"Once you cut through everything in your business that isn’t necessary, the next stage is to look at what is necessary but repetitive."
Creating simplicity
So how do you go about achieving simplicity in your business? Simplicity is all about finding the right balance of what is necessary and what is not.
In the past, many advisers preferred to structure their sales process across several face-to-face client appointments. The pandemic forced a move to online meetings, which resulted in much improved efficiencies for both advisers and customers alike with many firms choosing to continue this approach post lockdown. This even led to wider benefits such as being able to return mortgage recommendations within a few hours of the call because of the time savings generated.
This is a great illustration of how simplicity has been created on such a wide scale, despite it being forced on us by a global pandemic. And, importantly, it makes the advisory community stand out.
Hiding complexity to create simplicity
Once you cut through everything in your business that isn’t necessary, the next stage is to look at what is necessary but repetitive.
This is where good technology solutions come into play, effectively hiding the complexity of most repetitive actions (that’s what it’s really good at), so the users only see simplicity.
As an example, Uinsure knew that asking lots of questions to apply for insurance was complex, boring, arduous and sometimes ambiguous. So instead, we decided to shed all the complexity of traditional providers, by only asking the critical questions and sourced the rest of the data from other places. This was a meaningful innovation because it simplified the experience of accessing insurance and hid the complexity to the end user.
In a world full of complexity, it is simplicity that makes a product or a service stand out. It’s therefore crucial that we understand how to balance complexity with simplicity and can implement this understanding in our businesses.
