“Change is vital, improvement the logical form of change.” – James Cash Penney

If It Ain’t Broke… Fix It Anyway!

How to Aim Your Business After It’s Been Started

If you want your business to grow quickly and easily, commit yourself to giving your customers as much as you possibly can. Give them full value for what they paid for on the first sale, and then give them more than they expect with every subsequent purchase.

Don’t settle for building a base of satisfied customers. Shoot for happy, thrilled, and even astonished fans of your business that will help you grow your business over time.

The Ready, Fire, Aim strategy is about starting off with a good and fair relationship with your customers and building on that by giving them more and more.

By resisting the urge to over-analyze the business plan and over-refine the product prior to the launch, Ready, Fire, Aim gives you more cash and (just as important) more flexibility for “aiming” the business and improving the product line thereafter.

Put differently, by launching your business when it’s “good enough” but not yet “perfect,” you give yourself extra time and money and customer feedback to make it perfect later on. And you do that without sacrificing your chances of success.

If your launch succeeds, you roll it out, bringing in more new customers and cash flow every day. The rollout itself is fairly easy from a marketing perspective: mostly more of the same with some testing to “tweak” the offer.

Meanwhile, you flow those new customers through what I used to call a gauntlet of free benefits and services, as well as a separate gauntlet of new product offers that you are developing as you go.

If, as I said, they are more than satisfied with their experience of your company, if they are happy and impressed or even astonished, they will become not only loyal, long-term customers, they will become unpaid advertisers for your business and its products by recommending you to friends and family, and by giving you positive ratings on the internet.

To ensure that your customers are always happy with your products and services, you cannot leave well enough alone. You have to give more. You have to set higher standards. You have to establish a companywide policy of incremental improvement – regularly upgrading your products and customer service by small degrees. And you must do that even when there is no evidence that your customers are in any way unhappy.

The Ongoing Process of Incremental Improvement 

Incremental improvement involves collecting feedback from your customers every day. Not just passive feedback (i.e., complaints and questions) but also active feedback. You must reach out to them and ask, “How can I make our relationship better?”

Once or twice a year, you should get together with your product development team and figure out how to incorporate all that feedback into making your products (and your customers’ experience of buying them) easier, more useful, and more enjoyable.

None of what I’m saying is meant to deny the importance of making a profit. Keeping your business profitable is the best and only way to ensure that it can continue to pursue its mission, which is to provide your customers with increasingly better products over time.

In making improvements, you should promote them to your customers. You should remind them, in every way you can, that you are in business to make their lives better. By communicating your commitment, you will engender in them gratitude and the need for reciprocity. And those feelings will spur them to reward you with more of their patronage.

How to Create Great Products That Keep Getting Better 

For our purposes, “broke” means the product is not selling well, as in your customers are not buying it. If your customers are not buying it, you should not fix it. This advice runs contrary to what most business experts will say. But I have found, over and over again through the years, that it is almost impossible to make a bad (weak-selling) product good (strong-selling) by improving it incrementally. It is much smarter to drop it, go back to the drawing board, and come up with something significantly different.

Let me say that again to emphasize my point: If the product fails to sell well, trash it. If it does sell, improve it.

There are no proven rules about how to improve products. Everything I recommend to my clients is based on instinct and intuition (which, of course, is based on experience). My policy is to improve best-selling products as much and as often as we possibly can, and to let our customers know that they are always getting better.

Products that sell moderately well should be improved too, but only after the top-selling ones have been taken care of.

To avoid putting your employees through incremental-improvement hell, you should come to an agreement about how to deal with ideas for product improvement – how to determine if they are actually better, how to calculate their potential costs and benefits, and how to schedule them into production so you don’t overburden the system.

I have become such a compulsive product improver that most of the CEOs I deal with have developed ways to manage my constant suggestions. I recognize that not all of my ideas will actually improve things, so I never insist on any particular improvement. I make suggestions and have faith that over the long run things will get better.

How Often Should You Make Improvements? 

Several of the businesses I work with hold yearly meetings to brainstorm and plan product improvements. Several others do this once every two years, and one works on a once-every-five-years schedule. In contrast, my clients who are in the business of selling digital information products via the internet are able to improve their products almost instantaneously.

How often you improve the product depends on how much hardware the product has. As a general rule, the more fixed parts it has, the less frequently you can improve it.

But the main rule is: Improve your products as often as you can.

How Big Should the Improvements Be? 

Again, there is no science to this, but my preference is to make small changes incrementally. Since I have made many mistakes about whether certain changes would be seen as favorable, I shy away from radical moves. My preference, when working with a product that is selling well (and is, therefore, good) is to change one thing at a time, and then to see how customers respond to it.

Incremental changes can easily be rescinded. Fundamental transformations cannot. I want the quality of my clients’ products to be always angling upward. We don’t need sharp upward movements. I’d rather have a gradual incline.

I think our customers like that approach. It allows them to see constant improvements and feel that they are in a relationship with a business that is always one step ahead of them. Constant, incremental improvements allow for more frequent communication with your customers, too. And experience proves that the more contact you have with them, the more sales you will enjoy.

Car manufacturers have long understood the perceived value of incremental improvements. With every new improvement in the steering function or the dashboard, they enjoy an additional opportunity to distinguish their product from the competition and get past customers to exchange old models for new ones.

How Should You Communicate Those Changes? 

If you make it a policy to continually improve your products incrementally, you will have many wonderful, ongoing opportunities to speak to your customers about the great new changes you are working on. Making product improvements transparent to customers (and even competitors) might seem foolish to the businessperson who sees the value of any improvements as limited. But as a businessperson who believes that wealth can be infinitely improved, you will be happy to share next year’s improvements with the rest of the world, because you know that as soon as you get them into the pipeline you will be working on some others.

The product goal is constant, never-ending improvement, because the business goal is constant, never-ending sales.