A spark business guide
Unlocking Growth
Building and implementing a blueprint for process improvement
can translate into innovative operations that align with customer
demands, employee aspirations, and your own expectations for
your business.
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Alex & Gary Lapinskiy, co-founders of Ascendtech Inc.
How I Unlocked Growth for My Company :
Gary Lapinskiy, Ascendtech
Inc.: Targeting Quality
This electronics firm doesn’t stress about
immediate profitability, but it always finds a
way to get there
Ascendtech got its start in a location that was the initial home of many legendary
start-ups: the business owner’s garage. But physical space wasn’t the only thing that
the company quickly outgrew.
“In the beginning, we tried to do everything ourselves,” says company president Gary
Lapinskiy. “My brother (who is my partner) and I pretty much managed the most
critical processes: networking, finances, accounting, and purchasing. But in order
to grow, we needed to be able to move past that. There’s no way for one person to
singlehandedly drive the whole process. It has to be a team thing; the entire team
has to be on board and aligned with you.”
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Ascendtech repairs and re-markets electronics products to extend their lives
and divert them from landfills. “We’re trying to do a good thing, and growth
just comes with that,” Lapinskiy says. “As a company, first and foremost,
we are innovators and engineers. We don’t really worry about immediate
profitability. We invest in the future, and we invest in the quality of the work.
Growth comes with that. So we’re not really trying to grow. We’re trying to
create a quality product.”
Chasing value before revenue
To achieve that goal, the company maintains a focus on process improvement.
“Every single process is fine-tuned to be efficient,” Lapinskiy says. And
to strengthen the team’s ability to contribute to those initiatives, the
company subsidizes continued education opportunities for its engineers and
technicians—in line not only with company objectives, but also individual
employees’ interests. The approach encourages employees to feel invested in
and a part of Ascendtech’s process improvement.
The result: “We’ve grown to about $50 million in sales over the course of six
years,” he says. “And during the last five years, we really started fine-tuning our
processes. We stopped chasing revenue and started chasing quality and profits.
Our revenue has actually declined significantly—but our profitability has gone
up, and we were able to use that profitability to reinvest in the company and
drive further growth.”
Its emphasis on process quality has paid off in other ways, too. This summer,
Ascendtech earned ISO 14001, 18001, and 9001 certification along with R2/
Rios certification, which Lapinskiy notes is “extremely difficult to get and
awarded to only the most reputable and responsible electronic recyclers.”
How does the company test the impact improvements have on processes and
prospects for driving long-term growth? That’s a particular challenge because
it can take months—sometimes longer—to see the results of changes. Testing,
therefore, comes down to a mix of intuition and analytics. For example, when
engineers make repairs, they’re required to log every step they take. “We do
that not to come up with quotas, but to monitor the process, see emerging
trends, and fine-tune our process accordingly,” Lapinskiy says. “Knowledge is
power. The more information you have, the more informed decisions you can
make. And that’s what we try to focus on.”
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Best Practices Guide:
Business Process Best
Practices: Achieving Growth
by Pursuing Quality
To unlock growth for your company, adopt
these best practices in business process
improvement
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Introduction: Delivering Quality
In a competitive business environment, it’s always helpful to find an edge. The
search for that edge is driving business owners to pursue everything from
branding to social media to digital marketing strategies. But amid all those 21stcentury bells and whistles, companies continue to gain market advantage by
delivering that old-fashioned thing known as quality.
No matter what else changes in the business world, there will always be value
in doing exceptional work in your core business, which is why ISO and other
industry standards have gained popularity. Can these certifications propel
your company’s growth? Not in and of themselves. But by targeting the process
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best practices that position your business to qualify for certification, you can
optimize your company’s performance and establish a culture of achievement
that promotes sustained growth.
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Identify Growth Opportunities
As a small business owner, you’ve already got too much on your plate, and you
may think of business process improvement as a huge undertaking—one you
may not have the bandwidth to do productively. What kind of diagnostics can
you do up front to determine which areas of the business present the best
opportunities not just for improved processes, but improved profitability?
A small business
owner has always
got to be looking for
opportunities for
growth and increased
profitability
“A small business owner has always got to be looking for
opportunities for growth and increased profitability,” says
Andrew Miller, president of ACM Consulting and author
of Redefining Operational Excellence: New Strategies for
Maximizing Performance and Profits Across the Organization
(AMACOM 2014). “I don’t look at this as something to add to
their already busy schedule. I look at this as the way to run a
successful business.”
