Build Your Business With Standards and Rules

He has a Destination, What is yours?

Aren’t successful businesses built with good rules?  Shouldn’t every business have rules and standards for everything to succeed?   Pilots use rules to fly, the big burger chains like McDonalds and Burger King use rules to make burgers and the government is loaded with rules.  Last I heard Pilots were doing a pretty good job getting people where they wanted to go, the burger chains were making good money because the rules create a product that people are comfortable with.  As for the government, ok I’ll skip that one.

As a commercial rated pilot for over a quarter of a century, it is pretty rare that I go flying without a purpose, reason or direction.  Even as a student pilot, I had a purpose when I went flying.  All the while I considered my flying career a success.  When I fly, there is always someplace to go, something to see, or something to do in the airplane.  Isn’t that a lot like business? When a pilot starts out, he has a destination or an aim point, a plan to get there and a few thoughts in case the plan doesn’t work out.  The rules are simply guidelines to stay in.



It isn’t any different than driving a car.  When you speed a little or hit the road turtles, you have exceeded the rules.  The rules of flying and driving are there to make it safer for more people to do the same thing every day.  The reality is you don’t drive to follow rules, you drive to get somewhere.

Doesn’t that sound like a successful business?  Using rules to safely get somewhere?  It does to me.  Just like pilots and drivers, business owners need an aim point or a destination.  If they don’t know where they want to take the business how will it ever get there?  How can the employees help them get there?  That aim point becomes the focus that creates the ‘strategy’.  Ask my clients, I make them crazy sometimes with this stuff, and they agree it works.

In flying there are a lot of rules and regulations, just like in business.  The flawed thinking that many business owners use to build a business is to create rules for everything before the rules are needed.  Rules are great for assembly lines and other highly repeatable tasks.  As a business owner, I have fallen into this trap once or twice myself.  I once heard it said that “Rules are for people that don’t know what to do.”  Using that thought process I built step by step rules so all of my people would know what to do.  Eventually I was so totally saturated just writing rules trying to cover every situation I forgot why I was in business. Never mind that I was making myself and everyone around me crazy.

Why did I think rules were needed to build a business?  Like most business owners I started out working for someone else.  My worklife started when I worked for a Burger King while I was in High School.  There were exacting rules for everything that happened inside the store during business hours right down to the simple task of filling a soda cup.  There were even lines on the cup to show the ice line before filling the rest with soda.  I learned a little phrase for filling a tray “Drinks, Sandwiches and then Fries”.  These days, when I see fries getting cold waiting for a soda, I want to scream out “Don’t you know it is Drinks, Sandwiches THEN Fries.”  That phrase was such a simple and usable rule, it sticks with me nearly three decades after I quit working there.

At some McDonalds now, the rules for filling a soda are so exact they have programmed a machine to do it.

So if rules work for Burger King and soda filling robots at McDonalds, how come they didn’t work for me in my business?  It is really a matter of perspective.  At Burger King, I was employed to run a business.  As a business owner I was trying to build a business.  When you are running a business, there isn’t anywhere to go; you just need to fulfill the customer’s orders.  As an owner, the perspective changes and you always need to be thinking about building the business.  The adage of “If you aren’t growing you are dying” applies directly to business.  Owners need to worry about the direction of the business so it can grow.  Rules don’t grow a business.  A focus on an aim point does.

I realized some years ago the owners of the franchise didn’t have any rule books for how many Burger Kings to build, or what kind of flowers to plant out front.  The owners had strategies.  The smart owners knew that if the restaurant was clean and well-kept with nice landscaping, it made more money that stores that didn’t.  The owners that didn’t keep up their stores won’t make as much money.
As you look at your business, building some rules is ok.  If you have a service company, the old saying “Five minutes early is late…” is a great rule.  Rules should be very basic and simple.  When they get complicated it is time to use strategy and goals instead.

What exactly does that mean?

What it means is that your employees should treat your customers like they want to be treated.  This can be sticky if you hire people that have never been treated well.  I will save this topic for another day.  Basically, there is a strategy for treating customers that has been called “The Golden Rule” for centuries.  If you follow the rule you will get the gold.

It also means that your customers should already have an expectation of how they will be treated before they ever get to your business.  Your strategy should be clear on your website and the minute they meet you or your employees.

Recently I had an automotive service center owner ask me to go market to, and get all the “soccer moms” in the area to get their car serviced.  I asked him to take a walk with me.  We walked out the front of the shop and I said, “OK, here you are Mr. Soccer Mom.  Two kids in tow, and you are coming here for an service because your check engine light is on.  Let’s walk in and tell me if this place says ‘welcome soccer mom’”.  He quickly agreed it did not.  When we looked at the website, it didn’t either.  The print ads? Nope, not them either.  Nothing about the business said, “Soccer Mom’s will love an Oil Change here”.

When you walked in the place it said “Cool Car Guy Hangout”.  That is the message that the website also portrayed.  That is what we should be marketing to, because when those guys arrive, they will get what they expected.  The generic Soccer Mom won’t be happy sitting at a bar surrounded by expensive cars watching the racing channel.

When all of the employees know to treat the place like a soccer mom haven, they will make the right decisions and buy the right furniture without any rules.  When you build the cool guy hangout the same thing will happen.  Many times the owners are looking at opportunities while they inject their “hidden strategy” without knowing it.  This guy saw an opportunity to get more business through “soccer moms” but his actions created an environment for racing fans, and that is what his employees continued to build without any rules.

In flying, the pilot in command (or “Captain” at at airline) always has the ability to declare “emergency authority” and override any rules in order to keep the aircraft safe.  The rules say you can’t land in the Hudson River, yet Capt. “Sully” did just that and was made into a hero.  Sometimes you need to break the rules to get the job done.

If the implied strategy in your business is strong enough to create a single destination, your people will know what to do.  At the end of the day, the rules are only there to support the strategy, not the other way around.