When this tagline from the famous Wendy’s restaurant chain commercial came up in a conversation recently, I laughed hysterically. It features a group of spry, diminutive, elderly ladies inspecting a tiny burger on an over-sized bun, representing the competitor’s product, and repeatedly chanting “Where’s the beef?”
It was enormously popular and successful for Wendy’s, and it got me thinking.
Isn’t this exactly the same problem that we face every day in growing our businesses? There are always very few critical things that really matter—the ‘beef’. But there are so many things that vie for our attention, literally hundreds of things that could be improved, where we could spend our time.
I recently asked a client, who is working very hard but making little progress in growing their business, to compile a list of all of the projects and improvement initiatives that they are actively working on as a company. It was quite a list—more than 40 projects and they admitted it didn’t capture everything—addressing a myriad of issues important to the company.
But it was far more than their staff could even begin to tackle in a meaningful way. Not surprisingly they weren’t making much progress on any of them, because they were constantly shifting their attention from one to the next, and also trying to deal with the routine ‘fires’ that popped up each day.
For each of the projects there was a story about why it was important, and which problem it would solve. And in one sense they were being very diligent in trying to address each of them. But they were making almost no progress on any of them. They told me that every time they had to re-start something they were spending lots of time just getting back up to speed, not even really moving the work forward. And it was enormously frustrating to everyone.
When you focus on everything you end up focusing on nothing. Having 40+ projects ‘started’ was causing them to have 0 projects finished. So they weren’t getting the benefits of any of them. They were lost in the ‘bun’, just like the tiny burger in the Wendy’s commercial.
Undoubtedly not every one of the 40 projects was equally impactful for the business. They needed to start asking “where’s the beef?” Which are the 3 or 4 projects or issues that are most critical, right now?
Selecting those few activities and devoting the lion’s share of their time to them, they would be able to actually finish those projects, reap the gains and move on. And of course they would be fixing the things that help the company the most.
As managers we are trained to look for things that can be improved and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. We are very conscientious about looking for inefficiencies, responding to customer issues, upgrading our product and processes, and a host of other opportunities we see to get better. But as we do that it’s easy to get sucked into tackling too many things at once, only to find that we are not accomplishing as much as we want.
If you find yourself or your business in a situation like this, remember the Wendy’s gals and start asking “Where’s the beef?” I guarantee you’ll get a laugh out of it, and in all likelihood it will help you sharpen your focus, and improve your results.
Here are a couple of questions to help you get started:
What does your list look like? Do you find yourself pulled in many directions? Is there pressure to go from meeting to meeting addressing an array of different problems? Take a few minutes to write them all down—the real things that take your time every day. You will probably be surprised to see just how big the list is.
Where’s the beef? Make some qualitative value judgments about the relative importance of those items and prioritize them. Then decide the handful of things that you are going to do first and don’t tackle anything else until you have completed one of your top items.
Staying focused on the right things is an on-going challenge we all face. If you have some ideas or strategies that help you answer the “where’s the beef?” question, I’d love to hear them. Leave a comment. And if you’re not already a subscriber, sign up today to get all our posts.
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As always it’s a privilege to share these thoughts with you. I wish you great success!