of during the week'.
Those ideas spring from practical problems they face in their own tasks. Solving the problems improves both their own daily work and the business. Kelly listed a range of examples: ‘What's holding us up this week? Waiting for the forklift every day because it's always over there, or this jig takes a lot of working because it doesn't load or unload easily, or why don't we shift that rack closer so we're not having to go over there and get stuff all the time. If we had a bigger loader, or two forklifts …' Shane actively encourages them to write down anything they think of and bring it to the weekly meeting.
The problems may not sound earth-shattering and the solutions may not be wildly innovative, but when you add up all of those small improvements, across the different areas of the business, over a year or ten it's massive. And the thinking is so simple, it's brilliant.
Since then Kelly has evolved and formalised the process by learning from and modelling Japanese operational efficiencies. In essence though, he suggested, ‘The same philosophy applies: What problems do you have? What constraints? What opportunities for improvement? Can you fix it yourself? Do you need other resources? Do you need higher input etc.? It's been extremely powerful and allowed us in the last 12 months to achieve world's best practice in employment efficiency'.
If you visit Kelly Engineering today and look at their big international business – they export their IP (intellectual property) to both North America and Europe, with plans for expanding into South America and Africa – you could easily think things have always been this way. But if you backtrack over the decades you'll see the evolution of a simple idea to solve a simple problem, which caught the attention of a few early adopters. You'll see the progression of that idea over many years, through many simple ideas to solve small problems, and the steady growth of a viable engineering business within Australian borders. You'll see the seemingly chance meeting with a potential American distributor, leading to international expansion. And throughout this evolution, you'll also see the constant improvement not just in their products but also in how they conduct business. Step by step, inch by inch.
Kristy-Lee Billett is the founder of the Footprint Group, a recruitment and HR consulting business. It took her just seven days to set up her business, move into serviced offices, and be up and running. It sounds like an overnight success, yet her story started well before that.
In Billett's words, she fell into recruitment soon after studying forensic psychiatry at university. Floating around, unsure what to do for work, she went to see a recruitment agency and was offered a job. A little later, in 2006, she was working for one of the world's biggest recruiters when she had the impulse to start her own business. At the time she was heading up the organisation's newly launched commercial division. Just three weeks into her new role, however, her employers decided they didn't want to play in the commercial space after all. She recalls going home and thinking, I'm not happy with that. She resigned the next day.
The strange thing was that over the three weeks she headed up the commercial division they had been flooded with work. So she simply decided to do it herself, and over the next seven days she set up shop. Certainly she saw an opportunity in the market and homed in on it, but in reality it had taken years of experience and work to get her to that point.
Seven years later, the Footprint Group consists of a number of businesses in recruitment, HR services and SMSF (self-managed super fund) recruitment. Having started as a local operation on the Central Coast, about an hour north of Sydney, today the Footprint Group serves clients through the region and nationally. Billett won the Young Entrepreneur award in 2013, seven years after she launched the business.
As with Kelly Engineering, you could easily look at the Footprint Group and see only the success, rather than the gradual evolution and the years of experience behind it.
One of the major challenges businesses and entrepreneurs face is having an unrealistic expectation of how quickly a business will grow and become profitable. For about 90 per cent of those I interviewed it took between three and eight years to become profitable and successful. Not one of them saw overnight success. And yet we're bombarded with stories of the ‘instant' fortunes won by the very few. It's easy to look at the Facebooks of this world and imagine that all it takes is one brilliant idea and, voilà, you're a billionaire.
Australian actor Shane Jacobson, whose meteoric rise to success was on the back of the mockumentary movie Kenny, sums it up beautifully in his book title: The Long Road to Overnight Success. Perfect.
Think about it. The Footprint Group wasn't kick-started by a catalytic quantum leap, a sudden stroke of genius, but by a strong desire to do things differently and better. Billett's first tagline was ‘a fresh approach'. Over time, she has been very good at two things in particular that are vital in the game of inches: finding gaps in the market and finding ways of doing things better. For Footprint the game of inches is about constant, everyday disruption and reinvention.
Talking about this, Billett made a crucial point: ‘Over time, we really kept an eye on that market disruption mentality and some of the stuff we're developing at the moment is more along the lines of reinventing how things are done in the market'. This illustrates that disruption isn't always big, completely new or totally out there; it's disruptive because it's different. It's disruptive because no-one has done it before in that way, that well or in that market.
The game of inches is about constant, everyday disruption and reinvention.
As Siimon Reynolds put it, ‘Disruption is a moment, a tactic, a shift, and we must continually improve the disruption'. The game of inches also serves disruption – those breakthrough, Eureka ideas, big or small, behind business success. Yet success doesn't depend on being disruptive, because, as Siimon added, many successful businesses may actually never have had a disruptive moment, but will ‘endlessly improve until they were the best in their industry. You don't need to be disruptive but you do need to constantly improve'.
Constant improvement isn't just about improving a particular product or service. It's about improving your processes, your skills, your business model, your personal development, your vision, your mindset … If you want to be the best at what you do, you need to work consistently at improving everything you do.
The game of inches permeates every part of a business and every action you take. This is one of the greatest revelations you will ever have in business, because it's about changing what you do rather than changing who you are.
It's not who you are, it's what you do
Many people believe you need to be a certain type of person to succeed in business, that there is an entrepreneurial gene. We read or hear about entrepreneurs having particular characteristics: they are extraverts, type-A personalities, mavericks, thought leaders, risk takers, highly creative … and on it goes. But I didn't see any of that.
Success for the entrepreneurs I interviewed doesn't stem from their personality type or a cluster of character traits. Some were shy, some outgoing, some young, some old. It also doesn't matter if they come from a wealthy, privileged background or were poverty-stricken as kids. They had different backgrounds, had experienced different cultures and upbringing. What they do have in common is a philosophy that is demonstrated by the actions they take and the behaviours they exhibit.
At the risk of sounding like I've stepped onto a soapbox, I believe that immersing yourself in the realm of guru-ism and the supposed ‘characteristics' of successful people is dangerous. I didn't always think like this, but after interviewing a heap of truly successful people, I now know that it's not who you are that counts, it's what you do. End of story. You can keep on being you. It's your philosophy, the actions you take and the behaviours you adopt that count.
By ‘philosophy', I mean a way of looking at business not as
