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Nowadays there are thousands of companies that manage their own working style, potentially developing their personalized working areas that probably best fit them in order to be successful. But what varies the most in every business, is the way they work, how they plan their schedule, how efficient they are, and their vision for a quality product.
When starting a business, it is extremely crucial to analyze other business models and other companies when you are about to hit a target with a new brand. Being new to a market seems easy, at the end, if you have a product that strikes your customers, there's no "WHY" as to not being successful. But even if clients are one of the most important factors in order to have a stable and balanced business, there are small areas within the business that are worth taking into consideration, specially because those small systems are the ones that end up affecting not only your product but the customers as well.
So now that as an Academy we've opened our own smoothie business, or we are in the process of opening it, there have been different working systems that have adapted better to the culture that we maintain in the IA. In fact, we've studied different techniques to successfully function, implementing that knowledge in BlendZ. Among all the investigation and synthesis that has been done since the business started to shape up, there has been one main concept that has called my attention as I was reading "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries: working in small or large batches . |
Some startups envision their business as one that will definitely be successful without even trying the product, probably because they assume that their plan is detailed enough as to make NO mistakes. But honestly, with such a competitive world, there are minimum errors that you might encounter by trying to work rapidly and in large quantities, which as a result might affect your entire product being a waste of time and money.
With this said, one of the reasons why I strongly believe that working in small batches when starting a business is more efficient than working in large batches, is simply because you assure yourself that every step of the process works perfectly; if you make a mistake in step 1 you can quickly fix it and start again, you don't need to wait until step 11 to notice that everything stopped working because step 1 had a crack.
With this said, one of the reasons why I strongly believe that working in small batches when starting a business is more efficient than working in large batches, is simply because you assure yourself that every step of the process works perfectly; if you make a mistake in step 1 you can quickly fix it and start again, you don't need to wait until step 11 to notice that everything stopped working because step 1 had a crack.
Yes, it's true. Working in small batches might be by far more time consuming than working in large batches, but sometimes those extra minutes or hours are worth it. If you want to discover the perfect recipe you will probably need to bake your cupcakes over and over again, so if you want to figure out the most effective and secure process you might as well need to go over each step: finish one product and if it worked as you expected it to do so, you then start to work in large batches.
SO here goes to all those entrepreneurs who are wishing to start their own business: brainstorm your idea, establish a process, and take your time identifying if the process you selected actually works. Just as I explain it in the quick drawing at the right: it's better to spend 2 minutes of your time, print one paper, assure yourself that the document will be perfectly printed, and if it didn't work, fix it again, than spending 1 minute of your time, print 1000 paper, and then deliver all those papers to the trash because you noticed that all of them where useless. |
So don't get crazy to get everything done at once, go step by step, and take time with your product; at the end, you will recover the extra time that you took, when your product is successfully launched.