Rosenbluth wasn’t wrong in my opinion. Yet, he wasn’t exactly right either. In my experience, the most successful businesses champion a customer- and employee-first approach. They prioritize the needs of both stakeholders and align their interests in a manner that maximizes value for all parties. Guiding this belief is my nearly three decades of experience as a successful entrepreneur and private investor.

How entrepreneurs go about accomplishing this challenge is another story. I’ve managed to do it for nearly two decades by focusing on three important practices. This has enabled us to expand our business in more than five different industries and across multiple business units.

In this post, we will examine each practice, why it matters and how to implement it in your business.

1. Build reliable and repeatable workflows.

Success is the “cure-all” of any business. Discover it, and you can inject your teams with confidence and delight your customers with excellent service. Yet success hinges on performance, and performance depends on several factors that influence the efficiency and quality with which your teams deliver.

I’ve found that few factors are more important than establishing reliable and repeatable workflows. These provide your teams with the structure and foundation to produce outcomes you can consistently predict and control. When optimized, they also allow your teams to accumulate crucial expertise, accelerate their development and maximize the proficiency of their work.

To build reliable and repeatable workflows, focus on the following practices. Note that this should serve as a cross-functional team exercise and include both managers and frontline staff. Also, these practices should commence only after you’ve done the hard work of establishing a viable enterprise.

• Deconstruct your offering to identify your core workflows. Analyze your product or service to identify the critical processes that produce it. Identify who is involved, what tasks and activities they engage in and when this occurs in the process.

• Optimize existing workflows and create new ones where appropriate. Collaborate with your internal subject matter experts to optimize existing processes and create new ones where you need reliable and repeatable workflows. Stay involved, but empower key members of your team to own the effort.

• Implement, track and revise. Take an agile approach to workflow optimization. Rather than wait for a comprehensive rollout, implement new changes incrementally and immediately test and revise them as appropriate. Use sprints or phases to build habits that emphasize speed and continual improvement.

• Revisit your workflows periodically. Make it a habit to revisit and reassess your existing workflows. Repeat steps one through three to look for efficiency or quality improvements. At my company, we revisit workflows twice a year but do what makes sense for your business.