Recently, UPS eliminated all left hand turns. That’s right. They scheduled their freight deliveries only making right hand turns. Well, 90 percent of the turns are right hand turns. They basically said, “We don’t want to turn left. If it means going around the block, we’ll make those right hand turns.” As a result, they found they could save time and ultimately miles. How many miles? They saved over 2.8 million miles on their fleet of trucks and over three million gallons of gasoline. They even eliminated over 1100 trucks. Think about how that translates to the bottom line. UPS eliminated something and created opportunity for growth and greater margins and greater profits. They are managing their space and they realize that that is one of their accountabilities.
Are you being accountable to manage your space? What in your life could you eliminate that would create more time or allow you to focus on what could generate better and more meaningful results for you? Look at everything you participated in last week. Make a list. And then look at which items maybe you could eliminate and then fill that time with something that’s going to be more profitable. Or, look at your business. Maybe examine a product line and ask, “it is making money for you now?” You could turn your inventory into cash; reinvest the cash in another product that might make you 2 or 3 or 10 times the revenue.
Yes, we’re comfortable with what we know. Yes, we’re comfortable with what we’ve done in the past, but the only way to achieve meaningful growth is to create space for that growth and that means eliminating something from what we’re doing so that we’ll have opportunities in the future to do better than what we’ve done in the past. I’m not asking you to give up left hand turns but I am asking you to look at your personal life or look at your business and determine how you can go about creating space so you can grow and become what it is that you’re striving to become.
