Raising Quality

Assessing Yourself

This information is part of the Making a Quality Plan topic.

You first

If you're serious about raising quality inside your business - and you are the only person who can do it - then you have to start with you. Raising standards means putting quality at the heart of everything you do - and you have to practice what you preach. Your staff, your suppliers and to a large extent your customers, will take their cue from you. You set the tone.

Assess yourself

Honestly appraising what you do, and then playing to your strengths and working on your weaknesses is an essential first step. It will save you time and money and may even save your business in the long run.

There are five key areas to consider:

• Appearance
• Approach
• Organisational skills
• Business skills

Go through each area and score yourself honestly. As described in Making a Quality Plan use a grid to write the area or topic on the left, your score in the middle and your ideas for change on the right. Click here for an example grid. You may want to think each topic right the way through, including your ideas for change, before moving on to the next point, or you may want to score everything first, then go back and think about what you could do to improve.

PERSONAL ASSESSMENT
Scoring: Very Poor = 1, Weak = 2,
OK = 3, Pretty Good = 4

Appearance

90% of face to face contact is not what you hear but what you see. You should be smartly but practically turned out at all times that you might be seen by staff or customers. Be honest - do you present well or are you a bit dishevelled? Maybe you need to update your wardrobe, change your glasses, get your hair cut regularly, get your teeth scaled... If you look the part, you'll feel it and customers (and staff) will be reassured by someone professional looking. It doesn't mean you have to wear a suit and tie all day, being appropriately dressed is the key thing. But just because you run a farm attraction doesn't mean you don't have to be well turned out. If you're a bit lacking in the sartorial department then consider getting a set of boiler suits made with your logo on them - or a pair of custom-designed wellies!

Approach

Since your staff, suppliers and customers will take their cue from your approach, whatever the circumstances, no matter what the provocation, you have to ensure your approach is professional at all times: Calm - Polite - Appropriate

Lots of business owners manage this with customers and then lose it with staff. Be honest about your own approach. Score yourself separately on your approach to customers, staff and suppliers. No matter who it is, you should never shout, lose your rag, snap, snipe or swear and however bad your day, you should always keep your moods to yourself. You're the boss, you need to behave like it.

Another common mistake, especially for people in their first business, is to become over-familiar. Neither staff nor customers want you to be their mate. Instead they're looking for friendliness, warmth and professionalism. Be helpful and supportive, encourage conversation with customers and feedback from staff, share a joke but remember that there is a line. It's better to be too far behind it, than overstep it.

Organisational skills

How you approach your work will have a big impact on your staff and customers. Turning up somewhere where no-one seems to have their finger on the pulse, or, just as bad, where everyone operates with ruthless efficiency and the customer is processed like a package is not a good experience.

Approaching your work in the same way as you'd like to see your staff approach theirs is a good rule-of-thumb. How do you score against the following?

• Being organised - Do you have a routine and keep a clear list of all the things that need to be done?
• Prioritising - Do you regularly check the list and tackle the priorities first, re-prioritising regularly, as things change?
• Managing time - Do you have a clear idea of how much time you've got to spend on each task and try not to overshoot it?
• Finishing things - As far as possible, do you try to complete each job before moving onto the next one (so you don't end up with seven jobs on the go at once, none of which are being done properly)?
• Staying focused - Do you allow yourself to get easily distracted from difficult or tedious tasks?
• Doing it now - Do you put things off - hoping you'll feel more like it 'later' - or do you deal with problems as soon as possible?

Quote: " 'Later' isn't this miraculous time when you suddenly have all the space, energy and inclination to deal with everything. 'Later' always turns out to be a moment when you've still got everything you have to do now, plus all the things you didn't do before. And you're tired..." (Anonymous)

Training courses really help - there are lots geared specifically to small business owners. You may run your own business but you don't have to do it all on your own. Get help, take advice, improve your skills - and meet people! Good networking is essential to success and talking to other people in the same situation as you can be a real release.

Your Business Skills

Running a small or medium business sometimes feels as though you need to be a master at everything: finance, marketing, personnel, health and safety, IT, web design... The reality for the vast majority is that you can't be good at everything. The trick is to identify what you do and don't do well and to keep on training and learning - even just learning enough to make sure you employ the right person to do it instead is time well spent.

Score yourself against each of the key areas. Later on you'll look more closely at each area to see how your business is performing, but for now rate yourself according to how confident, skilled and capable you feel you are in each of the following areas:

• Finance
• Staff management
• Meeting legislation
• Customer service
• Marketing
• Websites and E-commerce
• IT and technology management
• Developing your products and services
• Research

Scoring

As mentioned before, the important thing is to be consistent. Using brackets that really mean something to you helps, eg: 1=Not at all good at this, 2=Could be better, 3=Satisfactory, 4=Strong point. Draw up your table as described, score yourself, then add each area up and divide it by the number of topics to see which area needs the most attention.

Quality ideas

Generating ideas to improve your appearance, approach and organisational skills is fairly easy. But what about your business skills? How do you set a target for something you don't know?! If you've scored yourself fairly low in any of the business management topics it's because you're aware that you're skating over some business areas. Identifying these is the key thing. Put in ideas for action that revolve around researching more - using the toolkit to really explore the marketing, IT, finance and other sections; using the web to do online research, looking for courses and networking events and so forth. The more of these activities you do, the more you'll learn about what you could/should be doing in these business areas and the more focussed your ideas for change will become.

What did you learn?

Going through any appraisal teaches you about the process, as well as about the area you're reviewing. Were you constantly interrupted - do you need to do these reviews at a different time? Were you too tired - can you tackle them in the morning instead? Did you find it difficult to score - do you need to change the brackets? Did you keep running out of space - is it easier to do it straight onto the computer. And so on. As you work through the review, you'll refine the way you do things so that it works better for you.

Take the next step in this topic:

• Your premises, products and services

Or return to Making a Quality Plan