You know those quizzes you find on social media that matches you to an animal, dessert or famous person?
These definitely serve as a fun break and were the inspiration for our own version for pet business owners. I invite all of you quiz takers to check-out Crystal Canine’s Biz Systems Strength Finder online quiz. You won’t be assigned a dog breed, but you may get an important insight on your business operations.
We’ve become obsessed with business systems as a foundational tool in solving business problems. So we’ve really enjoyed tallying results from our quiz takers over the first few months of availability. You get immediate feedback from the quiz tool, but behind the scenes we perform some additional analysis.
We love learning how pet businesses operate and thought you might also enjoy some of our early observations. Our focus is determining the strength of the six core systems we’ve identified in successful pet businesses: Company, Marketing, Customer Service, Staff Management, Financial and Operations.
Early results suggest:
- Operations system scores highest consistently
- Company and Financial systems score lowest consistently
- 76 of 120 is the average biz system total score
- Businesses operating for 5 or more years provided our high score of 103 and low of 55
In reflection it’s not surprising that operations score highest as most pet business owners start them to fill quality care gaps in their communities. For many business owners their strength and focus on great care allows other areas of the business to “make do”.
My concern is how often this is at the sacrifice of the business owner’s pay and lifestyle. The early quiz results support this with low Company and Financial system scores. The overall average score coming in at 64% also indicates that many owners don’t find time to focus on systems. I remember the days of daily fire fighting; by the end of the day you are exhausted and don’t have the energy to even care about business systems.
The irony is that strong business systems is how you minimize and eventually eliminate the daily fires. Systems are the key to increasing the size of your paycheck, getting employees to think like you and enjoying time away from your business.
Are you curious how your operations compare to our early results?
Take the quiz and see how you score. Afterwards pick your lowest scoring area and select one thing to change in the next month. Once that is done pick another low score and change that area the next month.
Improving your business systems is more like a marathon than a sprint. It can be grueling at times, but the steady forward progress does pay off. You’ll suddenly realize that it’s been a full month without a daily fire or crisis. You start to realize that you can plan a vacation and disconnect from the business. Best of all you also start to find more money in your bank account each month.
What is the biggest struggle you have implementing systems for your business?