Is 99% Good Enough?

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Today I had a listing appointment with a client that was referred to me because of my skills in “Alternative Financing” and moving properties that nobody else has been able to sell. 

Anyway, as I printed the Mapquest to his house, there was an ad at the top of the printout that was for Genuine Hewlett-Packard Ink for your printer.  It said:  “1 out of every 4 refilled inkjet cartridges will fail. Trust HP inks for 99% quality” or something along those lines.  Their point was the they only have a 1% failure rate as compared to 25% failure rate among refills.

It reminded me of a handout that I shared with my Women’s Group  a while back, and I wanted to share it with you today .

First, look at your mindset and your business, what quality level would YOU accept if you were put in charge of a product or service?  90%? 95? 98? 99? How about 99.9%?  Many big companies think that a 99.9% quality rate is good, in fact, Motorola commits to acheive “Six Sigma” which is less that 3 rejects per million items produced!

Here’s some examples of what a 99.9% quality level would equal:

-12 newborns would be given to the wrong parents every day
-114,500 pairs of mismatched shoes would be shipped per year
-18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled per HOUR
-2 Million documents will be lost by the IRS this year
-2.5 Million books would be shipped with the wrong covers
-315 entries in Webster’s dictionary would be misspelled
-20,000 wrong drug prescriptions would be written
-5.5 million cases of soft drinks would be produced with no fizz
-3,056 copies of tomorrows wall street journal would be missing a section
-880,000 credit cards in circulation would have the wrong info coded on the magnetic strip

Does that make you think a little differently about your acceptable levels in your business?  Just a thought!