Would you spend five weeks improving your company?

Dealing with your daily business you will be approached multiple times by different specialists to solve your problems and revolutionize the way you work. Let’s be honest, even if their product is a good fit for you, you might turn them down. What should you consider during your decisions?

Reasons why you shouldn’t improve:

What I experience a lot of times is that business owners tend to cut off discussions about improvements and optimization due to the lack of time, budget and interest. These are seemingly good ways to decide on whether you want to move forward or not, but they lack strategical thinking.

Reasons why you should improve:

According to research it is harder and harder to find and retain employees and being obsolete in terms of technology doesn’t help either. Visit a job fair and look around what is trending – everyone wants to work high tech, be part of a trendy company with applications and devices that almost figure out automatically what you want to do. Jumping into all the modernization can be a way to make yourself more desired on the job market.

Have a method to evaluate the developments:

If you have a decision to make, between staying as is or opting in for an improvement – as weird as it may sound I would suggest using a comic for benchmark on realizing how much time you lose now, compared to what your improved process/system/application/service could work.

If you spend 30 minutes extra on a task every day, this will chew up 5 whole weeks of your time in 5 years.

To get the math right just see how much time you will spend on the task in the lifetime of your company and just add a monetary value to the time lost. Finally, compare it to the cost of the improvement proposed. This by itself can make a go-no go decision smoother.

Accept that numbers may lie:

You might also go for or cancel a development plan even if the numbers say differently. You might consider the freed-up time and find that you could start a new business line with it – or consider legal requirements which leave you no room for the decision, and most likely, your competitors’ behavior will change the ways you react too.

In later posts I will propose ideas on what to consider beside of simple math in such decisions.

#2MinuteThoughts #peterkuna