Business Growth By Continuously Improving…

The Idea of “Kaizen”

So, you want to grow your business… but there’s so much to do and so little time to accomplish it all.

How do you do it? Where do you start?

Properly run, a business is an effective tool to support you to attain larger goals and commitments in life. Too often, caring for the business traps or enslaves entrepreneurs. Rather than a tool to enhance life, your business can become a burden.

The fear of being stuck in your business is a common concern that many entrepreneurs feel. Just starting to think about growing your business can feel totally overwhelming.

A way out that we've successfully used for 12 years is “kaizen.”

Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning continuous improvement. Kaizen is achieved by doing all the little things better. By breaking things down to their sub-components (and sub-sub-components, and so on), difficult tasks become do-able.

Each of the major issues and concerns an owner faces may be broken down into a series of smaller items. Looking at the smaller chunks brings clarity, making each chunk much easier to address. Through active work on what appear to be the “little things”, people are amazed at the lasting results they achieve. These results usually go straight to the bottom line profits of your firm.

What Stops You

In school, you were trained to get the “right” answer. Starting from grade one, if you got "everything right" on a test, you got a star. All through school, perfection was rewarded; poor marks were shunned. You’ve been well trained for a long time, to seek perfection.

Perfection has useful aspects as an ideal, but perfection in real life (especially outside of grade school tests) is exceedingly rare. In most cases, anything can be done better. Having a goal of perfection and then feeling bad when you (inevitably) don’t get there, is not an optimal way to go about life and business.

Where that can lead is that you start to avoid new ideas, new actions and innovations. The new ideas and actions have a learning curve and you will not be able to get “everything right” or perfect on your initial attempts; so you don’t even try.

This runs totally counter to the concept of kaizen. The philosophy of kaizen is small, incremental adjustments and improvements. You make progress by fine-tuning an existing situation. It is not the “all or nothing” approach usually used when people are striving to be perfect.