Why Good Business Systems Fail in Practice
I once had a manager in one of my stores who was not following our process. The store was floundering. So I sat down with him and we went through the business model page by page. I asked him directly on each page whether he knew how to do it, and I told him that if the answer was no, I was there to teach him. He said yes to everything. I had him sign every single page.
The next month, the store lost $30,000.
I let him go, and I moved in a guy who had been working with me in the store for a year and a half. The month after that, the store netted $30,000. That is a $60,000 swing in thirty days, and here is what did not change:
Same staff on the floor.
Same location.
Same advertising spend.
Same technology and same software.
One person changed. That’s it.
Why implementation is so hard
Most people do not fail because they have a bad system. They fail because they get bored.
The system is repetitive by design. It is the same steps in the same order every day, and after a few months people want to tinker with it. They want to change it and make it their own. That urge is what breaks stores.
Pick any large company you want. Coca-Cola, or anybody else that has been winning for decades. They have a system and you do not get to vary from it. They already know what works and what does not, and the entire business is built on doing that thing the same way every time. The discipline to keep running the play that already works is the actual skill.
The owner's job in all of this
You cannot manage this from a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet will tell you whether the numbers are going up or down. It will not tell you why.
There is a principle from Tom Peters called managing by wandering around. Around here I say you have to be “in the trenches with the wrenches.” You walk the building, you ask questions, you watch what people actually do rather than what the report says they did.
That matters in both directions. A bad month on paper is not always a bad month in reality. Sometimes the store invested in something. Sometimes ten things happened at once that will not happen again. You will only know which one it is by standing in the building and asking.
What to take from this
Get the system right, put the right people on it, and then keep the people accountable to running it the way it was written. Implementation is where almost all of the failure happens, and it is the only one of the three you have to renew every single day.
