The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: What distinguishes Theory of Constraints from other management
techniques you’ve looked at?

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DH: I think it can be very easily applied in a simple process. As I have said,
the one I use more than anything else is the five focusing steps. A lot of the
problems which arise in business are about lacking focus. I guess if people
were to describe Positive Solutions, it would be as a very focused
organization. We don’t seek to be all things to all people. We stick to what
we know will be the most profitable areas to us at any point in time. We’ve
been working on the same constraint for five years.
DW: And that is?
DH: Our ability to recruit the right people at a pace which fits our business
plan. The more people we have, the more profitable we become. A lot of
companies by now would have given up at about 300 advisors, something of
that nature. And they’d say the constraint is no longer recruiting people, what
we should be doing is trying to improve the productivity of those people, or
trying to get a better deal out of the manufacturers of financial products. But
we’ve kept the focus on the fact that as long as the people that you are
recruiting are profitable, then why stop recruiting them? Just because it’s not
getting any easier? Well, it’s not actually getting any harder, either. It’s just
another day at the office. But we can work all of our financials back to
simply the number of advisors that we have. Therefore, we don’t go any
farther.
DW: That’s your focus?
DH: That’s our focus. We’ve identified the constraint, now let’s exploit it,
make the most of it. Therefore we have easily one of the best recruiting
machines in the UK in this sector. We approach recruitment very differently
from all our competitors. Our competitors will advertise, they’ll try to acquire
businesses, for example, rather than the approach that we have, which is to
recruit people one by one. Our rate of growth might at first appear to be slow.
But because our advisors have been recruited in the right way, we don’t lose
many of them. That’s the beauty of TOC: as you really dig in to identify the
constraints, you begin to understand these things.