Many of the problems you will face as your agency grows are symptoms of deeper issues. When we solve issues without drilling down to the root of the problem, we end up temporarily fixing the problem at hand without investigating and addressing the main issue.

If your stomach hurts after you eat, you take anti-acid pills to relieve the symptoms – you’ll feel better. But anti-acid pills are not going to address the ulcer you’ve developed, which will continue to get worse over time. The penalty of not properly managing your health symptoms – is death. The penalty of not properly managing your business symptoms – is bankruptcy.

The 5 Whys Technique

This technique was developed in the 1930’s by Sakichi Toyoda – the founder of Toyota – and his technique can help any business in the modern world. You can use the 5 whys technique when you’re troubleshooting a problem within your agency.

The technique works best when you ask no less than 5 why questions. I’m going to give you an example of a typical “process” that many of us have used to “patch” a symptom.

Problem: Our clients could not use our video in court.

Why? – Because the video was blurry and the quality was too low.

How can we fix it? – We buy better cameras to increase the quality of our video.

That thought process will only patch a symptom and we will face that same problem every time new camera or video technology comes up. We didn’t address how we should pay for the camera. We didn’t address how often we should buy a new camera. Most importantly, we focused on what was immediately in front of us without solving the problems of tomorrow.

If we use the 5 whys technique, we can quickly get down to the root of the problem and fix it for all future incidents.

Problem: Our clients could not use our video in court.

Why? – Because the video was blurry and the quality was too low to clearly identify the subject.

Why? – Because our cameras don’t have HD capabilities.

Why? – Because we bought the cameras 5 years ago.

Why? – Because they’re expensive and we can’t afford to buy new ones every year.

Why? – Because we simply do not have the revenue to buy new equipment.

How can we fix it: We need to include depreciation costs into our pricing structure. If a camera with HD capabilities costs our company $500, then we need to include that cost into our yearly operational budgets. We will increase our rates by $1.36 per day to cover the costs of a new camera. This solution will help us meet customer demand, stay technologically competitive, and keep our clients happy.

This can be done for any type of problem we have in our agencies. We can do this for investigators who constantly get burned, investigators who lose subjects in traffic, making decision on future databases that constantly have missing information, etc.

By drilling down to the root of the problem, we can find long term solutions that will help make our agency more profitable. As investigators, we ask why. We follow every lead. We drill down to the root of a problem.

Let’s do the same for our business. When there is a problem – ask why.