I want to introduce you to an absolutely essential business and personal improvement tool - the Stop, Start, More, Less Grid.
You are probably one of the business owners that works too hard.
For me or any business coach or advisor to come along and say "if you want more profit you need to do X, Y and Z", you can immediately feel overloaded and more closer to the point where you do find the "straw that breaks the camel's back".
And this is where the Stop Start More Less Grid comes in.
It helps you to recognise real world constraints and the fact that you can't keep on doing more.
Unless you are doing silly things that moves your business backwards (like Gerald Ratner) you will be doing stuff that moves the business forward but perhaps not as fast as you want.
If you don't know the story of Gerald Ratner and his infamous PR slip he was chairman or a big discount jewellery chain in the UK and said" We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap". In the same speech to the Institute of Directors he then went on to add that some of the earrings his firm sold were "cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long". This was back in 1991 when the drop in value of the business by around £500 million was big news.
So to do more you have to find other things to do less.
You have to buy the time from yourself and the only way is to stop doing some things and to reduce the time spent on others. That way you now have time to start doing some new stuff and to do more of what brings in the money.
The 80/20 Rule
I'm sure you've heard it before - that 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts but have you stoopped to consider what those 20% of things are?
Or what the 80% of your time is spent doing that produces so little reward?
Well the Stop Start More Less Grid will help you to think about what you should be doing and will help you to resolve to stop doing other things.
Completing The Stop Start More Less Grid
Then start looking at your activities and ask yourself whether you really get value for your time.
Then mark off each activity, stop, start, more, less and the final category same. Get yourself a bit of paper, draw the grid and fill in your stop, start, more and less.
It is a great discipline to recognise that you can only do more or start something new if you do less or stop doing something else.
The Stop Start More Less Grid In Marketing
Everything you do consumes one or more of time, energy and money so if your marketing isn't working as well as it should, you need to face up to teh decisions.
What are you doing in marketing that isn't working and should be stopped?
What are you doing that isn't giving you the payback that you should be doing less of?
What should you be doing more of, either in terms of quantity or quality?
What should you start doing that can give you the results you want?
It may be that you are just not giving enough time to marketing, but unless you can identify where the extra time is going to come from, improvement is not going to happen.
It's much too easy to get sucked backed into the comfort of the old ways of doing stuff so you have to be clear and specific and the Stop Start More Less Grid will help you to gain focus.
And if it works in marketing then it works the same way for all your other business processes. Improvement keeps coming back to Stop Start More Less.
Product Development & Customer Value
The Stop Start More Less Grid also works when designing new products and services.
The same principle was one of the recommendations in the excellent book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Of course they are business professors so they have to use posher words that Stop Start More Less.
In Blue Ocean Strategy, it is called the Eliminate Reduce Raise Create Grid but teh principle is exactly the same.
What was novel about this approach applied to product design was that it stopped the more, more, more cycle.
Remember that whatever we do consumes times, energy and money, so to do more there is a cost.
The Stop Start More Less Grid helps keep costs under control and challenges the product developers to identify functions that add cost but no longer add value or that add more cost than value.
Just hitting the Stop Less quadrants of the grid will help move the brand to the discount or economy sector which may not be the intention. So the More and Start quadrants ask what new or improved customer value can we add with the money we've saved from the Stop Less quadrants.
Stop Start More Less Grid - Your Thoughts
I am interested to know how you use the Stop Start More Less Grid and whether you do it consciously and formally or whether you just try to squeeze in doing more things, have the discipline to do the new and some things just drop off.
Let me know by leaving a comment.
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