Larry Gilbert firmly believes that what gets measured gets results.
By breaking down segments of your business into specific measurements, you can create a list of best practices to ultimately improve your company.
Gilbert, co-founder, president and CEO of Event Network Inc. attributes the company’s growth to employees sharing best practices. The operator of gift shops at museums and cultural attractions posted revenue of $92 million in 2008.
When it comes to making best practices work, it’s about collaboration. You must determine what to measure and how to break down the measurements. You should involve all of your employees in the discussion and be detailed when outlining changes.
After implementing and measuring the best practice, you start the process all over again, Gilbert says.
“It’s just a never-ending process,” Gilbert says. “It’s not something you get to a certain point and you say, ‘OK, we’re there.’ You’re always looking to do better, and best practices are a large part of doing that.”
Smart Business spoke with Gilbert about how to use best practices.
Create a timeline to determine what you should be discussing and when. We, as a company, have a best practices calendar, so we identified all of the areas where we want to be sure that we are operating as effectively as we can and where about we want to use best practices to ensure the highest level of quality or the highest level of standards.
Like in most businesses, you’re doing different things during different times of the year. So we put together a calendar whereby we’re talking about in our business, we’re talking about getting ready for field trips and school groups in our stores in the early part of the spring.
The challenge is trying to not do everything at once, but for now, we’re going to focus on X because implementation is critical and you can only implement so many things at one time without overwhelming the organization.
That’s why I say we look at a calendar; we look at a plan with the expressed purpose of not doing too much too soon.
Determine the measurements you want to study. You want to identify areas where you have people performing tasks that are somewhat similar but the results perhaps aren’t.
In some cases, as I was saying, the numbers are fairly straightforward. For us, we might have four stores performing at X and one store performing at three times X in terms of maybe selling an item that we’re featuring or guest service scores or any measurable result.
