No matter the size of your organization, you need to be slight and nimble. All businesses and organizations take on too much clutter.
This slows us down. This makes it harder to make quick strategic decisions. This makes it harder to pivot and evolve with the ever-changing marketplace.
Here are a few questions to ask of you and your organization:
1. Too much overhead?
2. Too many staff not pulling their weight?
3. Too many pieces of collateral that do more to confuse than educate?
4. Too much distracting clutter on your website?
5. Are 80% of your customers only buying 20% of your products? Probably time to remove inventory that ain't selling.
6. Decision-making matrix involve far too many people?
7. Do you have too many meetings...that don't really produce results?
8. Too many fake prospects in the CRM database?
9. Too many marketing campaigns confusing the marketplace?
10. Too many pricing discounts and incentives that are costing you profit?
11. Too many phony sales and marketing scripts that are confusing your sales people, and preventing them from being human?
12. Attending too many conferences and not really getting return?
13. Doing too much needless travel when teleconferencing would do?
14. Have too much office space costing you a lot in rent?
15. Too many lost business opportunities because you are too busy having to pay attention to all the stuff above?
If you answered yes to even a handful of these questions (especially number 15), it is probably time to simplify a few things with your organization...
###
[drawing by hugh macleod]