Are Fires of Chaos Consuming Your Business?

How many times have you heard an owner or manager say, “My title should be head fireman. I’m constantly putting out fires.” I sometimes wonder if these “firemen” have ever considered finding the source of those “fires”—the root cause!

I’ve come to understand you can’t have a fire if you don’t have a source. It makes sense that, if an owner or manager would take time to eradicate the source, the fires would be extinguished permanently.

Imagine...when you eliminate every source of every fire in your business, you could take off your fireman’s hat, put on your marketing hat, and really grow your business! After all, isn’t growing your business what you desire to do? Wouldn’t it be nice to take time away from your business without worrying that the whole place might go up in flames?

If you want to retire your Fireman’s hat, there is a way to extinguish those flames forever

Where do you start eliminating the source of your fires?

Start by making a commitment—no matter how small the fire, you are not only going to put the fire out, but also investigate and find the root cause. Next step: with the help of your team, put in place a SYSTEM that will eliminate the source of that fire forever.

DO NOT buy into the lie that, “Chaos is normal in business.” It is NOT normal!

OK, I can hear you thinking, “What kind of SYSTEM will end my fire fights?” The SYSTEM I am talking about is actually a network of systems that will work in concert to stop fires before they start—i.e., control checklists, procedures, policies, etc.

I have seen simple Quality Control Checklists save companies thousands of dollars a year. The company where I first observed these flame-ending systems working was my own. Since then, I have heard numerous testimonials of success using the systems, from our employees, our clients and other companies all over the world.

TRUE STORY about the first time our company used a Quality Control Checklist: We wanted to stop the errors (fires) in our pressroom, as we were burning up a lot of money. Not to mention causing other small fires to break out all over our company. So, we developed a Quality Control Checklist for ensuring the quality and accuracy of a job before printing it.