The focus of any business today is often to put on doing more, doing it better, and doing it with less. Companies get under tremendous pressure to keep up with competitors. With customers/clients’ expectations increasing faster, it calls for more agility and more efficient deliveries.

In our recent online event, our knowledgeable guest speaker, Andrew Smart, (Head of FM Consultancy for Mace), highlights the importance of Speed. Speed in the Facilities arena means you’re moving fast, learning and improving. Speed might help you maintain your business, but on its own, it won’t make your business better. Your business needs velocity — direction — to be effective.

It may help us to think of speed as business process alignment like this quote suggests: “High speed is achieved by process automation. High velocity is achieved by process alignment: ensuring there is a collaborative process in progression, retaining process feedback, accumulating supporting documentation, combining request specific and supplementary information, all for the benefit of the final executive decision.”

Let’s take a closer look at what all this means…

Andrew explained; “With having more experience we need to have more insight and we need to be able to get to answer quicker than they (clients) can get to know what’s in an advisory frame. When we're working in a purely more interim management terrain, we don't have to answer more quickly but we do have to transact at a pace and with confidence that our client probably wouldn't be able to do themselves because that's what they're buying into. That's where they're coming from and what they're expecting from us. So, if you look back at yourself and think about how you interact with the marketplace and how you can work with organisations like mine, those are the things which are crucial to me. So, speed and availability, flexibility, expertise, and being able to do more than the client can do themselves are all crucial.”

Our Founding Director wished to explore further and asked Andrew how we would get the initial speed right. Do we get someone front first and then like we all know, move with the next steps?

With the speed that is not consistent, we know things slow down into approval, etc. and from an associate perspective too. One of our Directors then asked;

“Is it serious? How is it really coming off? And no one can really say how consistent that might be, and people and expertise drift off because they need to get applied somewhere else. Where do you see that too? Where do you see that as a risk? So, you present someone a month later or in the first week, and with interviews, presentation etc, and then nothing happens? And how long would you expect someone to be available for an opportunity? And when would you think that's fair enough to move on?”

Andrew Smart highlights “So let me give you a corporate perspective and then a personal one. So, a corporate perspective, we have opportunities that run for anything up to six months which means you know, I have things in my pipeline now where we presented to a client over six months ago, but we still know from conversations we're having with those clients that at some point they will press the button on those. Now, these are extraordinary times because a lot of those decisions are being delayed by external factors”.

“So, reoccupation of offices, people coming back into office space, people coming back into manufacturing space, and people achieving footfall in retail, all those things are affecting the speed at which clients are taking some of these projects forward. Particularly if they change programmes as opposed to just business as usual. These are quite exceptional times, but therefore, from a corporate perspective, anything up to six months is probably the right answer...”

“From a personal perspective, I wouldn't expect anybody to wait around for an opportunity for more than a maximum of four weeks. I just think it's unrealistic to expect individuals who you know, and I must remind clients this sometimes individually, and day to day, that their bread and butter on the table relies on them and having this kind of work is unrealistic to expect them to sit around waiting for longer than that. So, you know, you buy, or you lose. A seamless engagement and communication are the key.”

The Bottom Line

Only speed will improve and grow your business.

And to gain that, you must have everyone aligned with clear roles and responsibilities and outcomes continuously measured. A few proven ways to increase your speed are.

Identify sources of friction: Take a closer look at the underperforming areas and aspects, make observations, share them with your team for feedback, have discussions, and dig a little deeper to find out what can be improved.

Communicate purpose and goals: Review your collective goals with your client(s), communicate with them consistently and evaluate how well they’re understood. They say it takes teams ten times of hearing something before they’ll either remember or believe and execute it. To get your entire team to move with speed, everyone needs to understand and be aligned on collective goals. As a leader, it’s your job to make sure everyone has the right information.

Don’t fear change: It’s human nature to fear change, but the reality is that expectations, technology, and business are evolving daily. Your business must become comfortable with change, and a good way to do that is to develop well-planned change management processes that mitigate issues and make transitions easier. Instead of something daunting and scary, it can become an exciting chance for growth and improvement. Learn how our Experts can mitigate the risks and make the transition easier

Sound like a lot of work? To tackle some of your core priorities is to partner with like-minded organizations to help you build speed in areas where you don’t have the expertise or don’t need to have expertise. Discover how can we ease off the load!