What’s Your Secret Sauce?

No one cares what you do. I know this seems a bit harsh, but you need to face that reality. Many other companies do what you do and can fulfill the need your company currently fills. Your customers don’t care about your what, they care about how you do what you do. How you do things makes your business special. So what’s your secret sauce?

All in the How

To continually create the how that keeps your customers coming back, you have to make sure they have the same experience. Every time they interact with your business, they should receive the same standard of how they know and love. To ensure that same standard, you need documented processes that outline your how.

I imagine a few of you right now are saying: “We don’t have that problem at our company. We have very detailed standard operating processes.”

Then I bet a few others are thinking, “So what? My team generally understands our approach. We don’t need all that limiting bureaucracy.”

Keep It Simple

As EOS Implementers®, we find that most of the businesses we work with fall into one of these two camps:

1. Overly detailed documented processes
2. Nothing documented at all

Or worse, they have a little of both.

At EOS®, we teach that the right approach falls in the middle: document the 20% that gets you 80% of the results. As Isadore Sharp, founder of Four Seasons Hotels, would say it: “Systemize the predictable. Humanize the exceptional.”

That 20% represents the high-level steps for your handful of core processes. Not the 100 steps for each of your 30 “core” processes. This high-level approach ends up dialing in your secret sauce, the how you do what you do.

This simplified approach gets you the most return on your buck. When you create overly detailed process documents, they’ll be difficult to follow. If you don’t document your processes, they’ll be impossible to follow.

All in the How

Once you get your core processes down, then you need to start the hard part and get them followed by all. But understand that it’s impossible to take this step if you haven’t taken the time to document your secret sauce. So, get your handful of core processes down and start truly taking advantage of your how.