With Operational Excellence our goal is often targeted at a 10x return on investment of the training and coaching services provided to our project leaders such as Lean Six Sigma Black Belts, Lean Six Sigma Green Belts, Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belts, Lean Professionals, and so on. So when we look at ROI, if our investment is $25,000, in general, we would expect our return to be $250,000.
What if I said you could supercharge your return on investment up to $2.5 million?
Before you write this off as far fetched, let me tell you that we had two clients last year that saw a 100x return on their investments. These clients are from completely different industries and used completely different Continuous Improvement methodologies, but they both saw the same massive returns.
What’s the secret?
They had three things in common.
Driver #1: Leveraging Proven Methodologies
The first driver to achieving a large return on investment is to choose the right methodology. Selecting proven Process Excellence approaches that we already know work immediately starts off this process on the right foot. In our two client examples, one client chose to use Lean as their methodology. In fact, they leveraged a new model that we’ve introduced in the last couple of years called the Lean Cohort Model, which takes advantage of the next two drivers of ROI that we’re going to discuss. Our other client chose to leverage the online Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Certification Program. Two completely different approaches, but they both achieved massive returns on investment.
Driver #2: Leadership Commitment
These drivers build on each other so even if you have chosen a proven methodology that will work for your organization’s unique needs, it needs to be pushed forward with a committed leadership team. It is important to have a team that is all in – meaning they believe in the methodology, they are dedicated to identifying and executing the right projects. In short, they’re going to do what it takes to make their projects successful.
Driver #3: Bite-Sized Projects
Finally, the last driver is that you need to identify and execute what I like to call ‘bite-sized projects’. What I mean by that are projects that can be completed on an accelerated timeline – somewhere between three to six months, but leaning toward the shorter side. The brilliance of this strategy is choosing bite-sized projects means you can have multiple irons in the fire at once which significantly increases your opportunities to increase your return on investment. In essence, we’re playing the odds. We already know that not every project is going to be successful, therefore executing a large number of bite-sized projects means a higher probability of success and likely on a large scale.
You Can Achieve a 100x Return on Investment, Too.
The key takeaway from this is that there is no one right way to supercharge your return on investment, but these three drivers of success create a structure to follow to ensure you are on the right path.
Back to my example clients that achieved 100x return on their investments. They have three commonalities between them: they chose a proven Process Excellence methodology like Lean and Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt, their leadership teams were completely on board, and they executed several bite-sized projects instead of a few large projects.
On your way to your 100x return on investment, make sure that you take advantage of these top three drivers.
