What can Estate Agency learn from McDonald's?
Most would agree that McDonald's is not the best hamburger in the world. But they are the most profitable hamburger business in the world, so how is that possible?
McDonald’s success can be put down to many things but two of the core components are 1. Being able to almost guarantee to the customer what their experience will be and 2. Being able to open in any location, hire anyone to work there and have a business that works. The importance of these two components is often one of the last things a small business owner thinks about but can have a major impact on the speed and trajectory of your company.
Let’s look at them individually:
1. Being able to almost guarantee to the customer what their experience will be.
People like predictability. When you do your food shopping, you buy the same foods, when you shop for clothes you buy the same type of things, when you go on holiday you go to the same kind of places or even the very same place. There is huge value to be created in making perfectly repeatable processes. To do this you have to analyse the journey of your best customers. Why did they use you? What did they like about your service? What went well? Then compare this with your worst customers. Why did they use you? What did they dislike about your service? What went badly?
From this you can start to formalise your perfectly repeatable process and let people know what they will be getting upfront. No one goes to McDonald's for fine dining, if they did, they would be disappointed. They go there for quick, cheap food, that tastes nice. END. And McDonald's are ok with that but all too often in Estate Agency, we try to compete with other agents on fee, then the next minute be trying to give a top-notch service to someone else. You might think high levels of customer service are a given, but it is all about setting the right expectations to begin with. Customers of McDonald's don’t complain there are no plates, but most don’t feel that they received a bad service because of it. Figure out what you are and then let people know. If you do this, you will have a whole lot more happy customers and a whole lot less unhappy one.
2. Being able to open in any location, hire anyone to work there and have a business that works.
Why don’t you open in more locations? Is it the cost or is it the unpredictability? If you KNEW you were going to be able to find the right people instantly and it would make a profit straight away, would you do it? The answer for most is yes of course. But it is not that easy right? Well, somehow McDonald's manage to fill their restaurants with teenage kids that can’t even keep their bedrooms tidy, and it still runs like a money-making machine, with great service and no problems – how???
For the answer to that one you might be interested in coming to Estate Agency X 7 event on the 4th November, in London where among other great speakers, Marianne Page will be sharing knowledge from her 27 years in senior management at McDonald's on exactly how they do this, along with some other golden nuggets of information that might just change your business forever. At the time of writing there are still a limited number of early bird tickets remaining.
Click here to read more about the event, speakers and book your tickets.
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