There are 101 Things To Do in Any Business, But Which are the 97 You SHOULDN’T Do?
Most business owners are motivated by goals. They may not have clarity on what those goals are because they have not set aside time to think about it, document or consider the relative importance of various goals.
Our process begins by asking you to consider how important the following goals are to you in a specific timeframe:
REVENUE
More revenue can help stabilise your business, attract bigger customers, attract capable employees, grow the reputation / status, lead to bigger profits and make your business more interesting to acquirers.
PROFIT
Profit can be distributed to owners and paid in bonuses to the team. It can also be reinvested into your business to generate growth.
CAPACITY
This refers to your efficiency. If you are maximising the use of your resources, then your capacity is perfect. If your team could produce more, your capacity can be improved.
COMMUNITY
Your reason for being in business may be somewhat driven by a goal to contribute or give back to your community (employees, their families, other stakeholders, charitable recipients, etc) or leave a legacy.
LIFESTYLE
Some owners are unhappy because they want to work less (and do other things). Others are unhappy because they want to do different things in the business (e.g. focus more on client management and less on administration).
SUCCESSION
You may consider a (partial) change in ownership of your business, e.g. selling to a third-party investor, a management buy-out, transferring ownership to a family member, liquidating the business.
It is rarely just one goal that is important. You can see from the above that goals are often interrelated. We take the approach of allocating 100 ‘chips’ across the six goals so that you can rank them in order of importance and then developing a plan that makes sense for you.
The next step is to assess the current strengths and weaknesses of your business to gain an understanding of your business competencies across five key areas:
- Attract customers
- Manager customers
- Develop teams
- Optimise processes
- Innovate products and services
Within those five business areas, there is a range of projects that you could work on at any point in time to build on your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses. To determine which of those projects make the most sense, we start by rating your current business competence in each one by allocating a score of 1 through 7. In this case, a 7 says ‘We’re brilliant!!’ and 1 says, ‘Oh dear, we need to look seriously at this!’
Of course, 1 and 7 are often the outliers and there is skill involved in delineating between various projects that might be rated 3 or 4. That’s why a session facilitated by Alliotts could help you to ensure you get the ratings right.
Once the assessment of competences is complete, we create a prioritised project plan with associated timelines and projects. The projects listed are the ones that will have the highest likelihood of moving your business towards its stated goals.