or, How I spent two days of my life and created more than $1,000,000 in value.
How can you increase your sales potential without doing any sales? Here is how.
Today I took some time to increase productivity. Every day I spend about half of it on the phone talking with clients about growing their business. Yesterday I received an email from someone that had an Excel file with data (on one spreadsheet) for many clients. The idea was that I would have to split up this data into the 27 files needed and Email it to each of my clients.
Wait a minute. Split into 27 files?
Wait another minute. I was receiving this from someone whose job was to notify the clients with this information (not my job).
The problem was that she had 16 people she was sending this information out to. She had mailed all these clients before, but what was the problem? The problem was creating culling data and creating files for over 400 clients.
For me to do this would have taken probably two hours, not counting mailing it out. So, it was equivalent of about 2 person days worth of work for our team.
You are probably thinking: Oh, why did she not first create an analysis program that created 400 separate files? I do not know. Having worked with analysts that create these programs (and having been one), at some point you realize that creating one big file is not going to work, since the readers only can see one part of it and there are many readers. You create multiple files. In most cases, this happens because a) the creator of the program is not talking to the user of the data, and b) the user of the data does not know how to create this program or even ask for it.
Instead of just doing it (or more likely, forgetting about the file and waiting until someone asks for the data), I remembered something. I had written a program a couple of years ago that allows you to split data from one spreadsheet into multiple files at the touch of the button. Why had I written this? At that time, I was getting similar files that needed to be broken up.
So, today I opened up that old program and upgraded it to work for Excel 2007 and added a few bells and whistles that made it more user friendly. Furthermore, it would be able to handle some of the quirks in the data file and still work.
I emailed it to the sender of the file; and told management that they now had the capability of sending that out directly to the client without bother us.
What did I really do? I eliminated 2 days per month of my team’s time. That comes to 24 days, or approximately 1 month, or 8% of a yearly cost of an employee. 8-16,000 dollars. Not bad, need to put that on my resume somewhere…maybe.
However, on our team that extra month of time can translate into a lot more revenue. Our focus us to create more revenue, so, 1 month could be worth … another million dollars? That is not really that much of a stretch when you consider that the combined efforts of our team tally up to a lot of revenue.
So, today I possibly created somewhere around $1,016,000 in value by working on that program and enabling people on different teams to focus their time elsewhere. The cost? One day today and about one day before initially creating the tool. Two days. However, I already had the tool, so that first day was a sunk cost. The investment of today enabled it for this company. One day. One Million Dollar Day.
Of course, the program works on many other types of data…even more savings in time…and more creation of value.
