Best practice is a standard aspired to by many small businesses. Leaders look at what top-performing companies in their market do to maximise profitability, then attempt to duplicate those exact practices in their own operations.
If your business is currently chaotic and disorganised, looking toward industry best practices as a baseline is sensible. It provides clear guidance on where to allocate resources to start improving.
However, if you are already operating smoothly, blindly chasing “best practice” can actually hold you back. Why? Because best practice is, by definition, an average calculated across a wide range of businesses.
Averages are misleading
If Elon Musk walked into a crowded football stadium, the average net worth in that stadium instantly makes every person in it a billionaire on paper.
When viewed through that lens, setting out to hit an “average” suddenly isn’t so attractive.
Best practices are always a collection of individual processes designed to generate an optimal outcome for one specific business, in one specific competitive and regulatory context.
When you set out to duplicate someone else’s best practice, for example in a manufacturing operation with many individual steps, you can never copy every variable perfectly. Even if you get most steps 99% right, compounding works against you
You end up with a sub-optimal process that falls significantly short of your original goal.
Build your own SOPs first
A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is an individualised blueprint for how a task is executed within your specific business to guarantee repeatability. The ultimate goal is ensuring the procedure can be executed reliably by anyone, not just the current process ‘owner’.
Building detailed procedures for your core processes is a critical step in optimising performance. It is also the mandatory starting point for automation.
Regardless of what tech or tools you use, the primary challenge is to optimise the human process before you automate it. There is little worse than spending valuable resources automating a flawed workflow. All that guarantees is that you will deliver sub-optimal outcomes faster and at scale.
The bottom line
Rather than trying to match someone else’s standard of best practice, focus on optimising your unique value offering for your customers. Then work backward to build systems that guarantee consistent delivery. I call it ‘Hindsight planning’, and it is a key to strategic success.
