That's the philosophical component to Bogan's agenda. In the end, isn't benchmarking just about overcoming the limitations imposed by ego? Isn't it about stemming what Bogan calls "the white-collar urge to demonstrate how bright and good you are" by coming up with all your ideas on your own? Bogan thinks so. What BP is up to, he says, is "cultivating the mind-set to ask, What can we learn from others?"
A lot, Bogan contends.
Of course, he knows there might be money in it if he can get you to agree.
Ilan Mochari is a staff writer at Inc.
The company
Best Practices LLC, in Chapel Hill, N.C.
Business: Best Practices researches the world's leading companies to find superior strategies and establishes benchmarks in certain operational areas (for example, customer service or sales and marketing). The company then packages the information into sellable formats.
Financial summary: Projected sales of $8 million this year, with targets of $3.6 million in revenues from direct consulting and custom-research projects and $4.4 million in sales of products (reports, database access, and membership services).
CEO: Chris Bogan
Year founded: 1992
Capitalization: Bogan and his wife own 95% of the company, and Michael English, Bogan's coauthor of Benchmarking for Best Practices, owns 5%. Of the company's stock, 10% has been allocated for an employee stock option plan.
Strategy: Maintain a 45% to 55% split between revenues from onetime consulting and research projects and revenues from products and membership services, which generate multiple, recurring sales. That policy ensures that the brunt of the company's projects will be highly profitable.
Competitors: For some projects, large management consulting firms like McKinsey & Co., the Boston Consulting Group, and Accenture. For others, boutique consultancies that specialize in particular operational areas or industries (especially pharmaceuticals and telecommunications).
The founder
The four-year-old swung awkwardly. Repeatedly. His hands, inches apart, held the bat incorrectly. Chris Bogan adjusted his son's grip and guided him through the motion. No luck. Bogan kept at it. The boy did not. Frustrated with the lesson, he threw down the bat and headed toward the house.
Days later, Bogan and son watched a video that showcased the ultra-athletic feats of basketball legend Michael Jordan. The boy promptly went out to the hoop in the driveway, where he attempted to mimic Jordan's movements for nearly an hour. "That's when I realized," recalls Bogan, "that my son had been inspired by seeing a best practice."
Bogan, 47, tells that story when describing his company to young recruits. As Bogan sees it, the mission of Best Practices LLC is finding examples of superstar performance in the business world -- then selling their secrets to others.
The lesson his son taught him? Just because you know how to improve people's performance doesn't mean they'll want to listen. The key is presenting the advice in a form that inspires imitation.
Just as Jordan moved Bogan's son to play ball, Robert Frost influenced Bogan's decision to write a book of poems -- back in 1976, when he was a senior at Amherst College. Bogan went on to work as a journalist for 11 years. During a year that he spent at Harvard on a fellowship, he was intrigued by some business classes that he took. Years later, feeling hemmed in by his career path in journalism, Bogan enrolled at Harvard Business School.
The more he learned, the more his intellectual affinity for business grew. He realized he could apply the techniques of poetry and journalism -- "using language and storytelling to clearly communicate an experience" -- to explain the power of self-improvement through the study of superior behavior. In 1994, Bogan cowrote a business book called Benchmarking for Best Practices. The book aims to sell readers on the concept that businesses don't need to rely solely on inventing ideas themselves. Instead, they can improve on their own practices by stealing ideas from companies that are highly successful. After all, Bogan notes in his book, "performance improvement is blind to the lineage of good ideas."
The idea thief's M.O.
To find ideas, scrutinize yourself as you would a customer. During orientation, new employees at BP receive consulting assignments. But instead of giving the rookies a customer's problem to solve, managers ask them to assess a problem within the company. Rookies research the topic just as they would an assignment for a customer: They interview and survey employees to specifically diagnose the problem; then they talk to experts and research successful practices at other companies to generate solutions. They share their findings in a brief PowerPoint presentation.
To implement ideas, keep a library of checklists of internal procedures. To prevent employees from reverting back to old habits, BP frequently updates its library of checklists of internal procedures, which it keeps in a directory on its computer network. The checklists spell out required steps for such tasks as drafting cover letters, making cold calls, and sending invoices to customers.
To monitor whether the ideas are working, meet weekly to review the deployment of workers. BP has half-hour "resource- allocation meetings" each Friday. Managers review time-tracking data for the past week to see how employees have spent their time. They anecdotally fill in gaps in the data. If a new idea or initiative consumes too much of employees' time, every manager will see it and be on hand to discuss a remedy.
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