Pick Two Any Two

I come across customers all the time who would like everything now. “Give me a quality piece of furniture at a very low price, and by the way I need that ASAP.” In almost all businesses that is impossible to do and stay in business. Most mission statements for companies usually states something about giving or providing their customers with a product or service with a certain level of expected quality, price, or promptness, but there is also their responsibility to the stakeholder of the business (i.e. the owners and employees) By providing all three of these features to a customer, the business would quickly fail.

Let’s look at the first one, quality. Webster defines quality as a “degree of excellence” or a grade. People normally use it to describe high quality furniture. But quality is more like a sliding scale. There are different degrees of quality. For example I could put a quality finish on furniture with just a few steps (stain/seal, sealer coat, top coat). If done correctly, that would be a very fine finish. I could add a few steps to that fine finish and get a very high quality finish.

Another factor to add to the mix would be the price of the piece. Most everyone wants a reasonable price, and most businesses would like to receive a fair price for their items. Price and quality, for the most part, have a direct correlation to each other. When quality goes up price usually does too. Quality can come from a couple a couple of sources. First, quality is gained thru experience. The more experience your employees gain the higher quality you’d expect, and the higher wages they’d expect.

Another would be the time spent on the project. That leads me to my last factor, time. The finish can gain higher quality by spending more time and adding more steps. The longer you spend on a project the more that project would cost in labor. Going the opposite direction, by allowing for more time, cost could go down. This way the project would not require overtime, during a busy time, or it could be scheduled in pockets of free time in your schedule.

As you can see all three affect each other, which means you can’t have your custom product quickly and keep the price and quality down. One must be eliminated, low price, high quality, or speedy delivery. You must pick two and only two.

This usually applies to custom build products only. Production items are sometimes excluded. One example is our baseball bed. It is priced low, high quality, and can be shipped fairly quickly. This is because we already took care of the time factor. We did this by scheduling it ahead of time. We built them in pockets of free or slow time and build a large number together to cut down on the average time.

I can give you that high quality furniture quickly but expect to pay for it. By waiting, it could save you some money. I don’t mind adjusting the time and price factor. I like to leave the quality alone. If the quality move, I like it to move up.

Remember pick two: Price, Quality, Fast.