Stop Chasing The “Problems” In Your Business
It is not surprising in a time of incredible pressure that my clients say, I just want you to help with my biggest problem. Of late that has been consistently, “I need more customers”. We know that this is just the start of their issues and to really make a sustainable difference, we will need much more. We invariably need to help them identify who their clients are, get them in then the first time and then keep them coming back. We coach our clients using a holistic approach to building a resilient business mind set and have created a process called a “Success Fly Wheel” with five spokes.
The five spokes of the Success Fly Wheel are:
- People – Customers and Staff
- Products and Services
- Marketing and Sales
- Financial and Measurement
- Compliance, Risk and Competence
If you try and just fix a single problem, you just move the pain from one area of the business to another. This creates a continuous need to react under pressure to fix a never ending stream of consequential issues.
This typically looks like: I need more customers… I create some special offers and advertise them (extra cost – reduced margin)… I get busy… I need to grow my capacity to service them… I take on new staff but because I don’t have good systems, the training is haphazard, some orders are mucked up, service and productivity is poor (loss of profit)… our customer experience is inconsistent… return custom becomes inconsistent and sales drop off… I am over staffed and the whole cycle starts again.
Many businesses have multiple crisis cycles going on at the same time and they spend all their time working in the business just trying to keep going, desperately short of sufficient viable profit and time.
There Is A Better Way
It does require some up-front effort and a commitment to maintain the focus but the work you do in each spoke of the “Success Fly Wheel” will compound on each other. With sustained focus and a good plan, you can create a business that is much more enjoyable to own, much easier to run and often many times more profitable. When you create a “Success Fly Wheel”, you will get paid for the effort every year as extra profit, you will also get paid again when you sell the business (the value of your business is a multiplier of the profit, plus extra for any unique business IP- i.e. your “Success Fly Wheel”).
So Let’s Get Started
It would be easy to understate this process in this short coaching article, but we have created a system of minimum operating requirements as part of our business planning template. As we help our clients to build their business plan they will be identifying “must have” elements of their “Success Fly Wheel”.
We used to say: decide what you want, make a plan and work on that every single day, and we haven’t changed that. We have just systemised the plan making process, so it easier to do and called it “Success Flywheel”.
Be Very Specific:
Write down why your business exists, what you want it to achieve and by when.
Break your business plan down into five headings and write how your business works under each – these are called the five spokes: People, Product, Marketing, Financial, System/Compliance.
Who is your customer, what you know about them, what their need is, why they come back, etc.
List everything about your staff, their benefits why they work so hard, why they care, why they stay, etc.
List what you sell, what is unique (USP), cost, pricing strategy, what is the up sell/down sell etc.
List your plan to promote it, offers, communication plan, cost, ideas, who will do it, how much it will cost, what results you expect, etc.
Create a budget of expected costs and sales and load that into your accounting software (or ask your accountant to).
Create an activated dashboard and measure the important things in each key area. Your point of sale and accounting system needs to give you daily live performance data: sales, cost of goods, labour and profit as a minimum.
Compliance is most importantly you sticking to your own business plan, plus whatever statutory requirement you need to comply with.
List your risks and mitigate any potential areas of exposure.
Write an aspirational paragraph on how your business will improve its competence.
Work on your business every day – keep weekly management notes and do a monthly review.
We are here to help, good luck.