Running a Small Business

Lesson 2: Ensuring Quality

Defining the required quality level

The first step in ensuring quality for your goods or services is to define what constitutes good quality as far as what you're selling is concerned. Everything has many desirable characteristics and even more undesirable ones. You have to first identify all the characteristics that define your products or services, look at what is desirable and decide which characteristics should be included as guaranteed characteristics in your business.

Think of your products and services one at a time. Think about what they are used for and how they are used. Think of what a perfect product or service would be like. That will make it easier for you to list characteristics which guarantee good performance and ease of use. Then go on to appearance and list what looks good. Packaging, delivery, documentation etc. are peripheral but should also be considered. Finally, look at faults in all these areas and list as desirable the absence of those faults.

Now you've got a pretty good idea of how quality is defined for each of your products and services. But you can't do everything. While the perfect product is theoretically possible, the cost would be so high that there would be negligible demand. You need to decide what to include and what to leave out in a systematic way.

For each product and service which you are offering, you have a list of possible characteristics. These characteristics fall into four categories:

• Essential
  These are characteristics without which the product will not work or the service will not be useful. They constitute a minimum level of quality.
• Impossible
  These are characteristics which, for various reasons you can't do. Possibly they are desirable but generally impossible to do or perhaps you can't do them because of the way your business operates. Note that "too expensive" is not impossible.
• Low Cost
  These are characteristics which would benefit your customers and which don't cost you very much to implement. They should go on the list for ensuring quality and they will be used in your promotional material, especially if some are easy for you to do but not for your competition.
• High Cost
  These characteristics are desirable but cost too much to include for free. These will be "added value" characteristics. You can include them in your basic offering and charge more or include them as separate options but, in either case, they will be important marketing tools to allow you to position your business in the best way.

Now you've defined what constitutes the different levels of quality as far as your business is concerned. To actually decide what levels you will ensure are produced and delivered, you need to consider your customers.

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