How making small changes impact your children’s activity business more than you realise

This time of year lots of people set goals for themselves and their business (even in the strangest of years this remains important).

Sometimes these goals are achieved, other times they are amended or scrapped.

We wrote last week about some simple tips heading into 2021 children’s activity providers may want to consider.

Something we touched upon was the 1% principle, sometimes known as marginal gains. These are the small incremental improvements you can make to your business (and yourself) which increase chances of success in something over the long-term.

If you’ve never heard of it, we’d highly recommend you take a moment to look more into it. You’ll see it’s become quite synonymous with British Cycling success over the past decade or so, but has deeper roots in business development.

It’s based around the premise that instead of making big significant changes for potential big significant rewards, try making small incremental improvements to all areas and over time this adds up to a big powerful change, certainly in terms of performance and profits. Of course, sometimes big changes may be needed, but more often than not, focusing on those 1% adjustments compound to make businesses much more successful.

Success is rarely a one off event; in reality it’s a series of challenges you overcome that led to that same success being repeated ongoing. Whether it be losing weight, passing a test or building a successful brand, that success rarely comes from one or two big changes overnight. It’s a slow progression and process of fine-tuning that leads to greater long-term reward.

That’s not very exciting and we get that but aggregating these gains makes a serious difference over time.

We’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the very best and brightest activity providers in the UK and one truism and common trait of these brands and leaders is that they’ve taken their business (and themselves) on a journey of continuous improvement.

Some 1% or marginal gain examples for children’s activity providers to consider:

• Changing booking system to something a little more automated and/or effective
• Removing all paperwork in their business and going fully online
• Amending all social media channels to be completely consistent
• Increasing social media activity by an additional post a day
• Increasing efforts to build your personal brand by a small amount each week
• Attending one more networking event per year
• Increasing price by a small amount
• Adding 30 mins of working time per week
• Taking time out each day to relax and refocus to then be more productive in the afternoon
• Negotiating with venues, insurance or suppliers to get a better rate
• Amending your business logo to something subtly more appropriate as you grow
• Talking to one more customer every week to ensure you stay in tune with their feedback and thoughts on your services
• Switching payment providers to a better rate or more efficient system
• Adjusting parts of your programmes for better outcomes
• Reading a business book for 30 mins a day
• Joining a membership body to give you advice, support and inspiration
• Enrolling onto a course to up skill yourself

 and so on…

Of course, the fact some of you will be feeling pretty exhausted right now is not lost on us and motivation to action these improvements may be low, but with a couple of weeks left before the end of the year, it would be pretty great to get a head start on 2021!