, we want to make sure that everyone has the same level of service.

I want to make sure that every customer is delighted. The interesting thing is that by standardizing our products and by standardizing our services, which you increase the rate at which people are happy with that service because we’re standardizing it. We’re getting better at it. There’s less room for error. We’re also less likely to make things up as we go and make things up on the fly. And it turns out that customers are happier with a standardized service. The product and the services will also needs to be standardized. That was kind of talking about how do people get in contact with you, how do they confirm that they want to work with you and now, we can look at the actual product that they get, the product or the service that they get. Is the journey that you take the customer on, the same each time?

Customers might think they want customization, and we’ll talk about that in a bit, but, actually, what they want is the same journey that every else has been on. It’s extremely important that we standardize that. Is the result the same every single time? If you’re helping a customer develop a faster website or build a new Android application or finding new customers or what it is that you help someone do, is the result the same every time? Are they always going to lose weight? Are they always going to be able to take better photographs? Are they always going to be able to sell things online? If you’re able to standardize the result that someone gets, that’s a huge part of it. And also, would your customers be happier with a standardized process? And my argument is absolutely yes, they would be.

Interestingly, one of the big reasons that people fail to standardize is because they listen too much to what their customers want and an actual fact, customers only want what they perceive to be as choice. A lot of the time, what they really want boils down to what your expertise is and if you narrow down what it is that you can offer and standardize your products and find customers who are willing to sue that process as supposed to kind of changing it up every single time, you’re going to find that your margins increase, your efficiency increases and your profits increase. So you have to stick to the process. Absolutely tweak and make improvements along the way.

No product is perfect and is imperative that you have course, make improvements along the way and you listen to your customers and listen to that feedback, but don’t change the process for every new customer. The amount of times when we use to build websites and our kind of thing that we love to do was converting blog traffic into email subscribers. That was what we were really good at. It’s what we standardized our process around so we had a series of checklists and documentations. Even though, at the time, it was just me delivering it and then I had someone else do it and someone else do it and so on and then I taught other people how to do it. Even though we had a standardized process, we still had customer say, “Oh, are you also able to, you know, increase our website S.E.O. or search engine optimization or image compression? Are you able to add a payment form on it? Are you able to add e-commerce for one?”

And I actually turn that well down. I said, “No. I’m afraid not. I can refer you one to someone who does.” But we don’t change the process just because that’s the result you think you want, instead, we’re going to stick to this and do this really, really well. You don’t walk in to a McDonald’s and say to them, “I was wondering if you can make me some kind of pasta dish? Do you, guys, have some pasta available? And they go, “No. We’ve got what’s on the menu,” and that’s important, rather than customizing every single order. Customers want 99% standard and 1% custom. A good example of this is the website redbubble.com, whether you custom t-shirts, in fact, that’s where our . . . this one from.

They have a standardized process and colors for all of their work. It’s the 1% kind of the little-, the little motif or image or pattern that you put on. The colors are all standardized. The delivery process is standardized. The prices are standardized. Even though it’s multiple people putting it on, they’re able to source, uh, materials and work and all these . . . the printing and the process because they’re buying in bulk. But customers want a standardized process. They want a standard size t-shirt, for example. All of their large are exactly the same. All of their medium are exactly the same. What people want is a 1% customization to their business and to their kind of vision that they see. What you should be changing, as well, is the message, not the product.

The biggest mistake, I think, people make is they try to change the product in order to sue the customer, instead, it’s usually the message or the offer and the result that you’re talking about. It’s the marketing and the sales that you should be changing rather than the process. The process is absolutely fine. The process gets result. Have faith in the process. Have faith in your process. If it’s what you’ve done before, I’m sure it’ll be absolutely fine for the second customer and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth. If you’ve helped someone lose weight, then you can help 10 people lose weight. If you’ve helped one person develop an android app, you can help 10 people develop and android app.

The point is that you often have to change the message and the offer, not the product. So one of the questions that we often ask is can you make a better burger than McDonald’s? Robert Kiyosaki often asks this from Rich Dad Poor Dad, and everyone says, “Yeah, of course, I can. I can make a way better burger than McDonald’s.” He’ll go, “Okay, well, take me through your recipe.” And every single person has a slightly different recipe and a slightly different method and yet, no-, no one here . . . no one who answers that question, “Yes,” is as big as McDonald’s. The reason McDonald’s is so big or one of the reasons they’re so big is because they’ve standardized their process.

They’re able take people who are 14, 15 years old and give them a process whereby they can make a burger and they could be shipped to halfway around the world and make the exact same burger through the same process. Now, yeah, you might argue about the quality of their product, that’s irrelevant. But if we look at S.A.S. applications like sales force, sales force deliver you sales force as a C.R.M. and a Cloud-based system. They don’t say to you, “Okay, well, what kind of colors would you want, what kind of design would you want?” They don’t ask . . . offer any of that, they’ll say, “This is the product and this is the standard install and delivery process that we have for our software. Here’s our standardized training so that you could use this system and if any of you move to another company who also use a sales force, you can use the exact same system.”

I don’t have a process. It’s a creative freeform kind of process. You do. You absolutely do have a process. In fact, I guarantee it to you. You would have a process if all of your customers ask for the same thing. If every single one of your customers gave you the exact same problem and the exact same want and the exact same result, you would end up developing a process. Most of the time, it’s because you haven’t been delivering the same results for every single customer. As soon as you start focusing on the same results for each customer, that is what allows you to create a process.

If you can teach . . . sorry, you can teach it . . . you can teach it if you focus on the result that you were delivering. And a big part of this is your ability to teach other people how to take care of this process. What we’re trying to do is standardize a transformation. If you’re able to take someone from A to B, your job is to standardize that transformation. If some people want to go to C or D or F or Zed, there’s nothing you can do about that. Your job is to help people standardize that process and standardize that transformation that you take people on. Deviations create expenses. This is why staff is so expensive. Usually, not because they cost you, you know, because of insurance and salaries, it’s usually because the deviations that they add to the process.

The more standardize your process and the more rigorous your process, the fewer deviations they are. When we work with customers and they say, “Oh, can we do this slightly differently? Can we do it like this?” And you say, “Yes,” that creates a deviation which creates expense. It reduces your experience with this standard transformation and adds expenses to your margin, a little ease into your margin. So any time a customer wants a deviation away from your standard operating procedure, you are reducing your ability to scout and you’re reducing your margin. So your action for this video is to write out the results that you get your customers and that you help them achieve.

Then, examine the standard journey and the process that you take them on for each one of those results. Think about those results that you get them and then think about the process that you take them on. Is the process repeatable? We’ve talked about delivery of the products through standardized payment and standardized delivery times and how they physically receive it and how they access it. We’ve talked about the products and the service themselves. For example, when someone orders a book from me and buys from Single to Scale, obviously, I don’t rewrite it and reprint it myself and write it in a different manner, they get a standardized product. They get the exact same product.

When someone joins a gym, they don’t buy new gym equipment and they don’t change the gym equipment every time someone else joins, you have a standard training process and a standard set of gym equipment. Stick to the process. Customers like to think they like customization, but, actually, they don’t. They like-, they like standardization. They like process. And can you build a better burger than McDonald’s? It’s not about building a better burger, it’s about having a better process. Thanks very much for watching and I will see you on the next video.