We’ve been talking about the importance of systems; creating, measuring, adjusting systems to help your business run like clockwork.
But what about “best practices?” Are they the same thing? Are they important? Just what do we mean by best practice?
Best practice means finding - and using - the best ways of working to achieve your business objectives. It involves keeping up to date with the ways that successful businesses operate.
Applying best practice means learning from and through the experience of others. One way of doing this is through benchmarking, which allows you to compare your business with other successful businesses to highlight areas where your business could improve.
Learn from Others
Just like you’ve heard the value of “using other people’s money,” the same is true about best practices. We aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. There is very little in the business world today that hasn’t already been tried by someone else, so why not learn from their experiences?
There is a phrase that is currently being bandied about in the social media world called “co-opetition.” It is a combination of competition and cooperation. The beauty of social media is this wonderful ability to connect with others in your industry around the world! You can literally share similar customer or business operations experiences with people in the UK, Australian, India, Canada or the US although the wonders of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
As you began to develop the business systems for your company, what challenges did you encountered? What questions do you have? Consider posing those questions to your global community for their advice.
Ask a Best Practice Question of your Network
LinkedIn offers the chance to ask a question and receive answers from your network. From your LinkedIn home page, select “more” from the menu bar and then “answers.” Click on “ask a question” to pose a specific question or chose “advanced answers search” to see if anyone has asked a similar question.
Send a “tweet” out to your Tweeple on Twitter with a question or search existing comments by visiting http://search.twitter.com. Select “advanced search” and type key words into the form to see what is being said about your industry or particular operational question. Or check out this article on 5 ways to get your questions answered on Twitter from Mashable.
You’ll also want to research and read about what others have accomplished.
Best Practice Resources:
Of course, we would love to help you with the bench marketing process – defining where you are today versus other businesses in your industry. We can help you set a game plan for moving forward using the best practices of others, refining your business systems and moving toward your ultimate goal. We’d love to chat with you about that.
However, here are some additional resources you may find of value:
Entrepreneur Magazine has a variety of articles that share success stories from various business types.
Visit the Best Practices page of Addict-o-matic for an ever changing list of discussions on best practices from the social media sphere.
Work.com offers a variety of articles on Best Practices and Bench Marking.
An article about Small Business Best Practice Bench Marking.
Systems versus Best Practices
They aren’t in competition. They work hand-in-hand. Assess your business, create your system, measure the results, adjust as necessary by examining the best practices of others and then compare your results by bench marking in the industry.
We believe that your systems strategy is your business strategy, and the business systems you put in place are your business. At the heart of this idea is - that if you do it right, your business will run like clockwork, systematically and predictably.
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