What is Leveraging?
If I take one of my businesses, TCMUK Limited, we help manufacturers improve top and bottom-line growth
by reducing costs, fostering innovation, and accelerating growth. The approach we have is a five staged structured programme called TCM-E5, built around Examine, Evaluate, Engineer, Execute and Expand.
We look at discovering the primary triggers restricting business performance. We build the picture using data, analyse that data to build new capabilities, and form a new solution. We then execute the action plan and when it’s successful, we expand (transfer the learning to other parts of the business).
In this structure we have several excel spreadsheets that help in building the data and making the decisions, these are little tools that help us deliver what the customer needs.
What's the structure going to be, is it going to be a single person, a single supply chain. Is it going to be multiple units, a matrix organisation? This is about building the actual organisation that is responsible for order fulfilment and deliver of the leveraged product and or service.
Look at what additional support activities may be need, do we need additional HR, finance sales, operators, as a solopreneur/entrepreneur do you need to offload work to a VA to ensure you have the time to focus on this leveraged opportunity, how else can you structure to deliver the customer value.
You need to create the operator’s manual, work instructions, systems, and procedures.
This then brings us to Locations, where is the actual work to be located. What assets do I need to locate in there as well. That could be a building, it could be machinery, it could be intellectual property and locations could include, being on one floor of a building, your home office, business hub, factory. It could be an Amazon style business, so they're holding a certain amount of inventory, and you’ve got a certain amount of inventory as well, so where is that going to be held. It could be an eBay, could be Etsy, could be something completely different. You’ve got ask yourself where is it going to be, where do I hold that additional stock.
This brings us to Information and Systems, how are your existing systems going to work with the additional workload, can they cope, do we need additional infrastructure, what data needs to be stored and where. How are they going to integrate? If you’ve got suppliers how do link the information with those, and also your customer.
This may seem overkill from a process point of view, but don’t underestimate growth, it brings its own set of problems.
Next up Suppliers, I’ve just mentioned them in information and Systems. What needs to be set up with your collaborative partners and the nature of that collaboration.
And then you can get into the Management Systems, what calendar processes and meetings do we need to plan in to set targets, make decisions, drive improvement, measure performance, and how you’re actually going to measure these, what scorecard are you going to use.
There's a multitude of tools that you can use in delivering POLISM, including
- value chain map
- organisational model
- supplier matrix
- stakeholder map
- and many more.
There is a lot that goes into this but it is essential to understand what demand are you asking of your existing business, your existing processes and where do I need to bolster, what improvements or what money do I need to spend.
Uber is a nice example to understand, their value proposition was “low cost and more rider information”
The process
steps...
- Build and maintain platform and app.
- Negotiate with regulators and fight legal battles
- They've got to recruit, train and equip drivers.
- They need to market the app to riders
- They need to match the riders and drivers with a dynamic pricing.
- And then they need to provide driver location to the rider,
- and then record ratings and process the payments
these are quite high-level steps but that's what they deemed important for them to focus on.
Then organisation. They wanted a geographic structure with a strong central function.
Next locations, they wanted big cities and the HQ to be based in San Francisco,
The information
and the management system
they combined wanting a central platform, and an app
Their suppliers, they looked at lawyers and lobbyists, influencers, city legislations, drivers, and social media.
Within this POLISM
process they highlighted the important aspects they really needed to focus on. These were; recording ratings, process of payments, recruiting and training drivers, the centralised platform app, and city legislations.
This operating model is an excellent way of understanding what needs to happen within your business, as you look at diversification, pivoting or scaling up.
Bringing it together
When you look at growth for your business, think about what you can already leverage, understand your value proposition and the impact on your existing operations and processes.
You need to have that systems way of thinking. Your Strategy, the way you think, and you plan - Your Processes, the way we operate – Your People, the way you lead, and your Systems, the way you interconnect
These are all inputs, if you get these inputs correct your output to the customer will be spot on, you’ll deliver the Customer Experience, Growth and Innovation
you want to achieve.
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