Process v. Outcome

It’s nothing to do with Lucy; she’s very capable. But what you’ve delegated is a process and, while that’s a start, Lucy’s talent would be better deployed if you aimed higher – by delegating an outcome.

The point of client outreach is to keep customers coming back, and you started doing it a few years ago because only around 50% of your business is repeat (when it should be more).

What if you articulated a bold outcome, like, “Lucy, we want you to increase repeat business from 50% to 75% in the next eight months”?

Off Lucy goes to talk to customers to see how this might be done, and three months later she comes back and says, “Dave, we should scrap the hospitality day because they don’t care about all that. What they want is …” and she lists some ways of adjusting what you do to make your company indispensable.

It makes sense, so you start doing some of those things, and it works, and out the window goes the hospitality day and the rest of it, which would have kept Lucy busy, and she’d have done a great job, but it wouldn’t have created a new reality.