Ultra Lean Business E-Book

Antti Leijala

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Start the change now, increase your competitiveness! Ultra Lean Business, Entrepreneurship Black Belt tackles the most common problems small companies and entrepreneurs face. The reader gets 50 or more concrete learnings on different subjects, all simply put and easily implementable to increase company competitiveness. The book includes tasks that further the learning process, and useful links for additional information. Easy, fast and effective! The content of this book is designed to fit everyone from starting entrepreneurs to a university level, and from beginners to serial entrepreneurs. The lessons can be implemented in all industries and all types of business. Learning should never be a one-off thing. This book serves as a base for life-long learning where all aspects of the business are being developed, improved and challenged continuously, year after year. Have a pleasant reading and learning journey!

Leseprobe

Foreword

This book is dedicated to small business owners and entrepreneurs.

I want to thank the 33 small businesses and their owners, who participated my doctoral thesis study. My dissertation is still ongoing, but the entrepreneurs’ open attitude to discover their challenges has been essential also in writing this book.

Special thanks to Per Lindberg (Evifin Ltd) for writing the chapter Internet of Things, to Mika Rohula (First Wave Ltd) for writing Robotics, to Nuno Melo (Pricisions) for writing Prizing, to Juha Rantanen (Suomen Yrityskaupat Ltd) for writing Increasing company value, to Pekka Usva (Part-Time Genius) for writing the parts about hired management, and to Sanya Saarinen (Someleontti) for writing the social media part.

I would also like to give warm thanks to Laura Smith (Wannado Ltd) for the English language proofreading and translation work.

Vihti, Finland, 25.6.2018,

Antti Leijala

Content

Foreword

Preface

Continuous learning, small pieces

Own customers

1. What is your added value to your customer?

2. Customer buying process

3. Customer buying criteria

4. Customer satisfaction

5. Continuous improvement of your competitiveness

6. Price vs. customer value-add

Intensified competition

7. Today’s competition

8. New competitors

9. Competitor intelligence

10. How to protect against competitors

11. ”Lean” is the basics of competitiveness

Learn from mistakes and success

12. Learn from you own mistakes

13. Visualisation of cause-effect relations

14. "5 x why"-method

15. Especially learn from success

16. Don’t shoot with a shotgun, change the process

Learn how to manage your business

17. Strategy and vision

18. Execute your strategy

19. Increasing company value

20. Measurability

21. Forecasting

22. Risk management

23. Annual calendar

24. Contracts

Learn to measure things

25. Win Rate

26. Product level profitability

27. Work efficiency

28. 20/80 rule

29. Data quality makes the difference!

30. KPI dashboard

Employee growth

31. Your own time

32. Learn from your employees

33. Motivating and sharing responsibility

You are not alone

34. Learn how to ask for help

35. Growth with the help of a hired manager

36. Learn the importance of referring

37. Referral networks

38. Networks for the self-employed

Learn from your environment

39. 3D printing goes mainstream in 2022

40. Robotics will free you from routines

41. Internet of Things is here today

42. Other megatrends

Learn the digital basics

43. The principles of digital business

44. Are you using social media?

45. A web store is only a small part of the whole picture

46. Online courses and e-books in your business

47. Artificial Intelligence will change everything

Innovation development

48. Lean canvas clarifies

49. Refining business models

50. Financing development and innovations

Be in contact and give feedback

About the author

Preface

Too often companies are led with pure instinct. This book helps entrepreneurs (or those who aim to be such) to learn the basics of efficient business management and to wake up a passion for continuous development of your competitiveness.

Depending on the source used, there are approximately 340.000 companies in Finland. Typical annual revenue is between 30.000 and 150.000€, which means the company has 1-2 employees. Every year, around 30.000 new companies are established, and the same amount of companies fades away.

This book is based on my doctoral thesis about challenges that small business face, and it’s especially targeted to entrepreneurs in Finland.

Image 1: UltraLeanBusiness book is based on a thesis studying the most common challanges micro-companies face.

Targeting 1-9 employee micro-companies

94% of all companies in Finland are 1-9 employee “micro-companies”. These micro-companies count for 17% of the total turnover of all companies, and their turnover is almost 70 b€ in total. If we compare the amount of employees in different company size categories, we can see that ~25% of all people working in companies, work in micro-companies.

