Grow Your Business, But Not Like Jurassic Park

Posted 9/8/2011
By Jeremiah Wilson

As a trainer, we've helped hundreds of companies improve and optimize their on-the-phone sales and customer service performance. And each time we do it, we have to resist a temptation: walk into a training session and "dump." Dump everything we've learned through our high-tech analytics and experience in the industry as quickly as possible. Share every tip, technique, secret and tool we know about sales and customer service.

It sounds pretty ridiculous, right?

Why? Because it wouldn't work.

The skills we teach have to be taught in a very deliberate and practical way. They have to be learned, developed, practiced and refined. Growth is a process. It does not happen overnight. If we tried to train in hyper-speed we would fail.

And even though it sounds ridiculous, many business owners think they can grow their business in hyper-speed. They want to boil the ocean. They want more. And they want it now.

The problem is: if you do everything all at once and too quickly, you will fail.

Expanding Too Quickly

A leading cause of business failure is growing too fast. To borrow and grossly modify a quote from Jurassic Park: "Business owners get so preoccupied with whether or not they can expand, they don't stop to think about if they should expand." Remember: just like everyone who was eaten by dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, you will always pay the price for moving too fast.

The Optimum Way to Grow

Be measurable - You must have a specific, well-planned strategy. And you must be able to define success. If your goal is to "grow" or "get bigger," you will fail. Why? Because those are unmeasurable goals. What, specifically, is your business's goal? How will you measure that goal? And how/when will you achieve it?

Set milestones - When we train we don't teach people to do "better." We teach people to measurably improve one step at a time. Treat your shop the same way. Give it milestones. Milestones could be certain levels of revenue, car counts or number of employees. Once you've reached a certain milestone you will know what the next milestone is (remember you already have a very specific strategy that lays all this out).

Live within your means - When families create a budget, they often forget to take into account "unexpected" medical expenses, retirement, car expenses and home repairs. This makes no sense.

These "unexpected" expenses should be expected. They happen every year. Always. Businesses are no different. Make sure you consider employees
quitting, employees wanting raises, equipment breaking or property maintenance. Plan and budget for these "unexpected" events.

Grow Slowly and Prosper

Before we embark on any kind of training session, we gather real data (in our situation: from actual recorded phone calls), develop strategy, set milestones and measure, measure, measure. This is a process that produces optimal results. This process, we believe, is the best way to grow your business.

Jeremiah Wilson is founder and president of ContactPoint LLC, www.contactpoint.com. He may be reached at jwilson@contactpoint.com.