The decisions you make can affect your business in many ways.  But so does consistency, it touches every aspect of your business and can have a huge impact on the overall success.

We Are Consistent About Being Inconsistent

Truth is most of us are consistent about being inconsistent.  Today we decide we are going to create a plan and stick to it and by the end of the week not only are we not following a plan, we’ve likely forgotten we ever thought about planning.  But inconsistency is not a theme that makes for success in business.

What’s Consistency Got to Do With It? 

You’ve heard the song “What’s Love Got to Do with It” by Tina Turner where she describes how she finally had the courage to break free of her abusive husband Ike.   Love has a lot to do with success in business, you have to love what you do, but consistency also impacts success.  Consistency touches every aspect of your business.  Here are some examples from when I owned my recruiting firm.

1.  Set goals/objectives: We set specific goals or objectives for the process and identified the roadblocks or barriers to success in advance so we could watch out for them.  Then I was always checking on how we are doing.  It’s not that we stayed on the same track all the time, but we knew in advance if we had to change and agreed to what the next steps would be.

2. Marketed: I marketed in some fashion every single week.  Some percentage of my time was spent keeping the pipeline full with the realization that things don’t always come today just because you put out the effort today.  This attitude insured that I didn’t get dependent on any one client, that I knew I could whether any economic situation that arose and that I didn’t become complacent either about doing the work or my skills.

3. Ask for referrals: I constantly and continually ask both clients and candidates for referrals and got them.

4. Standards:   Held up standards for the way we worked together.  I wouldn’t start to work on an assignment until they signed my contract and returned it to me.  I wouldn’t start to work until I wrote a “here’s my understanding of what you are looking for and our agreed upon goals and objectives” letter and they signed off on this. And there were standards for our staff and candidates as well.

I have compiled a list of 30 examples from my recruiting days in all aspects of the business from sales to finances to client development to staff and more.  This consistency put our firm in the top 5% of all executive recruiting firms nationwide.

Inconsistency Causes Chaos

Employees are like children, they function better when they know what to expect.  It doesn’t mean they have to like it, but flitting from one idea to the next, changing your mind all the time or committing to something this month and next month it changes can cause chaos.  Employees don’t know what to do or what to expect.  They can’t meet your expectations because they don’t know what they are.  Thus neither you nor they feel satisfied

If you want greater success in your business, if you want to determine when things are not working and why, if you want to make decisions with good data not just partial information or through emotions you have to start with consistency.  This week I challenge you to take one piece of your business, define what you want for it and begin to implement a plan of consistency.  Then over the next 90 days monitor the results.  I’m betting you’ll have lots of new ah-has.

© 2014 Incedo Group, LLC