Where is your Business Juju coming from?
Finding your 80% Return
Pareto’s Principle tells us that the majority of our results come from a minority of our efforts (or resources). As a Corporate Sales Manager, I always had to subscribe by this as there simply is never the time or resource to attend to everything perfectly. Even more so now in my own Practice.
Lynne Cazaly writes about this topic beautifully in her book, Ish – The problem with our Pursuit for Perfection and the Life-Changing Practice of Good Enough.
Cazaly explains how perfectionism is an unobtainable goal which leaves us with a low reward for our efforts. I feel this is critical to building Rhythm into our workflows and customer relationships. Pareto says that 80% of any result will generally come from 20% of an entity’s resource. This idea has served me well, as long as it is held loosely and not exclusively. A few examples of it’s application:
80% of sales will come from 20% of a business’ product range
80% of a project will be done in 20% of a given timeline
80% of our focus will be taken by 20% of our team members
When we take a step back from our business to do some analysis, I find it helpful to look at our clientele. Who in our clientele is taking a lot of focus for little return? Who in our clientele is loyal to the bone and advocating our business to others? And, who in our clientele is consuming from us transactionally, but has the potential to become an advocate.
Building the overall pie by building the 20% of our loyal clientele (advocates, or Brand Champions as I like to call them) is a super way to increase our own Return On Effort (ROE). Allowing us to progress forward with acceleration in an enjoyable and profitable way. Or another way to put this, create some Business Juju.
