Overcome the “Invisible” Revenue Killer

Prosperity can be achieved by many means: hard work, smart money management or killer advertising. The list goes on. But there’s one prosperity-producing subject that rarely gets enough press. And that’s the subject of . . .

Speed.

How fast your company ships products, delivers services, takes orders and answers customers’ questions (just to name a few) has everything to do with achieving success in today’s computer age.

Today, people are impatient. They demand quick service and quick delivery. Perhaps you are a good example. Have you ever called or emailed a company with a question and had to wait for an answer? Then, instead, you went elsewhere and purchased a similar product? It happens.

One could even say today’s customers are spoiled. To no small degree, we can blame this on the internet giant Amazon.com.

Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t unusual for a business to have a policy that went something like this: “All orders will be shipped within 48 hours”—meaning, the orders would leave their site within two days of the order being placed.

Today, such a policy is a ticket to bankruptcy court. Today, most businesses promise “same-day shipping,” meaning they ship on the same day they receive the order, with a stated cut-off time.

Amazon has set the trend for speed of shipping. They offer same-day shipping and even same-day delivery to certain areas. The world has gotten used to Amazon’s shipping speed, and people now expect similar speed from every company.

And things are only going to get faster.

Amazon recently announced “Shipping with Amazon,” where they will employ their own fleet of transportation (cutting out third-party shippers like UPS and FedEx) to make delivery faster than ever.¹

But that’s not all; Amazon will soon ratchet up their speed of delivery even more by building their own delivery drones!

More on the drones in a moment.

Speed of Particle Flow Determines Power

Long before the advent of the internet or talk of drones, L. Ron Hubbard recognized the need for speed within an organization. In an article he wrote entitled “SPEED OF SERVICE”he said:

“The prosperity of a business is directly proportional to the speed of flow of its particles (despatches, cables, goods, messengers, students, customers, agents, etc.) 

“To prosper, service must be as close to instant as possible.”

As you can see, Mr. Hubbard refers to “particles” as dispatches, goods, customers, etc. In other words, a “particle” is a general term to refer to any item or person that a business handles in the process of doing business. Today, we could include in that list emails, shipped items, orders processed, and so on.All fall under the umbrella of “flow of particles.”

Amazon is the quintessential business today that excels in “speed of particle flow”—not only with shipping, but with ease of searching for products on their site and “1- click” purchasing. For those of us who like to shop, it’s almost too easy. With a few keystrokes and stabs of the mouse, we can find what we want and purchase it within minutes.

The Amazon Rocket Ride

Amazon was founded in 1994 when Jeff Bezos started selling books on his new site from the basement of his rented home in Bellevue, Washington.

Soon, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, hired their first employee and held staff meetings at a local Barnes &Noble. Back in their garage office, every time a sale was made they would ring a bell. Over the next several years they expanded their product line and it wasn’t long before the bell was constantly ringing.²

If they still practiced the bell ringing today it would be heard 24/7 around the world. In 2017 Amazon’s gross sales were $177.87 billion. As they say, “The sky is the limit” for Amazon.

Amazon Takes to the Sky

Amazon was recently granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a delivery drone.

The drones will be part of Amazon’s strategy to get orders to customers in certain areas within 30 minutes or less.³

Speed

The drones are expected to react to verbal commands from customers and even body gestures, such as flapping one’s arms to signal for it to go away or waving toward oneself to signal for it to come.

Throughout the history of Amazon, it has been rumored that Bezos likes to move incredibly fast, which has sometimes created chaos in Amazon’s distribution centers.

Apparently, his obsession with speed has also created prosperity.

Whether Bezos’s preoccupation with speed stems from a quirky personality trait or his knowing that it needs to be hard-wired into a thriving business, he nevertheless applies this datum that Mr. Hubbard stated in his article “DEV-T SUMMARY LIST ADDITIONS”:*

“The power of an organization is directly proportional to its speed of particle flow.”

Sometimes revenue can be hurt because slow-moving particles are invisible within a company. No one notices the slow-moving employee because, well, he’s slow.

Good advice for any business owner would be to do “practice runs” through areas in the business where particles travel and then observe where those particles slow down or stop.

Turn the slows into fast flows and you’re likely to see your business grow!

*Dev-t, developed traffic:unusual and unnecessary particles and messages; unnecessary work.

oOo

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Issue: 180913021INT