Steve Bigari knows a lot about hamburgers. As the owner of 12 McDonald’s franchises Bigari knows that in the fast food business, time is money. The faster you can take orders, the more customers you can serve. The less mistakes you make while taking these orders, the happier the customers.
Bigari has a penchant for measuring things and one metric in his business kept annoying him: 2 minutes, 36 seconds. That’s how long it takes the average McDonald’s drive-through to take an order. But it wasn’t just the amount of time it took to take an order, which annoyed Bigari. It was also the amount of mistakes his employees were making when they took these orders. So he decided to do the unthinkable and out source the order taking process. Today, when a customer drives up to one of Bigari’s McDonald’s, the person taking the order is actually sitting in a call center some 900 miles away. The result: orders now take less than a minute to fill, and mistakes are down to only 2%.
It would be safe to assume that you’re not an order-taker for McDonald’s. So why should you care? The answer is “Decoupling.” More and more jobs that were once an integral part of what a company does are now being “de-coupled,” separated from the core, and moved elsewhere, where they can be done faster, cheaper and better.
Last year, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline took its shared finance department and moved it from the company’s headquarters in the UK to India, where it is now run by Genpact, one of the world’s largest business process outsourcers.
If hamburger order-takers and financial controllers can be outsourced so easily, how can you make sure the same doesn’t happen to your job? The answer: add more value to your customers than anyone else. How? By following these seven rules:
1. Be Unique. The best way to ensure your job doesn’t go to someone else is to become indispensable. And the best way to become indispensable is to do something that no one else can do. Many years ago Jerry Garcia, the lead singer of ‘The Grateful Dead’ was asked what kind of advice he would give to a fledgling rock band. “You do not merely want to be the best of the best,” answered Garcia. “You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.” If you haven’t figured out what you can do for your organization that no one else can, now is a good time to start. After all, if you don’t know the answer to that question, why should anyone else?
2. Be smarter. If you’ve worked for your company for more than five years, chances are that it now looks very different from when you first joined. But how different are you from when you first joined? How many skills have you added to your arsenal since then? If your company offers professional development courses – take them. If it doesn’t, make the case for offering them, or take them in your own free time. Consider taking courses that have nothing to do with your “profession” (such as marketing or strategy), but have everything to do with the success of your company. But whatever you do, remember that as your company matures and develops, so should you.
3. Be valuable. We all like to think of ourselves as valuable members of our organization, yet we often forget that it is never we who define this value — it’s our customers. Whatever you think your value is, one thing is clear: It has nothing to do with your title. If you are an “order-taker” but can’t increase customer satisfaction, what’s your value? If you’re in “marketing” but aren’t discovering what your customers lose sleep over at night, what’s your value? If you’re a “finance director” and aren’t focused on new growth opportunities, what’s your value? If you want to deliver exceptional value to your customers look at how they define value, then deliver it.
4. Be humble. Many of us worked hard to get to where we are. We spent years at school, studied hard for exams and laboured endlessly to reach our current position. But servicing customers, be they internal or external, requires humility. If you want to be truly valuable to your customers, you have to remember one thing: It’s not about you. It’s about them. Because at the end of the day, your customers don’t really care how good you are. All they care about is how good they’re going to be when you’re done with them.
5. Be proactive. Remember your first month on the job? Remember how many things didn’t make sense? How many things were done “because that’s how we’ve always done them…”? Then a few weeks pass. You got used to doing things “the way they were always done” and stopped asking questions. Big mistake. One of the first things an outsourcing firm like Genpact does when it takes over a business process is look at what other departments in your company are trying to achieve and suggest a better way to do it. But you don’t have to wait for an outsourcer like Genpact to make things better. If you want to add real value to your organization, start asking your internal customers what their business objectives are and find a way to short-circuit the system – delivering better results at a fraction of the time and the money – before someone like Genpact does.
6. Be effective. The economics of offshoring are hard to beat. It costs 40% less to run a finance operation in India than it does in Western Europe. So how do you compete with an operation that is so much more efficient than yours? You don’t! Instead of trying to be more efficient than the competition, focus your energy on becoming more effective. Effective people do the right thing. Efficient people do things right. Effective people maximize growth. Efficient people minimize waste. Effective people get promoted. Efficient people get offshored.
7. Be prepared. Five years ago, offshoring mostly meant drilling for oil in the sea. Today it could mean your job. Five years from now, your company will be facing new challenges and opportunities. It only makes sense that the same will be true of you. But change rarely happens in one day. More than often it evolves gradually. The problem is that most of us are too focused on what happens inside our companies to see this change happening. But if you want to ensure that you’re not caught by surprise, make it a habit to see what the world looks like outside your company and even outside your industry. As the science fiction author William Gibson once said, “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Adding more value to your organization than anyone else is not easy. It requires the ability to understand what your customers, internal and external, are looking for, and then to serve them well, consistently. But even if you do all of the above, someone higher up in the company might decide to send your job somewhere else. If you’re worried about that happening, you can always do what Steve Bigari, the McDonald’s franchise owner, did. Bigari spent six years looking for a way to outsource order-taking at his restaurants. When he couldn’t find anyone to do it, he built his own call centre, which now offers out sourced order-taking to scores of other McDonald’s restaurants.
