Article: 5 Tips To Help You The Business Owner Survice 2009 (October 2009)
Tip #1: Innovate Across The Business
Make a commitment to researching and testing new ways of getting things done, from production to marketing, product design to packaging – in short, find a way to renew the energy and enthusiasm for new ideas you had when you first launched your business, then improve on it with the wisdom of experience.
Tip #2: Pursue New Growth Opportunities
Most business owners are well aware that in order to be a success a business needs to grow its sales and profits; therefore you need to diligently establish sales and profit targets and measure your progress. Research under-served segments of your markets, explore value-add sidelines and incentives to encourage more sales, more frequently.
Tip #3: Improve Quality
Quality issues have been at the heart of business management issues since the 1960s, culminating in the strategies of Total Quality Management (TQM). Quality issues are interwoven into the very fabric of business ownership, and include issues such as customer relationships and customer satisfaction, supplier relationships, manufacturing and service delivery.
Tip #4: Explore New Marketing Methods
Marketing in its broadest sense encapsulates advertising, public relations, selling and distribution. It is basically the act of letting people know what you have to sell, where they can get it and what value it has. In order to grow a business, a business owner must be constantly looking at creating and putting in place new marketing methods in order to gain access to new prospects and customers for the business.
Tip #5: Deal With Staff Issues
Good employees are critical to the growth of any business, but more especially SMEs. Therefore don’t let staff issues remain unresolved. Take care of employees and develop them, making sure they are satisfied in their jobs and have the knowledge and resources to perform well. Employee loyalty is especially important in tough times when you want employees to achieve more – while pay rises might be out of reach, actively offer smaller rewards such as lunches, unqualified praise, training or mentoring.
Checklist for business owners:
- Innovate in at least one area of your business over the next 12 months.
- Focus on growing your sales and profits and use them as indicators of performance.
- Institute some form of quality management into your business.
- Add at least one new marketing method into your business this year
- Take care of your staff.
Get in touch and ask us to conduct a FREE Business Evaluation Meeting and find out about our unique way of designing and implementing strategies to generate sustainable business improvement.
Motivate Yourself And Your Business (June 2008)
To motivate yourself and your business you need to have a vision of something greater than yourself. So let’s go back to the starting place:
'Your Wants and Desires'
If you don’t impose you wants and desires onto your business your business will impose its wants and desires onto you. You will become its slave and it will have you working late, getting stressed and needing you so much that it will impact on the time you can spend with your family and friends.
You must impose your wants and needs onto your business. This is an absolute must if you are able to achieve your dreams. So how much do you impose your desires onto your business?
It’s fairly simple:
Create a Vision for your business that excites you and all around you.
A motivated person has a greater ability to run a business that generates a wealth of freedom, surplus cash and a lifestyle that inspires.
Remember: Your Business-Your Life!
Get in touch and ask us to conduct a FREE Business Evaluation Meeting and find out about our unique way of designing and implementing strategies to generate sustainable business improvement.
Article: Transforming Your Business (May 2008)
From time to time in your transformation process, you may find something going wrong - a new procedure may not be working as well as it should; your new performance review system is causing staff to be unsettled; working ON your business is upsetting clients who are only happy when they see you.
Even the best planned transformation process can sometimes hit an unexpected problem.
Transforming your business is a process and like any process, can encounter difficulties resulting from poor planning, poor execution or simply experiencing the unexpected. Planning your transformation (for example, using the 24 month transformation plan) will assist you in minimising the number and frequency of problems, but is an unfortunate fact of change that problems will arise - some small, some big.
The first thing to do when you come across a problem is not to panic!
Immediately reacting to the problem by dropping everything to fix it is a “Level 3” response. However, if you are now working in “Level 2” heading towards “Level 1”, you will already have identified the possibility of experiencing a problem and have a simple process in place to address issues as they arise.
By working out what you will do when a problem arises, rather than reacting, you will be able to calmly take time to consider the problem thoroughly:
- What is the problem?
- Define the problem exactly so you are working on the right thing
- What is the effect of the problem?
- Define the effects the problem is having on clients, staff, productivity and goals
- Is the problem the result of poor planning?
