Reverse-Engineering Outcomes or a full Vision
The only way to engage Zanzibar Enterprises is to have a set of outcomes or a full 3-5 year vision statement that articulates the end state that the department or company is after.
In many cases, creating this “Vision” for a company has been the first outcome to work on. It is important to gain the alignment of the ownership parties as well as the primary implementation partners inside the organization. In more than a few cases, Zanzibar Enterprises has been engaged to interview the Boards of Directors, owners, and key executives before crafting a 3-5 year “Vision Statement.” This allows for maximum alignment where all key players find their own voice in what is to be engineered.
In most organizations, a “Vision Statement” is something with nice words on a wall that nobody is really taking very seriously. Not so when companies engage Zanzibar Enterprises. We make sure to have everything in the organization flow from and be derived from the Vision. We are rigorous in training everyone from holding the end game of what we are creating in the highest esteem as it is the whole reason everyone has a partnership together. The set of outcomes or “Vision Statement” is instructive for everyone in the organization right down to technicians.
Once we have a well designed (and even inspiring) set of outcomes, then we can get to work reverse-engineering those results.
Every result in business has more than one access to accomplish it. Our job is to create strategies that will unquestionably work without fail, while utilizing the skills, talents, and resources that are already in place. In this way, we can find a very efficient solution for outcome resolution.
Outcomes Produced
In one company called Worker’s Compensation Company of America, we were engaged because as the company grew, the profitability didn’t. We were called in not only to create a culture change in the organization to go from a complaint-oriented culture to one that pulled for success and each other’s success, but also to solve the profitability problem. The cultural problem was easily solved inside of the first six weeks. For profitability, however, it took a little more work. The cost reduction work they championed for clients was incredibly complex. The algorithm for how to mitigate costs to the employer was over 1100 items long. They required 15 year claims administration veterans in order to execute the work. These people demanded the highest salaries in the industry and thus chewed up most of the profit margin. The owners of the company were skeptical that anything could be done about it. They argued it would be impossible to develop our own talent. Zanzibar Enterprises went to work.
We designed a system of hiring in people just out of college (or even without college experience) to be assistants to those doing the work. This initial phase allowed our senior talent to execute up to 100% more work than they had been able to do before having an assistant. Of course, a rigorous management architecture was created to ensure the viability of these people as managers. (This is a downfall of many managers but we will go into that more in-depth elsewhere.) We then created a checklist around all the tasks that needed to be executed to do more senior jobs. Every week, we got some of those tasks checked off the list in their training. Before long, each assistant was able to be promoted to do the job they were previously assisting. We were able to drop the average salary per value delivery employee by over 60% and thus solved the profitability problem.
In another company, the senior managers were accustomed to a culture of overworking themselves so as to prove how dedicated they were to their work. In turn this filtered down to all of the departments. Burnout was commonplace and employee turnover was high. The Vision Statement said: “We have a work hard, play harder culture. We win in our accountabilities but also support and challenge each other in a team concept. Nobody is pressed to the max as each person finds smartest ways to ultimate accomplishment.”
To facilitate this outcome, we decided to concentrate on management. Almost nobody has been trained how to be a terrific manager of people. Most people get to be a manager because they were good at doing a job, so they are given people to manage who are doing that job. Even people with MBA’s and PHD’s in business and management have not necessarily been properly trained how to manage a group of people to guarantee their success. We will not take apart principles in management here, but once those principles were applied, all of the martyrdom of the organization was replaced with simple, elegant, purposeful activity. With the same number of people, the organization was able to produce a 35%+ increase in productivity while reducing average employee hours by over 10hrs/week.
In another company, North&Co, the mission was to create a real estate brokerage from scratch. The founder of the brokerage sought counsel from Zanzibar Enterprises to help him create something truly special in the real estate market in Arizona. Through some simple market research and many diligent collaborative conversations, we were able to create a profound Vision Statement that articulated what would be the highest value-to-agent brokerage ever conceived that would re-define what a brokerage should be for their agents. Once the Vision was crafted, we got to work creating accesses for value delivery to the agents that nobody had ever dreamt of before. The entire brokerage was to be a heart-forward and customized approach where each agent paid attention to customer in their own beautifully unique way. In turn, each agent was groomed in a way that spoke to their needs and talents. The architecture to accomplish this was intricate, but also simple to manage. Within the first three years of the organization, North&Co had almost 200 agents and was heralded by “Best of Arizona” as the the best company in the entire state.
Revenue and sales are almost always part of the Vision or outcomes that Zanzibar Enterprises is hired to produce. Each industry has it’s own top strategies for engagement but each organization has it’s own as well. Cold calls, networking calls, social media campaigns, yelp, past client calls, referral partners, lunch and learns, trade shows, LinkedIn, bumbleBiz, walk-arounds… and the list goes on and on. Regardless of the top ways to interact with the marketplace, every sales game has a target and a way to reverse engineer the target. We usually re-train sales staff how to sell from higher-conscious approaches which is to say that we eliminate manipulation tactics and have sales people focus on extraordinary value and being of service. From there, we make sure the activity level is more than sufficient to hit target. To date, we have more than doubled the revenue of over 100 straight companies that have had us work on revenue and sales results.