When did you last polish the scuffed brown shoes in your business?

Okay, so you got some marketing material from a company which interests you and give them a call to further proceedings. The conversation goes well but there are still a few things you need to iron out face to face, so you book a meeting.

Meeting day comes and you have armed yourself with insightful questions and background research ready to further your already strengthening commitment to this project. The call comes in to the office that your 10 o’clock has just arrived and you make your way down stairs to the reception area.

Okay, so you got some marketing material from a company
which interests you and give them a call to further proceedings. The conversation goes well but there are
still a few things you need to iron out face to face, so you book a meeting

Meeting day comes and you have armed yourself with
insightful questions and background research ready to further your already
strengthening commitment to this project.
The call comes in to the office that your 10 o’clock has just arrived
and you make your way down stairs to the reception area.

Your mind begins to wander about the potential benefits that
this new investment could have in your business, recalling the pain currently
being felt by the department that has asked for this project to be looked into
urgently as it is directly affecting a high profile customer relationship, what
if it could solve those problems, great, but you know it’s never going to be as
easy as just buying it, but you have a good team and are prepared to trade off
the initial challenges to reap the rewards.

With your thoughts concluded gravity takes you to the last
step of your march towards reception where the receptionist points your visitor
out amongst the loitering individuals.

High hopes for this meeting grip you as you approach your visitors
and for the first time your eyes meet.
Unconsciously you scan the individual in front of you make multiple
judgements which seem to pass all you defence mechanisms until…..

Your eyes finally fall to the feet of this guest and a flash
of concerns rips through your body as you realise the un-coordinated error and
shameful neglect that this individual has made….scuffed brown shoes.

Now, I’m not saying brown shoes are a problem, but when you
ware them with the wrong colour outfit and you are lazy enough not to care for
them, what kind of signal does that send to your customer.

This, single step, in the journey of your customer’s
lifecycle of dealing with your business, every step is as critical as the next.
The further your prospects and customers progress the more critical each stage
becomes as they ascend the ladder to ownership of your product or service and
when one of those rungs is fractured or broken they are suddenly catapulted
down the ladder and all your hard work and money spent helping them along on
this journey has been undone in one foul swoop.

Your business is a machine, a system, which must predictably
create an outcome that facilitates the growth of your business and helps your customers
to achieve their objectives.

Taking a holistic (top level), systemised approach to the
way your run your business and its operation is the best way to identify if you
do indeed have the wrong colour shoes and if they have been unnecessarily neglected. Sometimes though it may not be obvious, so a control
or metric (what should happen) can help you to compare your own objectives or
what is actually possible with the reality.

So go on, when was the last time you took a looked for the
brown shoes in your business and made sure they fitted with the rest of your
business outfit and were nicely polished?