Problems you caused, by taking shortcuts…
A few years ago, the apartment complex I live in was sold. It was, at the time, one of the highest prices ever paid for an apartment complex.
The place is huge, even has its own lake in the middle.
My balcony looks out on a decent sized open field with trees towards the back leading up to the lake.
I regularly see deer and coyotes out there, along with bats at night.
But when the new owners took over, they saw an opportunity to take shortcuts.
That field became their staging area, where they parked the snowplows and trucks.
Where they put the big dumpsters they used when they cleared out someone’s apartment of abandoned stuff.
Where the carpet cleaning van dumped his filthy carpet water on the ground instead of taking care of it properly.
And where the landscapers could dump all the fall leaves and trimmed tree branches without consequences.
Over a couple years, the piles of branches grew larger and larger. It made my view a bit worse, but the animals still came around and it wasn’t too bad.
Recently they decided to build a new building on this field. Apartments for old people. “55 plus community.”
It’s going to harm my view, and I may not stay another year after this.
But before they could start, they had a problem. All the piles of branches covering the future construction site. Something had to be done.
Enter the giant wood chipper.
But not yet.
First, they rented a huge bulldozer and used it to push all the debris into one HUGE pile. Then they… did nothing for a few months.
The taking of shortcuts didn’t end though. After a storm, they continued dumping more branches back there.
NOW enter the giant woodchipper. It’s out there right now.
This thing is HUGE. It has its own mechanical claw to feed the wood into it. It has been running non-stop for 2 days. The pile of chips is almost as big as the original pile of branches.
Soon it will be done, they’ll load the woodchips into trucks and take them away.
For years, it seemed easier to just dump their problems in the field, out of sight, out of mind.
But eventually, it created a new problem for them. A problem that could only be solved by the greatest wood chipper known to man, and several days of monumental effort.
A lof of businesses do this in customer service.
They dump all their customer problems on the customer service people. Out of sight, out of mind.
Customer service expends monumental effort “handling” these problems. Feeding them through the giant wood chipper known as massive corporate complexity.
Only to be left with… garbage. A big pile of chewed up nothing, and an endless stream of waste feeding into it.
It can be exciting. Every little boy loves watching big machines work. And it doesn’t go away when you’re an adult.
But when you’re running a business, the last thing you need is to maintain a massive machine that produces garbage.
Better to prevent the problem in the first place.
Better to keep things simple, use regular sized wood chippers when necessary, and make sure you never need the huge one.
This is sort of where the metaphor breaks down, but I think you get the point by now.
Having customer service “handle” something that could be prevented is a shortcut. It creates future problems, and big piles of waste.
Maybe easier in the short term, but messy and costly when it catches up to you.
Fortunately, this situation is easy to prevent. Do things right just once. Build a thing that works on its own.
Then step back and run your business instead of managing it.
I show you how here: https://gumroad.com/l/rkbth/VIP
— Mark
