The Ninety Five Per Cent Rule
By Jim Intravia 20-Aug-03
You have probably heard of the 80-20 rule. There are a few. They go something like this.
Eighty per cent of your revenue comes from twenty per cent of your customers.
Eighty per cent of your headaches come from twenty per cent of your customers.
The 80/20 statement will pop up here and there. I didn’t create it. As far as I know, I did create the Ninety Five per cent rule. Of course, it is not really a rule, or even a creation. It is merely a concept. A concept is a name for something that really does not exist except in the minds of the people who believe it. Concepts are just words, or even thoughts.
Take the concept of categories. A manufacturer’s rep will tell you that there are two categories of dealers:
o Authorized
o Non-authorized
Some of us would say that the two categories of dealers are:
o Professional
o Sleazy
Others might say the two categories of dealers are:
o Sales oriented
o Service oriented
A salesman might say there are two categories of customer:
o Those who buy from him
o Those who don’t buy from him
But the true “concept of categories,” comes from a college psychology text book, which states unequivocally and tongue in cheek “There are only two categories of people. Those who put people in categories and those who do not.”
Of course none of these are meant to be taken seriously. Nor are the 80/20 rules and 95 per cent rule to be taken with too many grains of salt. However, silly number rule games like this do provide some insight into how we work and why things that shouldn’t happen do happen.
Ninety five per cent of everything is easy!
That is my 95% rule. Think about this, starting with the most difficult thing you do on a day-to-day basis; service calls. Every service call is an adventure, but that is only because you want it to be. The act of fixing the machine and dealing with the customer is pretty routine, most of the time. About once every 20 service calls, there is a problem with a machine. Of course, as far as the customer is concerned, any time you are there, there is a machine problem, but most of them are routine for you. About once every 20 service calls, there is a problem with a customer.
Sometimes there is a problem at your end; car trouble, crossed messages, lost messages, or a wrong address. But for the most part, things go as planned, with machines, customers and yourself. If you figured it out, you would probably find that the machines are even more predictable than 95%. Ninety five per cent is probably the average technician, the one who gets five per cent call backs. If you are good, you probably average around 98% success rate on your service calls, which means only about one or two call-backs per month. The average technician probably has one a week or so. Of course every technician occasionally has the “Midas Touch,” where everything they touch seems to turn to …. (not gold.) The kind of day where you slide out a cleaner unit and scratch the drum, can’t figure out a problem, need parts that you don’t have, empty the developer and then discover you forgot to bring the new stuff with you. We all have days like that. Did you ever have a day where you ran out of loaner machines? I did.
Baseball, not just business
Ninety five per cent of everything is easy in its most basic form. Did you play baseball as a kid? A curveball or a good fastball was hard to hit. But if everyone were allowed to pitch, they would be easy to hit, if they could throw strikes. As kids get older, only the ones who can really pitch well keep pitching, and consequently, hitting gets harder. The 95% easy ones are finished pitching. It is still five per cent; maybe two per cent, maybe 20 per cent; don’t take the numbers too seriously. Remember, it’s only a concept.
Children in school
95 is an excellent grade, but it doesn’t represent ninety five per cent of all the work. It represents ninety five per cent of the work tested. It the teacher tested all the work, everyone would get 95. It would be only an average score. The teacher takes the difficult parts of the subject matter and tests on that. If the test asked the easy stuff, there would be no point.
Your money
You pay your bills, at home or at work. If you are really financially successful, you pay all of them effortlessly and have some money left over. But most people can’t quite do that all the time. They pay nearly everything, or they pay everything and have nothing left for anything else. They rarely have everything covered 100%.
Business decisions
The big ones are difficult. They cause a lot of consternation. It seems like there are so many of them. But there are so many that are so easy that you don’t think about them. You only worry about the five per cent. You don’t worry about arriving on time, about what sequence you will do your jobs in, what to say when the phone rings, or how many rings to answer on. Those are all in the easy ninety five per cent.
Dealing with people
Most people will behave as expected most of the time. Every now and then you encounter someone who doesn’t. They refuse to pay a bill, they bounce a check, they become abusive, they make unreasonable demands, they use physical tactics. Anybody can handle the ninety five per cent. It’s the five per centers that you have to watch for.
Conclusion
I don’t know if there is anything to be gained by this whole concept. However, I find that it makes sense when other things don’t. When you wonder why something so weird could happen, or why someone is so strange or nasty, you don’t have to come up with a logical explanation. You just attribute it to being a “five percenter.”
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