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An example of the 80/20 Rule in Practice

How small changes can make a big difference to your bottom line.

This week I helped a local Brisbane business owner and client – The Custom T Shirt Shop at Norman Park – with a problem.

He was overwhelmed with tasks to do and pretty stressed.

I asked him to pay attention first to the tasks which would have the greatest positive impact and suggested he adopt the Pareto or 80/20 rule – that is, 80% of results can be driven by 20% of tasks or effort.

In case you didn’t know, this ‘Rule’ can be applied to many situations in business and life. And it’s worth using to help in the increasingly time poor and ‘busy’ world we all live in.

The first priority we identified was that the pricing on the business website was two years out of date and lower than prices charged in store.

We agreed that updating this discrepancy was a high priority – to increase business sales and profit.

The large number of stock items on the website was making this a very big and overwhelming job.

Extending the 80/20 rule further, I suggested updating the website pricing of the 20% of stock items that produce 80% of website sales.

A substantially smaller list of stock items to update as a first step!

Fortunately, I left the client feeling less overwhelmed and more determined to take small steps to improve his business and cashflow.

Do you have an example of how the 80/20 has worked for you?
– Grant