In this article, we will be looking at the 5 top benefits of consistency in your business
Are you stopping short of the finish line? Consistency is vital when it comes to trying to grow or maintain your business. And it’s very simple because if you are doing something, or you’re going to do it you have to do it. If you saying you’re going to be somewhere, you have to be there. And if you want to create a new business process or an initiative, in order to get your staff to follow through, you need to be consistent.
Consistency starts at the top if you cannot be consistent you cannot expect your staff to be. Human nature is to do what others do, not necessarily what they say. Here are 5 guidelines or benefits to being consistent in your business.
Consistency allows for measurement.
Until you have tried something new for a period of time and in a consistent manner, you can’t decide if it works or not. How do you measure effectiveness if what you are measuring isn’t performed consistently?
As an example, if you have changed your invoicing process to a weekly cycle. Have you consistently sent your invoices out every week, on time, and in so have you seen a difference in cash flow? You can’t decide if something works or not, if you haven’t tried it for a period of time, and in a consistent manner? How would you measure the effectiveness of what you’re trying to do, if you’re not looking at it consistently.
So when you think about this, if you’re trying a new initiative within the business, or maybe a new process. What I would say is you want to try and give something at least six months before judging if it is a success or failure. Sometimes you may need to give it a minor tweak here or there instead of a whole system overhaul. But if you are not doing something consistently, you have no way of knowing if it worked or not. This means you can measure the success or failure of the change.
Consistency creates accountability.
Ff you have an admin assistant or a debtors clerk, they have to be accountable for their deliverables and their goals. And that means they should expect the same level of consistency back from you, as their leader. One good way of maintaining a level of consistency would be to make time available for your team. Or to have established recurring meetings. This means that anything that needs to be brought to your attention can be brought to your attention. And it’s a simple fact the more consistent something is the better is runs.
A good example of this would be using the Agile Methodology of daily stand up meetings. At Kitrin we have used this method for years now, the team meets everyday for 15 minutes. And it’s literally just a case of what were you working on yesterday? What have you got planned to work on today? Is there anything that you need help with from another member of the team? It takes 15 minutes a day, but it means that everybody knows what’s happening and it’s now it’s routine. It’s culture, it’s built into us that at a certain time every day, we meet to just go through what happened yesterday? What’s on the books for today.
It’s also a good way for you to be able to have reports on progress that’s being done. To be able to see if the method or the process that was implemented starting to garner the results that you were looking for?
Consistency establishes your reputation.
Your business growth requires a track record for success. You can’t establish a track record if you’re constantly shifting gears or trying new tactics. You’re going to fail long before you get to the finish line. But not because the tactic was flawed or the goals weren’t clear, very simply because you didn’t stay on course to achieve the objective.
In a previous article I spoke about having clear time lines and sticking to them as they create that client experience and how that experience shapes your reputation. That’s one side of consistency there’s a whole other side of consistency that can affect your reputation as well. Let’s take for example, your reception area. If one month you’ve got bean to cup coffee, available at no charge for anybody in your waiting area, or your reception, and the next month, you move to cheap over the counter coffee, you’re breaking that consistency, you’re breaking that experience. And again, what we’ve said on a couple of conversations is that in order to take your business from ordinary to remarkable is you want to create that experience. But it has to be a consistent experience. It can’t change from one week to the other.
This level of consistency should translate to documents, messages or notifications that are sent our from your business. You should also ensure that all the employees email signatures and they way they answer the phones is the same. This ensures that people understand how your business works more than anything they know what to expect from you.
Consistency makes you relevant.
Your employees and your customers do need a predictable flow of information from you. Now all too often we see businesses, it doesn’t matter whether they are large or small. Adopt a campaign or an initiative, only to end up before it gains traction. A great example of this is social media marketing. It starts off and has a post every day. And slowly but surely, because they’re not getting 100 likes a day on every post, it goes down to a post every two days or post once a week or post every two weeks. They haven’t given the campaign enough time for it to gain traction and have given up. And the problem with that is they’ve given up too soon. And that could have been a really, really successful marketing campaign.
If you’re running advertising campaigns, or you have got blog posts that you put out, be consistent with it. If you can’t put out a blog post every single week. Don’t start off by doing one every week. Start off with doing a blog post every month or an article every month. If you are doing newsletters you need to look at the amount of time it’s going to take to draft a newsletter. So does it make more sense to do a weekly newsletter, a monthly newsletter or maybe even a bi monthly newsletter, you can always tweak the process as you go and maybe add in an additional letter but taking something away.
Consistency maintains your message.
Your team pays a lot more attention to what you do then what you say. So, consistency and your leadership serve some model. If you treat a meeting as unimportant, don’t be surprised when you find your your staff or your customers doing the same.
When you starting out, define your brand and stick to it. Make sure that if your brand is very nurturing, that what you do within your business is very nurturing. The consistency is critical when it comes to coming up with your visual brand. Constantly changing your brand colors or changing your fonts can make you appear unprofessional, and sometimes even untrustworthy, which is the last thing you want when you’re trying to grow your brand. So if you think about this, things like Coca Cola have always gone with that self same look and feel to the product, the ad might change slightly, but the message is still the same.
Conclusion.
When something doesn’t work, look back at what happened and ask some serious questions. You know, did we shift gears too quickly? Did somebody not deliver on what they were supposed to? We’re all the processes followed. If you find that there wasn’t a general, general good enough reason for why something didn’t work. Nine times out of 10, the reason comes back to a lack of consistency.
You also want to do is make sure that the interactions that you have with your client, or that your staff have with your clients are consistent. This is how you build a loyal customer base and provide a memorable customer experience to everybody that is coming through. Understanding what your customers or clients want, and giving it to them every single time is important.
Now, I know that it’s not always easy to be 100%. consistent let’s be very fair here. Life happens around us. Your your admin person could be having a bad day, maybe they’re feeling sick, maybe your little ones off school, because they’re not well, maybe there are a number of things that can affect human mood. And that instinctively affects the way that we do things. So if you’ve got clear, concise business processes that should work irrespective of someone’s mood or the way they’re feeling.
We did a Facebook live on this subject to watch the video click here