Is there such a thing as working too hard?
Perhaps, only if you are putting your health at risk. But if you’re strong as a bull and have the energy of continent-cross blue whale, then have it, Henry!
But there is a such as thing as doing too much. Businesses that are planning too far ahead, trying to figure out what they can do to anticipate what might happen beyond 6 months to a year, or maybe even just continually doing too much in little bites, can fail.
Now it’s not wrong for you as a small business owner to plan ahead. In fact, you would be jeopardising your own future if you didn’t. However, when an accurate educated guess turns slowly into a wild stab in the dark, that’s when you start having major problems.
An overstocked inventory
We do this in our daily lives, we buy things that we know we don’t need right now but believe will come in handy later.
For example, you see apples are on sale at the supermarket, and even though you don’t eat many apples during the week, you buy a lot of them anyway in the hope that they can last you long into the future and you can eat them at your leisure. Weeks go by and your tastes have changed, and you forget about the apples. One day you come home and find them rotting away, that’s pretty much money down the drain.
This is a simple example of overstocking. It’s okay to use evidence from your business history to anticipate an increase in sales, e.g. during Christmas. However, you don’t know what’s going to happen, so don’t overstock your inventory as your products could go to waste sitting in the warehouse. Getting too far ahead of yourself and doing too much that is not needed, can end up losing you money.
Drop what doesn’t sell
Some products are just going to be more popular than others. Even though you heart may be invested in one of them, that product may not be doing so well.
With a Six Sigma approach, you can analyze what is and isn’t selling well in your business. Going through the various different training programs that are categorized as belts, you can learn how to monitor and solve problems that are flying under the radar. One month it may look like Product A has sold really well, B and C have done good but not great.
However, this new approach to thinking about your business, gives you a new way of looking at things. What if it costs twice or three times as much to make product A than both B and C? That means that even though the latter products haven’t sold as many units, they have made a higher profit if they were to be priced similarly. In fact, what if it turns out that products B and C have sold good consistently throughout the year, but product A has only had a couple months where it has sold to an equal amount of more?
Dropping what doesn’t sell and make sense, could help you to focus on other products you are doing well in.
Don’t overstep the mark and think you know exactly what’s going to happen during a financial quarter or busy time during the year. It’s important to not overstock as products you do not sell, could end up costing you money as either wasted or even for warehouse storage.
