My sister Sally coined this phrase to sum up her philosophy towards business. Everything she did during her work day, she decided, should somehow connect to one of those two goals. If it didn’t, then it probably wasn’t worth her time. She was so committed to this idea that she wrote the phrase down and taped it to her desk to look at every day.
Sally has had a varied career, working in the government and the private sector, as a contractor and running her own small business. But she realized early on that focusing on making and saving money can help you succeed in any organization or industry. Profit and loss drive nearly all of the decisions in our capitalistic society, and even organizations like the government which are shielded somewhat from the free market must still respond to budgetary pressures.
Young people looking to make your mark in the workplace, take note: this simple phrase is the key to your business, no matter where you work. It doesn’t matter if you are at the very bottom of the proverbial ladder. If you can find ways to streamline your work process to make it more efficient and save the company money, or ways to increase sales and/or profit to make the company money, you’ll move up that ladder quick.
Early in my career I worked with a very large utility company looking for a commercial facility in Montgomery County. Their representative, a fairly high-level executive, seemed to be about my age. I asked him how he had managed to advance so high in the company at a relatively young age. He told me that his first job out of business school was working at the bottom level of this utility company, in the procurement and contracts division. On his first day he was given their 250-page bid application and instructed to see what he could do to make it shorter. No one seemed to expect him to have much success, but he was a determined young man and gave it his best shot. He arranged a meeting with their in-house counsel and asked her if she would work with him to streamline the document while making sure it still maintained the necessary legal protections for the company.
In the end, he handed his supervisor a bid application form that was only 8 pages long. Keep in mind this was long before computers, so this application had to be filled out by hand and mailed and filed as a hard-copy. Shrinking it from 250 pages to 8 not only brought more willing bidders to the company, it also saved them tens of thousands of dollars in work-hours, ink, paper and shipping costs. It was a huge hit with the company’s top brass and brought the young business school grad to their attention in a big way. He became one of the youngest executives in the history of the company by focusing on the two key items: making money and saving money.
Like anything, you can go too far in either direction. You have to remember the short and the long term when you are trying to make and save money for your business, and find solutions that work for both. Firing your senior manager might save you quite a bit in salary costs, but if the production of that unit slows dramatically without that person’s leadership the savings could quickly be erased.
But it is always a good idea to review what you are doing and see if it is taking you towards one of those two goals in a logical way. If not, it might be time to shift your focus and your efforts towards something that will.
Have a great weekend,
Ro