Wanting to improve is almost instinctual to most of us.
We want to improve our relationships with people we care about, we want to improve our quality of life, we want to improve our job satisfaction levels and if you own a business, you definitely want it to improve.
Improving a business can mean generating more profits, increased customer satisfaction, or just better consistency and efficiency.
What is the first thing most of us do we want to better our business or any other part of life for that matter?
We dig deep until we find that one thing that is causing all the problems that are holding it back.
We try to find that one quality that is making us less charming, that one coworker or boss that’s making the job unsatisfactory, or that one bottleneck that’s holding up business.
The fancy name for this is root cause analysis. Sometimes it’s intuitive. At other times, you pull up some spreadsheets and pivot tables to find that one problem.
Only, after you are done solving that problem, you are still not moving forward as well as you think.
Why is that?
Well, there never was just one problem. Sure, one problem might be bigger and more important, but it was never the only problem.
Just one bad sentence will not make this article seem horrible. If you find that this is not a very good article, there is a lot more wrong with it than one bad sentence.
What might seem like one big problem in your business or in your life, it’s actually a cluster of one or bigger problems surrounded by smaller problems.
For instance, if you can’t wake up early, it’s easy to chalk it up to laziness, but if you really look at it, it might not be that simple. There's more to it.
Insignificant problems can combine and become fairly significant problems.
Let’s continue our example of not being able to wake up as early as we’d like.
Let’s get hypothetical, shall we?
Say you want to wake up at 5 AM so that you can exercise and get to work at 8 AM, but you are not able to. Maybe you watch TV till 2 AM in the morning.
Then you examine and find that you watch TV till 2 AM in the morning because that’s how long it takes for you to get rid of the stress you brought home from work.
Why do you get so stressed at work? Maybe because you don’t get enough sleep and if you do sleep longer, you are late for work and that causes trouble for you at the office.
Now, what’s the root cause of all your worries here? Why can’t you wake up at 5 AM in the morning in this hypothetical situation?
What is the one thing that’s stopping you from waking up early, getting your exercise in and getting to work on time and in high spirits?
You might be tempted to find that the TV is the root of all your problems. I will agree that TV is not great for you, but is it truly the only issue? All you do if you stop watching TV in this situation is letting the stress build up inside of you and possibly make it even harder for you to function.
The real culprit is stress you might say. I agree that stress is bad, but you are not just stressed for no reason. There’s got to be something causing it and that something is a lack of sleep, no?
So, is sleep the root cause of your problems? You can’t sleep because you are stressed. You are stressed because you can’t sleep.
To alleviate your position, you will have to fix your sleep, reduce the time spent watching TV and not be late to work. Maybe you try to sleep early one weekend, wake up early and sleep early again.
You continue this into the work week and you will find that you wake up at 5 AM, get to work on time, get stuff done, get back home less stressed because you were a ball of energy after a good night's sleep.
You don’t have to watch as much TV as you usually do and you get to bed early. Problem solved.
Now, what’s all this got to do with your business?
Well, if you are not moving forward as fast as you’d like, you’ve obviously got something holding you back.
Chances are, you already know about this. You are most likely already looking into it.
You might even find that one thing that’s holding you back. You solve it only to find that it wasn’t that big a problem after all. Your troubles still persist.
If this has already happened to you, we might have an answer why.
One bottleneck does not a business break.
Jim McKelvey, the cofounder of the payments company Square attributes its success to something he calls an Innovation Stack.
Simply put, an innovation stack is the stack of all the solutions that you have come up with that combine to form your business.
To use Square as an example and simplifying their Innovation Stack, their stack consists of a cool gadget, a simplified user policy, and a low fee. The way they combine is what makes Square unique.
If you go down deeper, there’d be a lot more than that. Those are just the larger pieces of the stack.
Your business too is a stack of solutions. If you just sit down and make a list, you will find the pieces in your own innovation stack.
Look closely at them. You might think that your sales team is not doing a good enough job.
But maybe, your user policy is very complicated and your sales team cannot get people to look past that. Maybe, you need a better sales team and a better user policy.
If one part of your stack is behaving in a less than satisfactory way, chances are that the pieces of the stack that this piece depends on are not great either.
We faced this problem first hand at Salesa. Let me demonstrate.
We have a killer product. We have built a bot engine like no other. Businesses and individuals can create bots that can hold full-fledged conversations, make decisions and take action.
All it takes is a few minutes and you can use it for free. But we had trouble generating leads because we were not sure how to move forward.
We had an amazing engineering team, a great sales team and a whole lot of grit, determination and skill. We doubted everything, from our product to our level of skill. We found nothing to complain about there.
Nothing explained our predicament.
We did a little root cause analysis. We found that we had a very minor problem that was holding things up – a bottleneck. The problem was, we had no presentations, no graphics and no copy to use for marketing and sales.
There are understandable mistakes and there are mistakes that are just sad and this happened to be a very sad and lame mistake.
Then we sat down to create presentations. That’s when we realized that not having presentations was not the only problem.
The documentation to use our software could be better, the website could be better, there could be live demos to test our software and a whole bunch of issues that no amount of PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator or content writing could fix.
Without fixing all the minor issues that seem insignificant on their own, just creating PowerPoints, graphics and content would do nothing.
It wasn’t a single big problem. It was a bunch of small and insignificant problems.
Root cause analysis is well and good. But, don’t stop there. Examine your whole stack. Improve every piece of it.
The small compound improvements will deliver much more significant results than improving one single piece every could.
If you’ve read so far, then I’d like to tell you that we are very grateful. We have just begun blogging as a way to drive traffic to our website. We wanted to provide a source for highly informative and actionable articles about business and technology.
This article has nothing to do with our product, but we decided we wanted to offer all the value we can, even if does us no good.
We will get better at creating content and hope to create more value for you in the future.
If you are looking to upgrade your team and would like to try out A.I employees that can act as sales people, customer support staff or anywhere else, consider using Salesa.
It’s free for basic use and will stay that way. If you are a heavy user and decide that you need to upgrade to a premium plan, that’s just $ 100 a month as well.
If you have any queries or want to contact us for any reason, you can drop us an email at contact@salesa.org.
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