What you can do to get higher quality for lesser price

In the business world as in the regular world, everyone does what he or she can to get higher quality for lesser price. It's not an easy thing to do. If you're speaking about wares, you're speaking of coupon cutting and bargain shopping. If you're speaking of business performance or manufacturing performance, though, you're speaking of a different sort of discipline. You're going from a very general topic to a very specific one. To get a higher quality for a lesser price out of your company, very close scrutiny combined with very high levels of dedication and zeal is the name of the game.

What we're speaking of here is the incremental, day-by-day elimination of wastage, whatever form it takes, within your company. By doing so you get a higher quality for a lesser price. You're not paying for waste any more, which allows you to focus on profit, what you're bringing in rather than what you're sluggishly pumping out.

To use a simple example of a company cutting waste to get higher quality for lesser price, let's pretend we're a company that makes banners for announcements and such. Big banners, banners that stretch across a whole street. It costs us X amount of dollars to make them, and we charge X plus an additional cost to our customers, thus bringing in more then we put out. We have two employees, Jane and Joe. Jane designs the banners and Joe prints them out of a huge press. What would we do in this situation to get higher quality for lesser price? Well, we'd take a close keen look at Jane and Joe. What are Jane and Joe doing that helps our company? Are Jane and Joe doing anything to hinder our company? If we answer "yes" to that last question, we know what we need to focus on in order to get higher quality for lesser price.

Let's say we answered "yes"-Jane designs the banners more slowly than she ought to and Joe feeds them into the press more quickly than he ought to. Joe's mistake gums up the press while Jane's gums up the process preceding the press. What we'll do in this situation "to get higher quality for lesser price" is simply try to train Jane and Joe to do their jobs better. This is a simple, yet revolutionary, way for business owners to think. The idea is to build, slowly and day by day, improvements into the system itself, and thus spend less and less money on outdated or simply bad business practices, and therefore have more and more money to upgrade equipment, add extra staff, and so forth.

You can start applying this logic to your business right way. You can start getting a higher quality of work from your employees, from the people you do business with, and so forth, immediately. You don't have to wait until you have a certain amount of money to buy Y with-you focus instead on improving X. Perhaps X will improve to the point that Y becomes unnecessary, and you can spend the money saved on some other more crucial thing. But even if Y is still necessary, you'll earn the money for it a lot quicker, and learn a lot in the process.

What does this mean? It means that getting higher quality for lesser price is a process more "up to you" than business owners commonly assume it is. That is, we tend to focus so much on updating to a new thing, getting a new deal, advancing, that we rarely focus on what we can do to get the best out of old things, old deals, and so advance in the highest and best way possible rather than merely discarding one problem for another.