Google has a clear purpose: To ensure that when folks like us are searching, we have a great (and relevant experience).

What’s interesting is that they don’t make money from the searchers, well not directly. They make money from the advertisers (the little ad’s down the side of the Google page). But if there’s ever a conflict between the two it’s the end user who wins.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say that you are running an ad for your latest book. Your research has shown that 5,000 people per month type in the name of your book searching Google and there are no advertisers; result: you can run an ad for 1p per click.

However you get a bit lazy and greedy, rather than creating a site that gives the searchers lots of useful information about your book with different pages and lots of content you just throw up a single page site to sell your book, and worse you try to sell other books on your site. Google won’t be happy, they will deem that the visitor experience is poor and they’ll Google slap you.

What this means is that they’ll impose a minimum bid on your ad for anything between £5 and £10 per click, thus making your advertising pointlessly expensive.

The point is this: when Google have to choose between their intermediary advertisers and their end users the real customers will win every time, they know that if the customer has a poor experience then they’ll use another search engine. So they choose to take a hit on short term advertising money for the sake of long term visitor value; as a result they are the world’s largest and most popular search engine and make billions of pounds annually.

What can we learn from this? Two points:

1. Make sure that you are clear on who your real customer is and decide how you are going to serve them.
2. When there is a conflict between an intermediary and the real customer always take the side of the end user.

Google have a clear single purpose built around creating value for the end customer, as a result it allows them to stay focused and make good decisions in their business, how about you..?

Many Thanks

Stuart Corrigan

First I trust you all had fantastic Christmas and New Year. This post is on the subject of how to start the process of taking your business to the next level in 2010; as usual it involves getting data and also has some advice from a quality guru.

I’ve ranted about this in 2009 so no reason to stop in 2010 (I’m reaching my mid 40’s so I’m now officially allowed to be cranky).

Just before Christmas I was studying a system within social services. As a result of unclear rules, occupational therapists in the service weren’t sure how they should order a stair lift.

So different therapists applied their definition of the process in different ways and it meant that the budget was being used faster than necessary. Now I’m no quality guru but I’d have thought that ensuring that everyone was clear on how to do their work was always a good place to start when running any business.

But to do this you have to know how people work. And you can’t do that from behind a 17 inch screen.

In-fact point 6 of Deming’s famous 14 points states that we should ‘Institute training on the job.’

I wouldn’t have thought you needed to be one of the quality management guru’s to understand that rule, or would you? Look at the language, “institute training on the job”, in practice this means you have to be there and listen and learn so you understand what to train. An interesting quality philosophy don’t you think?

Naively I decided I wanted to get the answer to the question, ‘what is the correct budget for a stair lift?” And I even went right to the top to get the sacred knowledge.

I doffed my cap and asked the question “what budget should I apply to a stair lift?” I waited with baited breath and got the following answer:

“It’s not that simple, let me ask you, how many angels can dance on a pinhead?”

Seriously that’s the answer I was given! Is it any wonder that people in this business haven’t got a clue what they are doing? Seriously I’m sure I felt the spirit of quality guru W. Edwards Deming enter the room and breathe a deep sigh before having a wee cry in the corner.

A better quality philosophy

So if you want to take your business to the next level you could do worse than making sure that everyone was actually clear on what they should be doing every day. And I bet that if you go and have a look at what people are doing you will see lots of stuff that you could fix, thus getting a double bang for your buck.

And on the subject of Deming’s 14 points you can get a free download in the form of a PDF that covers each one or scroll to the end this post to hear them in our presentation. And for those of you who want to take your learning to the next level you could do worse than get Deming’s book Out of the Crisis. I assure you it’s the best book you’ll read this year.

Oh and one final point does anyone know exactly how many angels you can get on a pinhead? I’d really like to see the chap’s face when I give him the answer.

Many Thanks

Stuart Corrigan