- If there were steps missed during the planning phase, identify the missing components. Assess whether the process can be modified or needs to be rewritten to address the issue
- Is the problem the result of poor execution? Problems arising from poor execution can be remedied with some degree of ease. The two most common examples of poor execution are:
- Staff not properly trained to use a new procedure - retrain staff
- Incomplete implementation e.g. the procedure is implemented but the checklist is not yet complete - complete the whole procedure and retrain staff
- Is the problem the result of the unexpected? No matter how well you plan your transformation, you may come across something you did not expect. These are the things you didn't know you don't know e.g. you may not know that your new procedure triggers an undetected flaw in your system. You then have two steps to complete:
- Identify, isolate and address the unexpected issue
- Determine whether your new procedure needs to change
It may seem a waste of time putting a procedure in place to deal with problems when none exist but think of it this way:
- Because you prepare your procedure in problem-free times, you can think calmly about what you would need to do in a time of crisis
- When the problem arises, you don't run around wondering what to do, you already know!
- As a result, you avoid missing key steps in resolving the problem
Preventative maintenance will save you time, worry and money in the long run. Adapt this procedure for your business today.
Get in touch and ask us to conduct a FREE Business Evaluation Meeting and find out about our unique way of designing and implementing strategies to generate sustainable business improvement.
Article: How Would You Deal With Dishonesty In Your Business (April 2008)
As much as we like to think it will never happen to us, there may come a time when you are confronted with a horrible truth - you have a dishonest employee. And as a business owner, even the smallest incidents of dishonesty can be magnified by the simple culture guidelines you have in your business - you offer a service/products based on trust.
While we have avoided this situation in our business, we recognise the possibility of it happening. And as part of our preventative maintenance, we have prepared a procedure because we know that should it ever happen, we will likely be angry and hurt and may be unable to deal with the situation rationally.
Below we look at some of the early warning signs and provide a simple procedure for you to use in your business if you are ever confronted with dishonesty.
Business owners discovering a dishonest staff member usually react with disbelief. Let's face it - how can someone you have employed and worked with steal from you? Disbelief is generally replaced with anger and resentment, perhaps even feelings of hurt because you have been betrayed.
But what are the early warning signs that something is not quite right? A few business owners who have had the experience of a dishonest staff member have told us of the signals that became all too obvious after the event:
- Small amounts of petty cash going missing
- Expensive 0800 calls that no one will admit to
- Stationery and office supplies that need regular reordering, despite low usage
- Sending personal mail on the business account
- Missing equipment
- Clients complaining that they paid their bills in cash - but you have no record of payment
- Regular reports of personal items (or money) going missing
And while some businesses may put up with the odd pen going missing or personal letter being sent, there is a point when convenience becomes dishonesty - and that point varies from business to business.
So how do you prevent dishonesty in your business without coming across like a Scrooge? Well, you can probably never completely eradicate dishonesty - if someone is dishonest, you are unlikely to change their core impulses - but you can do some preventative maintenance in your business to control both big and small incidents of dishonesty.
Preventative maintenance can take the form of procedures to handle sensitive areas such as billing and petty cash, policies on use of equipment such as telephone calls and emails or implementing new security systems and checklists. But more than this, good preventative maintenance can start:
- In your culture - by instilling values of honesty in your business
- In your recruitment process - by proper reference checking
- In your operations - by systemising your business to remove the potential for dishonesty
- In your management - by communicating your expectations and leading by example
- In your leadership - by transforming your business into a business that offers opportunities that outweigh dishonesty
Get in touch and ask us to conduct a FREE Business Evaluation Meeting and find out about our unique way of designing and implementing strategies to generate sustainable business improvement.
Article: Complacency (March 2008)
"A feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger, trouble, or controversy"
"An instance of contented self-satisfaction"
How often have you heard one of your business clients utter the immortal words "Things were going so well - I didn't see the danger until it was too late!"? While having a feeling of satisfaction in a job well done is a positive outcome, that same feeling can be the ruin of a good business when overshadowed by short sightedness, arrogance and over confidence.
The one critical characteristic that separates okay businesses from great businesses is their desire (at all costs) to avoid complacency creeping in to their operations.
Complacency comes in many disguises:
- Thinking you are so far ahead of your competitors you can "take it easy" for a while
- Considering you know what your clients need better than they do
- Ignoring the importance of clients (and staff) who refer new business
- Believing you have enough experience, knowledge and/or skills
- Disregarding high staff/client turnover and considering it someone else's problem
- Assuming that 'good enough' is going to be satisfactory to your clients
These are some of the signs of a business that is complacent about its success. Complacency can strike at any area in your business: your efficiency and productivity; the effectiveness of your procedures and systems; the quality of service you offer your clients. Some of the most common areas of complacency we see are in the leadership, knowledge and skills in a bsuiness.
