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Hi, it's Pete Wilkinson here, the Strategy Gap Podcast, and this is episode 10. Here we're going to talk about benchmarking. Now I'm a big fan of benchmarking because I think you can easily become complacent in your business. It's very easy to become a little stagnated and just be like only concerned or aware of what's happening inside the company and not occasionally looking out and how you can compare and measure and analyze against other organizations. And I think there's real benefit in doing that, you know. And I remember going years back, you know, when I was in retail, we used to do obviously benchmarking through mystery shops ourselves, and then we would go out and look at other businesses and look at how they're approaching things and how they are serving their customers and how their stores are set up and things like that. So I think it's it's good to keep um aware of what's happening. Obviously, your main company, your own company is the main focus, but it is still good to look outside and and see what's happening um around your sector or in a different sector and just see what could you look what can you learn from there because complacency is a very serious thing, and it's very easy to to become complacent, and then things will start to slip. So um I'm a big fan of simple models, you probably get that by now. I like to have simple models that explain things really easily so people get them. And this is a model I'm going to share with you now that I have used in literally uh over 250 companies have actually taken through this particular this particular model, and I like it because it works and it's simple and and it helps people to understand. And the model is called OGAP. That's O G A P. And if you were gonna kind of work through with me on this and you would have like a sheet of paper in front of you, you'd write the letters O G A P down the uh down the left-hand side of the page, and each letter means something, and we'll go into that, and then this is like I'm gonna go through the process of how to turn this particular name uh into a verb so you know that you are gonna start O gapping things. So when you're looking at OGAP, um the O stands for outstanding, and it's like the very best of what it could be. G stands for good, A would stand for uh average, some people say acceptable, but I prefer average, like it's okay, and then P would be would stand for poor. Um so the idea being that you've got these these four levels going from outstanding at the top, then good, then average, then poor. So it's an acronym, obviously, um, to help you remember that that you know you were looking at the to O-gap something. Now, what works very well is you turn that word into a verb and you start O gapping so that you regularly check something and you you all gap it, you go and all gap it, or you ask a team, hey, can you go and all gap this thing? So it becomes like a process of looking a little outside, widening your scope a bit with a particular outcome in mind that you want to assess, and you put it through the O-gap process. So, how it works is you would pick something that's important. Um, now, from my experience, the best things to pick when you're O gapping are in two main areas. The first area is something that directly affects the customer or the client, however, you talk about your customers. So, yeah, you would OGAP a process that would directly affect the customer. It could be the onboarding process, it could be the customer success process, the customer management process, it could be the the um the training process, it could be the payment process, it could be the customer ordering process. So you would always start with a process that directly affects the customer. That's the first area. The second area to check would be an area that directly affects your PL, your profit and loss statement. So, what I mean is you wouldn't normally OGAP the uniforms, for example, you wouldn't bother O gapping um the pens you use in a workshop, right? It's it's got to be big things. So it's either number one affects the customer directly, or number two, would have a great impact on the PL. So what we would suggest we do, if you're gonna do this, is you pick something and you get a little team together. And sometimes it works really well that you have people from different teams working together as like kind of like an O-gap team. Uh, you put two or three people together, three or four people together, create a little micro team of the company, and you you ask them to go and all gap something, and you would pick something, affects the customer, affects the PL. And what they then do is they first of all, the first step is to assess something of where you are now. So if we were going to all gap the onboarding process for a new customer, you would look at where you are and you think, well, we're not or we're poor, we're not poor, but we're probably just about average, nothing great. So that would be where you would be, and then you would think about like who in who do you know, or who could you go and find out about that would be outstanding in that specific area. So maybe you've bought something yourself, maybe you have one of your business suppliers and you think their onboarding is outstanding, and you would put their name in the outstanding level, and then you would start to the team would start to think about what are some of the things that they do that means that they're outstanding. So we know that we are kind of in somewhere between poor and average, just okay. We feel they're outstanding. What are some of the things that they are doing consistently in their onboarding process in this example? That that that means that they're outstanding and and what could we model? And your idea, your outcome is to take your poor level or your between your poor and average, just to get to the next level. Let's get to good. So if we are poor, if they're outstanding, what are they doing? What could we copy? Well, it used to be called copying. I think modeling is now more socially acceptable. What could we model that would allow us to go from poor stroke average up to good, the next level up? And you would just think about what that is, and then then then the team, the OGAP team, would come back and they would present to say, hey, we picked onboarding. Reason is we picked it because we think we're between poor and average, and we know we need to improve that. It would have a much higher beneficial impact on our customer if we improved our onboarding, which obviously, as a byproduct, would have a better impact on your PL because maybe your customers stick around for longer, maybe they have a better experience and then recommend someone they know to your company. So that one would be a good example of affecting the customer directly to begin with, and then also affecting the PL. So they would they would say why they've chosen that area, they would maybe list some of the reasons why, as a company, you're poor at that or only average at the moment, you know, onboarding is not consistent, um, it's applied differently within different teams, you know. We've got there's no real guidance on there, there's no support materials when we're onboarding a customer, um, we're getting lots of questions during the process that we could be answering in an FAQ, things like that. And then you go and say, but we picked this company that we are a customer of, and their onboarding is outstanding, and this is what they do, and they list out why they're on outstanding, and then because obviously they may have more resources than you, they may be down the line, they may be more experience, more money, whatever it might be. You would go. So, based on the differences, we feel that these are two or three things that we could adopt from their model, what they've done to improve our process to take us from poor up to good, and then of course, at good, you then can get that established, cement that, and you've got two options. Then you could you could either stick it good with that if you wanted to, um, or you could then do it again and go from good to try and get to outstanding. What some people do is if they are poor at something and they get a good, and that is providing value, they like to stay at that level for a bit, and then they would then go and OGAP a different thing. So maybe if you do this every two months or once a quarter, um, you then pick a different thing to OGAP, and then you get you go through that process. Where are we? Why are we at this level? Who's outstanding? What are they doing? What can we adopt? And there was one company we did some work with um an IT technology business years ago, based at Leeds, actually, and um and and they did really well with this, and they actually ended up because they got some really good value early on in the process, they started doing it monthly, so they would have like a monthly all-gapping meeting, and it would be like, Oh, this month we're all gapping this, next month we're all gapping this. They had kind of like a topic list that they would work through, going going through, which is great, and that made a massive difference. So, I'm not saying you need to do it monthly, I'm just saying that, like, if you are feeling that some of your processes in the business are not where you want them to be, the OGAP methodology, outstanding, good, average, and poor is a very simple thing to explain to team members, and it's a really easy, quick way for you to get some sort of um development going, some value back to the customer or to the PL in a simple way, and it just makes perfect sense. So, the action from this podcast is that to think about O gapping and if you were going to O-gap what area of your business, again, recapping is going to be affecting the customer directly or the PL, okay? What would be the area that you should O-Gap first? And if you were able to O-gap that area, who do you think you would go to watch, observe, model who would be outstanding at that area? You know, so like product launches, you know, the way Apple do it are amazing. What could I learn in my business from Apple the way they do product launches, you know? Or um customer service, John Lewis Partnership, really good at customer service. What could I or what could I learn if I was going to O gap customer service in our company benchmarking against John Lewis? So it's just thinking about it, taking some sort of action, because this is a great way to prevent complacency and address some of the areas that you feel you're underperforming. And the O gap is a great way to benchmark to improve those areas, which to deliver better value to your customer and hopefully also to your PL. Thanks very much, it's Pete. Bye for now.