Thread by @joshuamschultz

Survival in small business is about adapting.

Feedback is essential for knowing what you may need to change.

One of the key aspects to my small biz operating system is implementing mechanisms to

- collect
- analyze
- act on

feedback from

- customers
- suppliers
- employees

Customer feedback can be elicited from:
- emails
- phone conversations
- interactions
- surveys
- submissions/requests

These help you know how the market is shifting, new needs, possible future strategies.

Supplier feedback can be elicited from:
- quality issues
- root cause meetings
- emails
- site visits
- audits
- surveys

These help you can better utilize your supply base, help them make more money/margin, collaborate, reduce errors, & create a better partnership

Employee feedback can be two fold (and both should be collected via separate mechanisms):
1. Ideas / Improvements
2. Problems

The best ideas come from those closest to the action. There is no way around this. Find a way to capture it instead of thinking you have all the answers

Take your improvements and ideas:
- Collect these,
- aggregate them,
- hold town halls or meetings around them,
- find small teams to experiment and implement them.

Have a separate method to collect problems.

I have found that when you combine these into "Employee feedback", you end only getting complaints. It becomes an anonymous way to report rather than ideate.

When it comes to reported problems, the feedback loop on these should be almost immediate. Not the action, as much as the receipt and consideration.

Show the company that you care.

Reward those who self report problems to make the company better.