For a business, the fall from good to really bad can be rapid, unexpected, and yet totally obvious to those who are outside the organization.
Maybe you’ve seen it at the place that you visit infrequently, like a dentist or a car repair shop. During one visit, there was a little clutter in the place. Six months later, it’s become a mess. To those working there, the change was gradual. They got busy and thought cleaning was a low priority. To the customer, it’s immediate cause for concern.
Sometimes things go bad due to a lack of succession training. There is a superstar in the business. The kind of person who knows everything. But he or she then gets a job somewhere else. Before that departure happens, there’s no attempt to capture that person’s vast knowledge or step up the training for everyone else.
As a result, old, successful habits go away and are replaced by questionable, stop-gap measures. These are desperate moves that are not part of a thought out process. Customers start to notice that the business doesn’t run as smoothly as it used to. Employees may be too close to the problem to realize how far, off course things have gone.
Customers often perceive a business as a series of random snapshots. They won’t know why things changed for the worse or if there’s any plan to make things better. Due to this perception, overnight, the business can become undesirable.
“We don’t know what went wrong,” you’ll often hear owners say as they search for an elusive clue. The puzzle is actually in front of them, every day. They just chose not to see it.
Without proper planning and commitment to quality, there is no guarantee that tomorrow will be as good as today. Every day, you are being judged by your customers.
This post was inspired by the chapter, The Mediocrity Slide, from my book, Stuck on Yellow. In the book, I talk about ways to overcome the slide from good to really bad.
