Change one process, open a new line of business

In short: when owners hear "increase income, cut costs", many think of saving water and electricity. That saves small change. The real gains come from re-examining how work flows through the business: shorter, smoother processes cut costs and raise productivity at the same time.

A large company's experience

I once spent a full year helping a company with over a thousand staff and more than twenty departments restructure its business processes. The owner's brief was simply to increase income and cut costs. Shortening processes did both, quietly lowering costs and raising productivity.

The airline example

When airlines started selling tickets online, they changed a process. To sell the same volume through counters and travel agents alone would have taken how many staff, outlets and fixed costs? Selling online made life easier for customers, cut costs, raised productivity and opened up volume that physical outlets could never handle.

Start with your own business

1. Map every step the customer takes: from enquiry and booking to service, payment and follow-up. Where do they wait longest?
2. Map every step your staff take: which tasks are repeated daily, written by hand or kept in someone's head? These can often go to a system.
3. Ask "can we stop doing this?": some steps are just habit, and nobody would notice if they disappeared.
4. Ask "can we do it differently?": online booking, automatic reminders and digital receipts are all process changes.

Businesses survive not by beating someone, but by being ready before the change arrives.

Adapted from Dave Tan's book How High Should Your Customer Retention Rate Be? (2014, in Chinese), updated for today. About the book

Author: Dr. Dave Tan, DBA — Founder of Vital Design, Doctor of Business Administration (DBA). A business consultant to salons and SMEs since 2003, and author of a book on salon management.