Business Strategies

Many people do not like change, and there are such people in this company as well as the next. That is not always a bad thing. It seems to me that there should always be a healthy amount of apprehension as we look at change. It keeps one from changing the things that work.

In this company we have never before created long term goals, strategies, and short

term objectives for managing the business. The executive levels were non existent until recently. We thought we did not have time to work on the business and only worked in it.

I am told that the first reason for a business to fail is that the operator does not know the numbers. Rapid growth without a business plan is the second most common reason a business fails.

Naturally we tend to be of a mentality that makes us feel as though our company is successful in relation to the profit we realize from it. We also feel as though it will continue to prosper as long as it continues to yield a nice profit. While these points could be true, there are a few aspects missing. If you have not spent time working on the business you have no goal. When you have no goal and no numbers, you have no objective and no means whereby to measure your progress. And that is a ticket to failure!

Yes we all want a business that can thrive with very little input. Some businesses require less input than others. Other businesses may seem to thrive with only a small amount of input at first, but lookout when the time comes that it requires more! Sad as it is, many businesses fail because there is no vision.

The first thing we did was to expand our knowledge base. The leadership in the company started to discus strategies and to realize that change needed to happen with the leadership first. We also started to read good books on entrepreneurship.

We identified our mission and created a mission statement. We concluded a two year goal. Then we took time to write down a one year strategy that will help us achieve our “big hairy audacious goal” (BHAG).

At this point we started to see that there were a number of things we could immediately set in motion. This was the when we started to feel the motivation created by the leverage that this new business plan was starting to give us!

We use a very simply illustrated system that provides measurement, helping us stay on track. It is the fact that when one has aggregate of varied sizes to be placed into a container, more of it can be placed into the container when one fills the container with the largest aggregate first. These large aggregate are quarterly goals, we will call them “rocks”. These rocks are things that are the most important as relating to the yearly strategy, we chose only the three most important ones.

So we looked at our situation and established our “rocks”. Then we were able to list smaller aspects of the “rocks” as measurable points along the way. We were also able to appoint appropriate members of our team to take ownership of these smaller parts of the rock.

We started with catching up grounds keeping, solidifying a more efficient leadership, and completing an additional office that already had been started.

So we will forge ahead through this second quarter, following a detailed strategy. At the end of the quarter we will have a meeting in which we analyze things that are working, things that are broken, things that are confused, and thinks that are missing. All of these will be looked at with the yearly goal in mind.

So there it is! I hope you might be able to gain some inspiration from this basic idea. If it is personal, or for your own enterprise, I hope you can gain a bit of a better edge in your life. I believe it will be a great thing to finally shake down the sand into the last few cracks, as our business model shapes out!

That is all! Until next time!