A Job Description for the Business Owner - стр. 13

Let’s look again at the Grundfos mission statement. Its first part, “to successfully develop, produce, and sell high-quality pumps and pumping systems worldwide”, is actually a pretty clear purpose statement. It is how they are going about fulfilling the main goal of “contributing to a better quality of life and a healthy environment.” By the way, Apple has another purpose, which Steve Jobs always carried out well: The products have to be aesthetically pleasing. In fact, the design is even more important than the technical elements in manufacturing. The design of every aspect of the visible and user-function controls and ports was just as important as the technology operating inside. If Apple remains loyal to this purpose, it will never manufacture cheap products, as the low cost of such products is achieved by improving the internal technological process at the expense of slick design and user-friendly interfaces. As for McDonald’s, the main part of their purpose is cleanliness, a limited number of items on the menu, and fast service. By stating its purpose, the company’s owner predetermines what the company is going to be like. For example, Visotsky Consulting’s purpose is consulting with business owners and leading them through the difficulties of implementing essential management tools. Our purpose is embodied in our core product, the Business Owners Program. We do not do anything else.

It is important to focus on defining the organization’s purpose, as this is what will lead the group to fulfilling its main goal. If a small company has too broad a purpose, it will just waste its resources. If instead the purpose is more narrowly defined, the company will concentrate its resources toward its main goal. Take, for example, a furniture manufacturer that defines as its main goal “creating comfort in life,” and its purpose as “to design, manufacture, and sell modern, well-designed furniture made available to a wide range of customers.” The intent is very well defined. Clearly, the manufacturer will not produce luxury furniture and will not use high-grade natural wood. A well-defined purpose determines which market a company will serve, who its customers will be, its distribution process, and which resources and equipment it will use.

In 2003, my business partner and I formulated one of the purposes of the Geroldmaster Company—namely, “to produce medals that perfectly match their designers’ creative ideas while prioritizing quality over the manufacturing process.” It may seem a strange purpose for a manufacturing company, but that is how it was stated at the outset. The fact is, the company started with just a small office specializing in medal design. It was founded by designers who had a pretty good but, as it later turned out, naïve idea. They saw the medals that Ukraine received from the USSR and decided to design more inspiring ones. The underlying idea was “to design and fulfill manufacturing orders using already existing facilities,” but the idea contained the above-mentioned purpose. When the first orders of Jubilee Awards for the State Corporation for the Production of Armaments and the Emeritus Employee of the Tax Service medals were designed and manufactured, two things became clear. First, the existing manufacturing facilities could only produce products at the prior level of quality, rather than improved, value-added quality. Second, these manufacturing facilities could only produce the products they had been producing for years, since the idea of making the processes faster and cheaper had been the most important standards to follow. It was impossible to implement Geroldmaster’s purpose with this approach. That was the reason that, over time, the design office eventually turned into a manufacturing facility with a unique production cycle of models and molds for manufacturing medals. The unique part was that when the customer approved a medal design, special software allowed all of the geometrically correct elements of the medal to be modeled, directly based on the approved design. If the medal contained a wreath, figures, or any reliefs, their prototypes were hand-sculpted first. Next, a 3-D scan was performed, the model was finished on the computer, and special equipment transferred the computer model into a metal one. As far as I know, to this day it is the only facility with such fast and perfect manufacturing tooling technology. The creation of such a process was not just the owners’ whim. All we wanted to do was accomplish the main purpose: to make sure the manufactured medals matched the intended design. It was simple, made sense, and proved to be commercially successful. Despite fairly high prices, our customers came back to us time and again. None of our competitors could match the same level of quality, and with regard to medals, people were not willing to compromise quality in order to save money. I am not saying there were no customers who prioritized price; they just weren’t Geroldmaster’s customers. This is neither good nor bad, as it is impossible to satisfy everybody’s needs: those who want well made products and those who want cheap ones. That is why companies with different purposes are needed. In the end, there will always be a Mercedes and there will always be a KIA. Such companies have different purposes and, accordingly, different customers.