Operational Excellence: Five Principles to Transform Your Small Business and Accelerate Success

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Operations Toolbox, the podcast designed exclusively for solopreneurs that are navigating the intricate world of business. I'm your host, tanya DeHarrison, and today we're diving into the heart of what makes businesses tick operational excellence. So, whether you are a coach, consultant, doctor, running your business as a one person show, or you have a small team, understanding and implementing operational excellence can be the game changer you've been searching for. So what exactly is operational excellence and why is it crucial for small business owners? Well, those are the questions that we are going to be answering today.

At its core, operational excellence is about consistently achieving superior performance by optimizing and aligning various elements of your business. This is from processes and people to technology and culture. Operational excellence is a holistic approach that aims to create a high performing, adaptable and customer focused business. Imagine, just imagine your business as a finely tuned instrument. How do you envision it working? How does that look to you? And then I want you to think about as CEO how does that make you feel? Operational excellence is the framework that ensures your business runs at peak efficiency, reducing costs and maximizing overall value. That is the impact of operational excellence. So, as a business owner, we face numerous challenges right, so we got to worry about market competition, changing customer expectations and this ever-evolving landscape of technology. Operational excellence provides us with the tools to navigate these challenges effectively. It's about continuous improvement, not perfection, about continuous improvement, innovation and a commitment to delivering exceptional quality at every turn within your business. As a small business owner, your time and resources are precious commodities. Operational excellence becomes your secret weapon in making the most of both. It's about creating a structured foundation that allows you to focus on what you do best, whether that's serving your patients, your clients, producing products, whatever it is that you do best, and it's also going to help you eliminate unnecessary tasks, unnecessary steps and scale your business without burnout. Now, I know that has to sound good, especially if you are a solopreneur or micro business owner. I want you to think of this as your operations toolbox, a little like this podcast. It's a set of skills, strategies and principles that empower you to handle challenges, seize opportunities as they arise and propel your business to the next level. I mean everything from managing workflows to delivering five-star, top notch customer experiences. Operational excellence is your guiding light.

When it comes to operational excellence, there are five key principles we here, as signal partners help our clients implement to achieve greater efficiency and better business outcomes. While there are way more than five principles, we focus on these core five because they drive the best results for smaller businesses. The first one is performance management, so this includes time management, so managing yourself, managing your team, but then also managing your business performance. The second one is process and system driven. This is about exhibiting continuous quality improvement, being able to efficiently and consistently perform tasks and achieve desired outcomes. We want to be documenting and tracking all of this so that we have those repeatable good outcomes, planning for success. Now, this is a foundational principle. This is to help you stay focused on your goals. If you have a team, this is going to help everyone going and moving in the same direction and help you get more of the right things done. So many times, we focus on getting things done, but they're not necessarily the things that we should be working on to drive results.

Number four is people before profits. Once we get this right in our head, it helps a lot. This is about understanding how to create value for the people, and I'm talking about you included. So many times, as business owners, we exclude ourselves, we exclude our health, we don't think about what it is that we need, but when I'm talking about people before profits, this is all of the people, which includes you, this includes your team, this includes your customers. How are you creating more value for your clients, your partners, your vendors, anybody that you work with, any collaborations, anything you want to think about how you create value and we walk through how you implement this within your business.

And then the last one is profits. Now, this is the result of efficiency and effectiveness. So if we do the other four pretty good not perfect, because we're not looking for perfection but if we do it pretty good, we are automatically going to see an increase in our profits. So increased profits is an outcome of being focused on the principles of operational excellence. It's a byproduct. So when you think about operational excellence, I don't want you to think about it as something that only applies to larger organizations. I want you to really think about how you can take it and implement it in your business today. And even if you just take one of the principles and implement it, you are going to start to see results. That's the great thing about these key principles, because they are the core principles, and the more of them you implement, the better your outcomes are and the faster you're going to be able to get to where it is that you want to go.

So the operations toolbox podcast we are here to unpack practical insights, to share expert tips and to explore real world examples to help you implement operational excellence effectively.

Whether you are just starting out or you are looking to fine tune your existing operations, this podcast is your go to resource. Before I leave you today, I want you to think about one thing that you can implement that is going to make your business function more efficient. This could be documenting a process, automating a workflow using your analytics, some data within your business. Whatever it is, think of one thing that you can implement to make your business more efficient and that, my friends, is the start of implementing operational excellence within your business. Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks, we are going to be diving extremely deep into this concept because it's so important and we are in a time where we have to function as lean as possible and yield the best results that we can. So stay tuned for valuable discussions, interviews and actionable advice. Your operations toolbox is about to get a serious upgrade, my friend, so go ahead and subscribe, and let's build a thriving business together. Talk to you soon.