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Why Repeatability is Your Best Business Strategy

There are a lot of people I have met over the years that absolutely love what they do. AV is a great industry to showcase this mindset as we constantly get to work with new and exciting equipment and solve interesting problems. Historically speaking, this craftsmen (craftswomen) paradigm was evident everywhere. People would take pride in the main purpose in life – their job. Imagine the days where your career was pre-determined by your family, and you learned to be good at what you did through years of dedication to a specific task. (That may be a dream or a nightmare, depending on your perspective)

Fast forward to today, and the landscape is vastly different. In order to pay the bills we find ourselves taking on more and more different tasks. Everyone proclaims multitasking as the way to get a lot more done. The interesting thing is that unless we realize some core concepts about productivity a lot of work may be happening but nothing is getting done properly or effectively. Your end results are all over the map, and nobody can depend on anything.

Lets look at this from a business standpoint. A lot of businesses suffer from the same lack of general direction and overall focus. Trying to be everything to everyone is a direction that is doomed to failure. Ultimately, regardless of what finished product you are creating be it a widget, or an installed AV system the ability to recreate more of it enables you to drive more sales. The more repeatable your product is, the more customers will come to expect a certain end result when they purchase from you and recommend your products/services to others.

It may seem that I have veered off into two directions with this article, but the concept of repeatability and defining your core focus are both parts of the same objective. In order to really produce a repeatable result, you need people that are good at very specific tasks. Having people doing many things at a mediocre level just cannot equal the success of having many people doing a couple of things they are really good at all the time. I’m not suggesting that our industry should have a bunch of mindless drones churning out installations, and I encourage growth and development. What I am saying is that unless you define the parameters of expectations around certain roles in your organization, the confusion caused by everybody doing everything will cause your end result to vary immensely from job to job.

As your organization grows, make a conscious effort to foster an environment of repeatable performance. If the quality of your installations can be measured, then you have a frame of reference which can be used to improve and expand. Rather than being in the AV business, look at how you can be in the consistency business and do everything in your power to enable your company to produce repeatable results.

What are your thoughts on a repeatable result? Leave a comment below, or find me on ProAVSchool.com and let me know what you think.

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