In total, micro-companies are ”the biggest employer” in almost all Finnish towns.

So-called ”start-up” companies gain a lot of media attention. Startup Dashboard1, ordered by Ministry of employment and the economy of Finland and Business Finland, give a real time view to the Finnish start-up companies. If/when the number of the start-up companies is around 2400, we can easily calculate that this is only ~1% of all companies.

In a similar manner, the share of 1-249 employee SMEs (small and medium size enterprises) from the total Finnish export is around 15%, and only a marginal share of that comes from the micro-companies. Thus, we can conclude that the income of micro-companies comes almost totally from the home market.

This book suits especially well to self-employed entrepreneurs. In Finland, more than half (~165.000) of entrepreneurs are self-employed businessmen and businesswomen, instead of having limited companies or other forms of companies.

Target of the book

The primary target of this book is that the reader (entrepreneur) gains ~50 learnings grouped in 10 categories. By focusing on these small, yet essential, steps, they can immediately improve the competitiveness of their business.

One of the principles of this book is the philosophy of “continuous learning”. Despite of the subject, learning (=improving efficiency) should not be a one-off thing. It’s not important to apply all learnings of the book, but rather to build a solid foundation for lifelong learning and continuous improvement of the competitiveness of all aspects of the business.

E-learning

This book is also available online as an e-learning course, enabling fast updates and introduction of new topics. Check out the free-of-charge green belt course2 and the black belt course3, which is equivalent to the content of this book. See also www.pktehokasyritys.fi.

Fit for all

The content of this book is designed to fit everyone from young entrepreneurs to the university level, and from a beginner to a serial entrepreneur. The book suits all industries and types of business.

Usefull links

I have also included numerous useful links. Since this book is mainly targeted to Finnish entrepreneurs, links are mainly from Finland and some are unfortunately only available in Finnish.

1https://dashboard.vainu.io/dashboard/

2www.pktehokasyritys.fi/UltraLeanBusinessGreen

3www.pktehokasyritys.fi/UltraLeanBusinessBlack

Continuous learning, small pieces

Continuous learning

UltraLeanBusiness® black belt level is a good foundation for successful entrepreneurship. The content is designed to match the most common challenges of small businesses, and to help you avoid the same mistakes and problems your peer entrepreneurs had. Don’t underestimate the value of learning from others, as it may have direct impact on your own competitiveness.

You, like all other entrepreneurs, can impact the content of this book in the future. If you have identified common problem areas, I welcome ideas to improve the content. Also, if you’re an expert in some of the megatrends, we might collaborate in the future – maybe you could write your own chapter for the next edition?

10 themes

The content of this book is structured in 10 themes, each covering roughly five different topics in a short and easy-to-understand manner.

Image 2: UltraLeanBusiness main themes.

In small junks, but with a possibility to deepen your knowledge

Many resent studies have shown that learning is most efficient when it’s done in small pieces. In today’s data-centric World, the amount of data grows exponentially, and the biggest challenge for students is to quickly find and adopt the most relevant parts.

This is something I have applied in this book and in the online course - I’ve tried to assure that each topic can be read, understood and even implemented in only 2-5 minutes. Still, each chapter provides answers to the following questions:

what?how?why?

The total amount of data in the whole World has doubled during the last 2 years. How to pick the most relevant parts for the benefit of your company?

I have included many website and literature links that help you deep dive into various topics. Most of them are from Finland (supporting local small business), but some also from other countries.

A lot to learn, keep brakes

Even though the learning of an individual topic is made easy and fast, there are many of them and it’s a lot to take in. It is recommended that you split the book into 3-5 parts, and thus avoid an overflow of information.

Own customers

In the first chapter we focus on the customer.

Why is starting from the customer so important?

Companies are often led via instinct and love for their own products and services. This leads to situations where own product or service does not match the customer needs.

When your business (the whole company or an individual product/service) is designed or improved further, it is fundamental to know the customer needs as well as possible.

In this chapter we cover:

Customer value add is the starting point

Understanding the customer buying process improves your own possibility to win

By understanding the customer buying criteria, you can influence your Win Rate

Satisfied customers buy and recommend

Improving competitiveness is a continuous process

Correlation between price and customer value

With only few exceptions, companies exist to make profit for their owners and this money comes from their customers.