Double Your Revenue with Business Process Optimization
What if we told you there is a way to double your revenue in only 90 days? You’ll probably think it’s too good to be true. CEO and coach Simon Severino might convince you otherwise.
Simon Severino is an author and CEO of Strategy Sprints. He is also the host of the Strategy Sprints podcast, where he interviews powerhouse entrepreneurs like Rita McGrath, David Allen, Perry Marshall, Verne Harnish, and Brian Kurtz on business, productivity and growth. He helps business owners in SaaS and Services run their companies more effectively, which results in sales that soar. He created the Strategy Sprints™ Method that doubles revenue in 90 days by getting owners out of the weeds and optimizing business processes. Simon leads a global team of Certified Strategy Sprints™ coaches that help clients gain market share and work in weekly sprints which results in fast execution.
Strategy Sprints™: A Business Process Optimization Methodology
“It's pretty simple. It's three strategies, three habits and three numbers.”
In his 20 years working on business process optimization for big companies such as BMW and Google, Simon had compiled over 274 blueprints and templates that constitute the basis of the Strategy Sprint™ Method. The core concept of a sprint is a deep focus on one task or objective for a short period before jumping on to the next thing. Just like marathon training, sprinting requires intense exercise for a very limited interval before recovering for an extended period.
So what exactly are these three strategies that double your revenue in 90 days? As Simon implies, they’re pretty straightforward. You focus solely on the activities that:
Increase sales frequency by 25%.
Increase the price of service by 25%.
Increase sales conversion rate by 25%.
By applying these changes for 90 days, you can cut out or automate the tasks that don’t directly lead to sales conversion and put all your energy into revenue-generating activities.
“Now you have more oxygen in the tank,” Simon adds, “and you have a more optimized system, which has three qualities that are important: velocity, resilience and agility.”
A system with high velocity is not only fast but also has a clear direction. If your business process optimization leads to the direction of your overarching vision, whether it’s acquiring a bigger portion of the market share or doubling your annual revenue, all your tasks will be solely geared towards realizing this goal. Every time you find your company going off track (and everyone gets distracted), you are always able to go back to the three strategies and correct course. This is a simplified idea of a system with velocity; it ensures that you're running in the right direction.
“The worst thing on the planet is you running a marathon and you're the fastest [person] but you're running in the wrong direction.”
The Name of the Game: Reduction
One can easily misconstrue the core ideal of Strategy Sprints as doing more. After all, doesn’t one have to work double to achieve double the results?
“Our method is simple, and simple things are not easy to do,” Simon emphasizes, “we work by reduction. So we never say do more.”
How exactly can you achieve more through reduction? Bottleneck analysis is a good place to start with business process optimization. Simon encourages detecting and resolving bottlenecks regularly in your value creation activities, from awareness to engagement to sales opportunities. By fixing the weakest processes that impede your system, you can increase your overall performance by a little bit. Compounding these improvements over time will result in a significant impact. This business process optimization approach is derived from the Theory of Constraints that involves identifying the biggest obstacle that stands in the way of achieving a goal, and then systematically removing that constraint until it is no longer a problem. By eliminating these bottlenecks month over month, your process becomes more focused on the end goal, allowing you to achieve more with less effort and time. This, in a nutshell, is how reduction works in business process optimization.
Resilience through Process
Another important aspect of an optimized business process is resilience.
“Resilience is when you have self-correcting, and self-healing loops in the system.”
A resilient system is one that can repair itself without relying on one single person. It allows business owners, who themselves could be the biggest bottlenecks in their organization, to remove themselves from redundant tasks and focus on revenue-generating opportunities. It also gives them the freedom and peace of mind that things will not fall apart should they become unavailable.
Simon gives the example of Wikipedia as a system with a self-healing loop. No matter how many people you remove from the system, the network is intelligent enough to repair itself at all times. In a fast-paced world, information and facts change every minute, and you will always find somebody who will make an entry to keep the cycle going. A resilient system like Wikipedia’s can survive any abrupt change and will most likely outlive every engineer that worked on its algorithm.
The main reason these systems work is the lack of a single point failure. A task might change hands, but the process remains the same. Simon had found himself in a similar situation three and a half years ago. He had decided to step back from operations when he realized that he was the bottleneck. While there was trepidation around this move, Simon trusted in the resilient system he had built and knew that his clients will be taken care of given that his employees had the blueprint for success.
“Every sprint is different, but the anatomy of a sprint is always the same. In month one, you get people out of the weeds, make the system less people-dependent, and make the system more resilient, and more agile. Month two, improve their sales model, and three, scale it. And that's how we created the sprint. We know that we have to achieve frequency improvement, conversion rate improvement and positioning improvement, which then leads to higher prices that they can charge.”
The conversation doesn't end here. In his discussion with Marquis, Simon Severino shares advice on time tracking, his thought on hard work, and the trifecta to achieving fulfilment in life. To learn more about Strategy Sprints™, check out Simon’s book, which will help you identify and resolve problems in your marketing, sales and operations and scale your business.
