Why is McDonald's easy to price and why is their product so consistent no matter where in the world you are? You know that if you get a Big Mac in Chicago or one in New York, it will taste and cost the same. This is due to standardization and you shouldn’t underestimate the role digitized data plays in maintaining this consistency.
Your firm can standardize and price just like McDonald’s does, if you have the right tech infrastructure, in addition to standards related to both clients and workflow.
The number one hurdle that keeps firms from standardizing services is how they receive data and documents from clients. Data may arrive in shoe boxes of receipts, reams of paper, QuickBooks desktop files, excel files, checkbooks, registers and any number of other archaic data collection methods.
You may have some clients who arrive with banking credentials and bank feeds and others who don’t know where to start.
If you’re allowing this amount of chaos to walk through your door, there’s no way to standardize your processes. As a facilitator, you are as much a part of the problem as your clients.
