Whether you are a franchisee, franchisor, retailer, or owner of your own brand, comparing the stability of your business to the way a table is constructed is a great way to explain the five elements necessary for any business to succeed.
The five elements include the tabletop and its four legs on which the tabletop rests. All aspects of managing any business can be placed under one of these five elements, regardless of the business. Use these five elements as a quick checklist to analyze the stability of your business at any given time.
“For every month of business we run a loss, it can often take you the next three to five months to get back on track”
The tabletop represents the platform on which the business concept and customer experience takes place, while the four legs represent the four pillars on which the concept and customer experience needs to be supported. The four legs represent: Product; branding, marketing, and advertising; human resources; and business analysis and control.
The tabletop
Our customers, who are free to choose where they want to shop, when they want to shop and what they intend to buy, are the most important and influential partners of our business. Therefore, our business concept and customer experience must usually offer something unique and different to that of our competitors, regardless of what type of business you are in. Whether your business is a physical store, marketplace on the internet, or a service orientated business, all five elements remain the same.
Think of the tabletop as the floor of your business. Every time a customer steps onto our business floor, they are in effect accepting our invitation to jump on our tabletop rather than the tabletop of our competitors.
The culture and customer experience created on our business floor (or tabletop) therefore needs to remain consistent and professionally maintained at all times. Take a step back and have a look at your tabletop from the perspective of your customer and check that everything you planned and created for your customer is continually maintained and in check.
Look up at the ceiling, the light fittings, the air vents, then look at the windows from inside and out, the furnishings, shelving, and restrooms. Is the correct background music playing? Is it set at the right volume? What about the room temperature, and odors in the store? If you are a service business, how are the phone calls answered? Would you be completely satisfied with all the various aspects of the customer experience you would expect to receive if you were the customer of your own business?
Assuming everything at your customer experience level is right, then you will no doubt need to constantly support this continued commitment to your clientele. This is where the remaining four legs supporting the tabletop come into play. We therefore need to ensure that our “table remains stable” with all the various elements required to insure its well-being as a successful and profitable business.
The first leg: product
Naturally, every business relies on its product, without which our customers have no reason to enter our business.
Regardless of what our business is and what we offer, ensuring that our product range is always relevant to our customer’s needs, always in supply, correctly priced, and with standards which constantly meet our customers’ expectations and approval, are the elements which comprise the first leg of the table.
The second leg: branding, marketing, and advertising
Now that we have our product correctly displayed and presented on our business floor, we need to attract enough customers to justify the existence of our business. In the old days, we might have found ourselves marketing our business using old-school tactics such as newspapers and billboards. Today, advertising has become more complex and the need to stay ahead of the competition via social media is crucial.
Whichever marketing and advertising methods we choose to use today, we need to continually brand, market and advertise. Regardless of how successful and powerful your business or brand may happen to be, advertising never stops, and analyzing the effectiveness of our advertising remains crucial to the survival of our business. This is the second leg of the table.
The third leg: human resources
Behind every successful business exists the work force and team of people which drive it. Have you invested enough time and energy training and motivating your team? Imagine if your customers, after all the time and effort invested in creating a great concept and business experience, enter your business due to the vast sums of money you spent on advertising, were met and greeted by employees who have not efficiently been trained?
The subject of managing a successful team of employees who see themselves as an integral part of the success story of the very business which employs them, is an extremely serious part of running your businesses.
Regardless of how fantastic your business concept, product and marketing may be, in order to ensure that your customer experience is complete, the subject and science of human resources needs to be an integral element of your business. This is the third leg of the table.
The fourth leg: business analysis and control
The fourth and final leg represents the need to analyze and control your business. Very often, business owners neglect this role, relying on others (such as their accountants) to take charge of their businesses.
This leg basically has two roles. One is to keep a constant eye on the finances of the business, making sure that you are continually on top of your operational break even point, cash flow and the “profit or loss”of your business.
The second role is to take a step back to check the overall stability of your table, ensuring that you have checked the other legs and above all, that what is happening on your table top (your customer experience), is as it should be.
In most retail businesses, the cost of every dollar we lose due to inefficiencies in staff training and retention, incorrect stock controls and management, will cost us another five dollars to get back on track.
This means that for every month of business we run a loss, it can often take you the next three to five months to get back on track. Our fourth leg is in essence the brain cell of the table and ensures that the reason for starting our business in the first place, remains justified and that we are not working for nothing.
All four of the above-mentioned legs of the table are equally important to ensure the stability of your business. There is no point in having a great product if you do not advertise it correctly, and there is no point in having a milliondollar looking business if your staff are not trained to look after your customers properly.
The author
Steven Wolfson is the founder of the Israel Franchise Institute (IFI); the chairman of the committee for franchise regulation for LAHAV; and a certified arbitrator and mediator (University of Bar Ilan) for the Israeli Center of Mediation and Arbitration.