To begin, look for the areas of the business in which process improvement could
have the most impact. Try to think in terms of the outcomes you want to achieve
rather than the challenges you’re trying to address, Miller advises. That’s not
just a matter of semantics or spin: “When we talk problem, then the solution
becomes problem resolution. When we talk outcome, the solution becomes
growth and innovation.”
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Stay True to Your Core Focus
Once you’ve completed the impact assessment, consider how well the area
you’ve targeted aligns with what you want the company to be. An opportunity is
worth pursuing only if it makes sense in the context of your company’s identity,
culture, and path to growth.
“You have to know what you want to achieve. You have to know who your
target customers are and what’s valuable to them,” Miller says. “From a growth
and innovation perspective, you’ve always got to keep in mind your ultimate
objective, and make sure you align whatever tactics you employ with that
objective. You’ve got to build the process around what you’re trying to achieve,
not try to achieve what comes out of the process.
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Process improvement
is anything you do
that improves the
performance of the
company
“Process improvement is anything you do that improves the
performance of the company,” says Paul Harmon, co-founder
and executive editor of Business Process Trends and author of
Business Process Change, Third Edition: A Business Process
Management Guide for Managers and Process Professionals
(Morgan Kaufmann 2014). “The goal is to perform better as a
company, but the question is what that means for you.”
In considering the answer to that question, it’s important to look beyond
your own goals for the business. You also have to consider the impact that
the process improvement would have on the company’s stakeholders—the
employees, customers, and vendors whose relationship with the business
will be affected by the proposed process improvement. To achieve optimal
results, you need to understand their investment in the process, and know
how to measure their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the change. This
will help you to establish meaningful metrics for assessing the process
improvement’s performance and its ability to contribute to sustainable
profitability and growth.
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Outcomes and Impact
To get a sense of how this works in practice, consider a process
improvement that focuses on the success of your sales and
marketing meetings. To ensure that those meetings make the
best use of your time, consider whether you’re doing a good
job of meeting with the right types of prospects. Could you
improve the processes you use to qualify prospects? Could you
enhance your understanding of their needs and, by extension,
your ability to pitch the right products or services to them?
A shift in your perspective on these meetings—for example,
from landing the highest volume of new accounts to launching
long-term client relationships—can support your growth and
profitability objectives.
Consider whether you’re doing a good
job of meeting with the right types of prospects.
By improving the percentage of sales meetings you have with the right potential
customers, you can maximize the time you have available to provide those
prospects with the information and attention they need. This can shorten
the sales cycle and customer acquisition process, accelerate the rate at
which you bring new customers on, increase your sales employees’ sense of
engagement and achievement, and free more time to devote to qualifying more
prospects and delivering service to existing clients. The process improvement
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will strengthen your conversion rate, enhance your productivity, and as a
consequence, contribute to your bottom-line performance.
Sometimes, it’ll be small
changes. There are small
enhancements you can
make right away that
will already get you one
step closer to where you
want to be
Of course, to achieve these results, you need to consider
whether your organization is capable of implementing the
process changes that you envision. The sales and marketing
process improvement outlined above will produce results only if
you consider their impact on the rest of your organization, from
order fulfillment to customer support. When you’re developing
a process improvement strategy, it’s essential to build scalability
into your plans so that the entire organization is equipped to
handle the growth generated by the initiative.
Similarly, your approach to process improvement has to be fluid enough to
allow for continual adjustment and refinement as required to keep you on
track to achieve your objectives. “Sometimes, it’ll be small changes. There are
small enhancements you can make right away that will already get you one
step closer to where you want to be,” Miller says. “As that outcome or objective
changes, you need to go back and look at things. ‘Does what we’re doing now
still apply?’”
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From Improvement to Innovation
To find the best answers to those questions, it’s essential to involve employees
in planning and implementation. Their participation affords you the advantage
of access to first-hand experiences and insights that you may not have as the
business owner. In addition, it lets employees know that you value their input
and want them to feel empowered in, and not just responsible to, the business.
By engaging everyone in the organization, you create a company mindset and
culture that encourage every member of your team to think constantly about
opportunities to improve business processes—and, beyond that, to achieve new
and profitable levels of innovation.
For the same reasons, you’ll want to solicit vendor and customer feedback on
what you can do to make it easier to do business with your company. In that
respect, you can think of business process improvement as essentially customer
experience improvement. This, again, will keep you focused on outcomes that
support your performance goals.
Once all these components come together, you’ll have a blueprint not only for
process improvement, but for a strategic approach to effective, innovative
operations that align with customer demands, employee aspirations, and your
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own expectations for the business. By building a company that delivers in each
of these areas, you’ll establish a strong foundation for driving sustainable
success and continued growth.
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from Capital One help. Whether you’re looking for unlimited 2% cash back or
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