Many small companies believe that having a system or a standard is unnecessary. “I’m too small” they’ll say OR “I’ll never recoup my investment”.

What is your vision? Why did you open your own business? What’s in it for you? What’s in it for your customers?

A standard is your best practice and an integration system for all aspects of the business – below the ground – the foundational operations and above the ground – your strategies. How do you currently measure your capabilities in all aspects of customer service? What model do you use to measure the effectiveness of your facilitators at events? How do you measure performance and customer satisfaction? How do you establish a financial value on the performance of your facilitators and their impact on your brand?

The vision that a business holds will determine the depth of the operational framework (The HOW and the WHO) and the height of the strategic framework (The WHY and the WHAT). If your vision is detailed you will value it by creating a structure that minimizes cost and maximizes resource as you navigate your business through the endless cycles. Every enterprise needs resource in trade. These resources – raw materials – include their staff, an industry to work in, networks to connect to, partners for various projects, suppliers to provide the materials for the products and the services, markets to sell to and customers to serve. Without these frameworks, how do you manage your resources?

A Business standard is an exchange of information – it forms the currency of your trade. The level of standard determines the ability for currency exchange. A business standard is a language that gives you the ability to align the promise that you make with yourself with the contract you make with your customer. A Personal standard will be appreciated by you and maybe a few others, National – by those who live in your country, Global – congratulations – you’ve just given yourself the opportunity to trade on a worldwide scale! As you value your brand and value your customer you define the value for your brand and for your customer in the standard that you deliver and meet. This is your calling card for the size of your vision.

Your business is a promise you make to your customers and your shareholders. The people, processes and technology in your business interweave to align with the delivery of your products and services and this promise.

Peter Drucker said that the purpose of business is to create a customer. For thousands of Training and Personal Development companies, a customer has a couple of faces – number one as a participant AND number two as a facilitator and trainer – once they partake of the in house certification programs available to them. The conversion of customers into stakeholders via the sale of training programs is an effective and common strategy in many business plans and a particular feature in the PD industry where the lure of potential income is strategically marketed.

The recent headlines about the three suicides by participants of one particular Australian personal development company program have shown the spotlight on the importance of risk management policies and training for facilitators, trainers and volunteers for every company selling these programs and then utilizing these people as volunteers at their program events.

The global volunteer industry is burgeoning – let’s face it – the world economy is largely dependent on volunteers. For a personal development or training organisation, a facilitator or crew volunteer is an effective profit tool. The experience provides valuable training opportunities as well as community connection. When working with facilitating volunteers keep in mind the actual real time cost of this resource. Do you know your ROI per volunteer?

Research shows that approx 70% of customer’s will discontinue dealing with a business when they no longer feel the exchange is of value. It costs at least 6 times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. What statistics do you have about the customers you have lost over the past decade? How much could you have saved if you retained those customers instead of the six times more expense you have incurred?

A facilitator volunteer is first and foremost a customer and as such, part of the customer contract is a promise for the business to deliver a customer service. As the Personal Development industry explodes worldwide, many businesses have experienced unprecedented growth. The downside to this growth is the lack of time to build systems, codes and policies to manage the resources involved. A hallmark of the Personal Development industry unfortunately shows that people fall between the cracks. Ask yourself this question – how much money are you losing with each facilitator volunteer that asks questions which remain unanswered? What is the ultimate cost of your growth?

The conversion of a dissatisfied, questioning, complaining customer into a long term joint venture profit partner is an effective customer service strategy. What valuable feedback do you collect from every whiny email and phone call received? These are the customers you can see – they are actually taking the time to give you critical business information – information you are not paying for in surveys and market research. They have invested in their own time in order to make that last ditch connection before they defect to your competitor. What about the customers who simply leave without letting you know? What is your strategy to retain them? If you lose 50 a year, that’s a potential $100000.00 loss. Do your statistics track your retention rate and financial losses?

Creating lasting partnerships with your customers in the way that you engage them and handle challenges is a foundation activity for enterprise. Infatuation with the brand is like eating Chinese food – it will only last so long. Have you compared the cost of your current “system” with an effective profitable long term customer service plan? How much money is this present “system” costing you?

“To make new discoveries we must see with new eyes”…. Albert Einstein

If you looked through the eyes of your disgruntled customers, what opportunities may you see?

Winter is in the process of ending and Spring is looming before us. Trees whose leaves went reddish yellowish brownish purple in April and then fell in June will begin to bud and bloom again in September so that by December they will be a brilliant green.

When we isolate principles of structure – like we do when learning music or dance or programming software – the series of lessons in natural order and organic forces – like the observation of trees in the cycles of life – provide us with the greatest of holographs.

New forms emerge from the disintegration of the old. Moss growing on dead tree trunks and seedlings sprout through dead leaves. Forests hold an organic order through growth, maturation and decay processes. We don’t hold onto the old leaves and attempt to glue them back onto the trees. We appreciate their life cycle.
Yet we beat ourselves up by being in one cycle or another.

“I need to move forward.”
“It will be ok when I get there.”
“Now I have updated my model and have improved life is better.”
mmmm………….I think I smell something….:-)

Wherever we are and whatever pattern/story/trait/value/belief we own forms part of our life cycle. There are times when things come together and times when things fall apart. This is the organic process of nature. Yet we hold on to one side because we don’t want things to fall apart. We negate our masculine or feminine OR our predator or prey – (keep going there are endless metaphors here) as we try to fit into someone ELSE’s cycle and paradigm – thinking it is better than ours.
WHY?
How can you answer this question?
How can you possibly deduce the billion structures weaving and playing out together to create this end result?

When we appreciate the seasons of us as reflected back to us by the hologram of nature, we learn how to hold tension and from this point we learn how to create while sitting in this tension of seasons and cycles. In other words, knowing that we will feel every emotion in the spectrum, every thought in the cosmic unconscious and every sensation in our body without wanting to justify it, explain it, understand it, logic it or change and avoid it, is the ability to hold the tension of the both sides of life.

Robert Fritz calls this Structural Tension and from this appreciation vantage point we assimilate and create.
So perhaps instead of telling our stories of how we are one side or the other, we can merely say to ourselves “Ah this is how I am at this moment. I am also the opposite – and can think, feel and sense that too. There is no why, this is simply one of the many HOWS I will experience in my life”

Someone once said “there is nothing to change but much to love.”

Copyright Nichola Burton 2006 ©