Where are we headed?

“As the leader, when you enter a brainstorming session – take the cotton out of your ears and place it in your mouth.” ~ Seen on a online Business Leadership Chat Site ~

Where are businesses focusing in this recovery? What is working for others? A 2010 Executive Market Intelligence Report surveyed executive recruiters to identify the top high-growth functions for executive placements in 2010. They were, in ranked order:

1) Business Development
2) Sales
3) Operations Management
4) Engineering
5) Marketing
6) General Management
7) Finance
8) R&D
9) MIS/Information Technology
10) All other disciplines

What does this tell you? If you consider the top five categories, there is a theme: Top line growth, bottom line control and adaptation/optimization of “what you have”.
If you haven’t gotten the message yet, the present and future are going to be all about change. As soon as businesses relax their hold on what used to work and begin to embrace the concept of change, new methods, new perspectives and new market adaptive directions - business should begin to accelerate into a drive-able recovery.

“Sometimes if you hold on too tight to what you have, you end up choking it.”~ Anonymous ~

REALITY: Most will agree that inflation is coming (no one knows when but it's coming) and that the economy is going to take a long time de-leveraging - so cash will continue to be tight for some time. Government stimulus programs will phase out later this year and the hand-off to the private sector for the recovery will take place. That hand-off will be felt in the form of a dip in the recovery. Businesses already have cut costs - so liquidity will have to come from revenue growth. The market WILL NOT ALLOW revenue growth from price increases. Revenue growth will have to come from sales diversification and market share growth. In other words - successful competition. Most businesses recognize that they need a plan for that. Such a plan involves much more than new advertisements and adding to the sales force.

BUSINESS PLANS AND THE RECOVERY. Small and Mid-size businesses (SMBs) intuitively know that there is no standard blueprint for their specific business – they have to draw it themselves. Yet, most SMBs don’t take the time to initiate and maintain even the most modest of business planning processes.

Successful businesses have plans. So why don’t more SMBs have one?
Here are FIVE reasons why:
Reason #1: Belief that a business plan is only required when borrowing or when soliciting investors.
Reason #2: Belief that a business plan will constrain the owner’s creativity, be too rigid and diminish the ability to flexibly operate the business.
Reason #3: Belief that those who will have to draft the plan are too busy to focus on a plan and that they don’t possess the knowledge or time to do it right – so why bother unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Reason #4: No excuse.
Reason #5: Your reason.

Reasons 2 and 3 are perhaps the most reasonable. It has been said that every business is either in a storm, coming out of a storm or going into a storm. There is never a convenient time to carve out the time to do a deliberate plan. But the reality of changing markets and circumstances really prescribes planning – even if the plan must change and adapt along the way. Business plans are not meant to be stagnant documents.

“I was wondering why the baseball was getting larger and larger – then it hit me!” ~ gotta be Yogi Berra ~

Larger companies employ Boards of Directors and Advisors who use a business plan as the subject of their fiduciary attentiveness. These Boards bring external perspective, experience and provocative ideas that stimulate thought and action for the good of the enterprise. Small business owners with their day-to-day perspective rarely have access to such talent and the accountability to success that comes with it.

Business planning is a project that becomes a process. I'm working with companies that undertook an internal business planning project that quickly identified other profitable projects of opportunity that presented themselves along the way. We took those new paths – and we’re still doing the business plan. That’s okay!

Through relationship oriented business advisor/management consultants like WayPoints Partners, you can bring an external perspective, objectivity and a sympathetic resonance with the issues of small businesses into YOUR small business. With it you will get fresh energy and sense of urgency for success at a fraction of the cost and without all the formality of a Board of Directors. You also get an advocate for your business through the many network contacts of your advisor - and, perhaps, some marketing and sales experience and intuition that will kick-in for REVENUE GROWTH.

The WayPoints Partners motto, “with you along the way … all the way” is a good example of the relationship orientation you will want from a business advisor/consultant such that any business planning process that you might jointly initiate doesn’t become a dusty document left on the shelf but part of an ongoing and evolving business success story.

All the best!

Bill