Many will know that I’m an avid Amateur Cyclist, and every year at this time, my attention turns to the Tour de France.
The Tour de France has been run – almost every year – since 1903. Today it is a gruelling 21 stage cycle across France and beyond, covering 3,400 km and has over 21,125m of climbing – the same as climbing Everest 2 and a half times!
Many will not know that the first British winner of the Tour de France was Bradley Wiggins in 2012. Sir Brad owes his success to the head of Team Sky, and also Head of British Cycling – Sir Dave Brailsford and applying the business technique of Marginal Gains.
Simply put, this is taking all the elements that make a business (or a cycling team in Dave's case) and improving each by 1%. And subsequently, at Team Sky has meant that they have won all bar two Tour de France races since 2012!
I always look to sport when I look at my business and what I offer to my customers - take a service department. If I had a service department which earnt £25,000 per month in Service Labour income and I asked my Service Manager to come up with a 36 month plan to increase this by 40%, he may struggle to come up with a plan.
However, if I was to ask him for an extra £250 of income in the next month, and then £252 the following month, this would be achievable. I would simply be asking for 3 or so hours of extra labour sales per month, 1 hour extra per week. This is the "Power of One" at work - a 1% continuous marginal increase - which adds up to 42% over 3 years. Incidentally, one way of doing this is to apply a fully integrated Online Service Booking System.
Apply this to every role in the dealership, asking every manager and every team member for simply 1% more this month than last month and the effects are massive. But how do we gain this 1% ?
It requires investment in three areas :-
People - We need to recognise that people make or break our business. Even in a digital age, where everything seems to be automated, the end result always comes down to people. Invest in people, train them, Mentor them, give them freedom to deliver.
Tools – we need to ensure that we deliver the very best tools to do the job. Whether that tool is a spanner, a telephone or some computer software.
Process – Generating and documenting processes, and continuing to review and improve these has a cumulative effect.
Measurement – A basic principle of business is simple. What you measure improves. This is the theory behind KPIs. The trick is to ensure that we understand the key KPI’s for our business, know how to measure them and aim individuals and teams to continuously improve the key KPIS. So in my example – labour sales may come down to no of hours per job card, no of jobs, recovery rate. (not total labour sales – this in itself is meaningless).
We apply this to the software we develop to our dealers. We add marginal gains all the time to our software tools which help Dealers to deliver more to their staff and their customers, improving processes and providing instant, up to date information in the form of reports and Dashboards.
I love business philosophy which is transferred to sport and then back again
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