While complacency is defined as a 'feeling', unlike being happy or angry, the damage to your business can be profound. Let's consider the impact of a complacent leader and complacent business:
- "I know enough/I have sufficient skills to run this business" - people, businesses and markets change every day. If you are satisfied that you know enough, or have enough experience to effectively lead your business towards your vision, reconsider. Leaders who seek to continually build their knowledge and skills are far more effective in keeping abreast of important changes and making course corrections so benefit of their business. The day you stop learning is the day you stop leading
- "We are far too good for our competitors" - that may be true today but what about tomorrow? If your business is complacent, it fails to understand that there is always going to be another business in the market seeking to overtake it and attract your clients
- "Our service is good enough" - service can always be better. A Business that casts off complacency and adopts continuous improvement are those that have recognised how dangerous being satisfied with the 'ways things are' can be
- "Sure we have high staff turnover but that's just because staff carn't hack the pace" - if you are complacent about staff turnover, you are failing to recognise that things are not all rosy in your business. Thinking it's your staffs problem is a certain recipe for eventual disaster.
Complacency is insidious and starts with something as simple as 'oh - that's good enough'. As the leader, you need to ensure that you continue to challenge the status quo to avoid complacency creeping in. Ask yourself: 'How can we do better?'; 'What ways can we improve our service?' and most importantly 'What lessons did we learn when things went wrong?'.
Article: Got What It Takes To Be MD? (February 2008)
Having a clear business direction is the most powerful business improvement tool you can use. There are many clichés about planning and business direction:
As worn as these clichés are the fact is that they are, by and large, true. Without a clear business direction your business will not go anywhere. It may survive on enthusiasm and energy in the short term but in the longer term it will fail.
Some people say they are not planners and it is true some of us are better at planning a direction, setting goals and achieving them than others. But saying you are not good at it is just an excuse, an admission that you don’t enjoy the discipline the process brings to your business and even less the fact that you end up with something by which you and others can measure your performance.
Setting a clear business direction doesn’t have to be a complicated process – in fact the less complicated the better. In its simplest terms it is a matter of deciding where you want to be at some point in the future (“Where”); critically assessing your current situation (“Now”); and setting in place strategies to get you from where you are now to where you want to be (“How”). Add a time frame (“When”) and a means of measuring how well you are actually doing against what you thought you would do (“Measuring”) and you have it – a clear business direction.
Depending on the complexity and size of your business your business direction might cover an A4 sheet or it might be a more significant document. This is one situation where size really doesn’t count but - clarity is paramount.
Like any good process there are a number of steps to setting business direction that will bring clarity to your thinking. The key steps are summarised below.
Develop a vision for your business and personal life. A vision is a statement of where you want to be at some point in the future. What is it that you want you business to look like? What will it be doing? How well will it be doing it? What will it be providing for you? How will it feel to have the business where you want it.
It is a view of an attractive future for you and your business. It is bold and exciting and importantly is in some way better that what exists now. Generally it is timeless and while it might change on the way it is something you are always aiming for. It is what you are aiming for in everything you do in business.
Clearly define what business you are in. In doing this you are also defining what business you aren’t in. Define the purpose of your business. Work it out from a customers perspective – what do you need to provide to your customers not what they are going to get.
This is often called the Mission of your business. In a military context it states the overall target and how and when the target will be achieved. In a business context it defines the business you are in, the core purpose of the business, your target markets and how you are going to operate. It incorporates the culture you want in your business, its philosophy. It defines how your business is different from others. It is supported by your core values or guiding principles.
Your guiding principles are the core values by which you want to run your business. They are a benchmark on which you base a decision to proceed or not. If a core value is to be compromised in going down a particular track then you would make a decision not to proceed.
This is a goal setting exercise. What are the specific goals you want to achieve? What do you want to achieve over the next 6 months, 1 year, 2 year, 5 years, 10 years? Make sure they are:
For each goal set specific strategies that will achieve your goal in your timeframe. The more strategies you can implement the faster will be your growth. But remember growth needs to be balanced so make sure you are addressing each area of your business at the same time to keep all in balance.
There is no change without change. This means that all the planning in the world won’t create change unless you act.
