Production, Production Capability (PPC)
A mentor shared this concept from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People with me yesterday.
Production is actions that directly produce (or move you a step closer to) income. Some examples of production: cold-calling, nudging pending clients, collecting deposit or final payments, shipping out proposals, cranking out a video for a client.
Production Capability indicates the effectiveness of your production efforts. The goal is to increase it. For example: If you cold-call 100 companies, you are producing. If you take a couple hours to plan out the best possible script and process for targeting the right companies, you are increasing your Production Capability.
Production is doing, increasing Production Capability is planning. Production is working hard, increasing Production Capability is working smart.
Often you can’t increase Production Capability until you produce (even if it means cold-calling 100 companies with a really shitty script). You need to Produce first so that you can learn how to increase your Production Capability.
This came up yesterday because we were planning out our sales process in an effort to increase our Production Capability. The mentor on the phone, after helping us break down and understand how to build an effective sales process, said something along the lines of, “This planning session is great, but your focus for the next three weeks should be putting your heads down and executing it before you revisit the process.”
Growing a business means finding the balance between focusing on Production and increasing Production Capability.
Get out there and hustle. Make things happen. Collect data as you build different parts of the business. Don’t worry about inefficiencies in the process.
Then, once you feel yourself being inefficient (but still producing a lot), take a step back to understand what just happened so you can plan out how to improve it and make it better.