Organisational Needs

What is the organisation trying to accomplish or avoid? These can be categorised as:

• Strategic—The need to increase revenue and growth. The need to expand into a new market. The need to reduce expenses. (Not a strategic or marketing plan or a cost reduction analysis).
• Technical—The need to have their servers up and running at all times. The need to operate more efficiently. The need to launch a new product. (Not a new monitoring service or time / motion study or new logo).
• Financial—The need for ideas on how to become more profitable. The need to sell the business. The need to improve sales results. (Not a tax return or valuation or sales compensation study).
• Political/Environmental—The need to bring a new acquisition into the fold. The need to allow a new store to be built. The need to avoid bad publicity. (Not an employee survey or a grassroots campaign or a series of press releases).

Individual Needs

What is influencing the individual or individuals who will decide to engage our services? These are the needs that are often unspoken and less obviously connected to our services. While you cannot always uncover these types of needs directly, by being aware of what may be going on, you can be alert to the obstacles that can keep you from connecting your services with your prospects needs.

• Professional—To get a promotion. To prepare for a new job. To become well-known. To gain experience in new areas. To do a good job.
• Social—To impress the neighbours. To be accepted and respected by peers. To have a nice place to hang out.
• Psychological—To avoid risk. To take risk. To have someone to talk to. To please the boss. To gain recognition.

Determining Your Client Needs

How do you uncover your clients’ true needs and position your services in a way that fulfils their organisational and individual needs? I suggest the following exercise to get you thinking about how your clients view your services and how you can define them in terms of your clients needs.

1. Bring your key principals, partners, or business developers together for a brain storming session.
2. Think of all the clients you currently have. Why did they seek you out? What needs did they have that caused them to look for a service provider?
3. Think about the last sales conversations you had. How did your prospects speak about their needs?
4. Try to use the words that your clients and prospects use, not the marketing speak you use to describe your services.
5. On a flip chart, write all the needs that you have down the left-hand side.
6. On the right-hand side, write the services you provide.
7. Connect the needs to the services. Which ones satisfy the most needs? Are there any needs you have listed for which you have no services? Should you have those services?
8. Develop the questions that will help you uncover these needs in future conversations.
9. Continually refine and reshape your needs list as you engage new conversations and new clients.
10. Repeat the process as needed.

So, the next time you are asked what your clients need, you will be prepared to answer with the real reasons they seek out your services. You will make better connections, develop stronger relationships, and most likely find new clients in the process.

1. Consider what you are doing that isn’t effective. Do you make many mistakes? Does it tire you out? Would you rather go to the dentist for a root canal than complete the task? Get real with yourself and stop doing these tasks. Find someone else to do them faster, better or cheaper than you can.

2.  Stop learning how to do things that aren’t high ROI (Return on Investment). I always tell people that I make it a point NOT to learn how to update my website. If I don’t know how then I won’t be tempted to try to figure it out. It’s a waste of my time and money to do it myself and I know better. There are very good website development businesses out there who could give you a cost-effective alternative.

3.  Become ruthless. It can be a lot of little seemingly insignificant things that add up to big time wasters. If you were determined to create more time for what’s important then what would you cease doing immediately? Buying office supplies? Figuring out whom to do your product distribution? Doing all those social marketing posts?

4.  Create an exit strategy. For the bigger roles that you are more integrated into (like project managing or handling the operations) you may need to follow the steps of many successful CEOs and create an exit plan from these tasks – what can you do over the next 6 months to replace yourself in that role?

5.  Change your mind about what’s important. If you are a control freak or regularly find yourself holding on to something because no one can do it as well as you, then it may be time for a reality check. I guarantee that in one Coaching Session I’d be able to find at least 10 tasks or roles that you could get off your plate. So start being realistic about what you can really accomplish and remove yourself from the rest of it.

Be willing to clear the decks of everything that is getting in your way of the most important things. When you look around at the people who really do enjoy a lifestyle business, who make consistent income in the high 6, 7 or 8 figures and are enjoying some level of sanity in the process, you’ll see that they never try to do everything and often they do very little. Sir Richard Branson said in an interview once that it is easier for him to run his multiple billion dollar companies today than it ever was to run a small company.

Something tells me he figured out how to remove himself from a lot of tasks! This analogy is important in realising that there is more to business than just doing it all yourself. You may actually start enjoying being in business again. Remember that with the right information and expectations communicated to others the tasks can be done just as well or even better than you. Try thinking outside the square and think of virtual assistants that can help with on- and offline tasks or even get interns to help out when certain tasks need to be performed, usually at no extra cost to you as these people need the experience.

For your business to grow and be successful, you have to eventually settle on the one with the best fit, and pass the others off.

We make a strong distinction between the following

• The Business Owner creates the Vision.
• The Manager creates the Systems.
• The Technician creates the Results.

Each person requires a different hat.

All business owners have qualities of each, but where they most often lack confidence or expertise is in that of The Manager. Makes sense though, right? Most businesses are started by a technician that thinks he/she can be an entrepreneur. Being a manager doesn’t even come up in that scenario.

After careful deliberation a business owner will conclude: “What I really need to do is to hire a Manager.” It is here though that many business owners think “I can do this myself”. That thought does not leave the possibility of creating a business that can operate without the business owner being present. A business is only an effective business when the owner can stand aside and see that the vision is being implemented through a manager and the technician. It is this type of business that will create wealth for the business owner over time, not to mention the freed up time to invest somewhere else.

What a Manager Needs to Be

An effective manager certainly has the potential to take on some of the accountabilities that command so much of the business owner’s time. But how is this by itself really going to move your vision any closer to reality–and without causing too many hassles?

Back to the hats: In the development stage of your business the business owner wears all of them. You must be able to look at your business from each of the three distinctive points of view. As The Entrepreneur, you have the sole authority and responsibility to determine the direction of the business. How will the business be positioned in the eyes of its customers, employees, lenders, vendors and the larger community? The Entrepreneur must determine and constantly communicate and reinforce the company’s intention.

The business owner’s vision is The Manager’s follow-up orders; the vision is the high standard set. The Manager’s duty is to communicate, enforce and manifest the vision.

Managerial work ultimately bridges the space between the business owner’s vision for the business and the daily technical efforts needed in moving the business toward that vision. Effective managers, those who can encourage and motivate employees to reach their full potential while working on important tasks, are instrumental in building turnkey, systems-dependent businesses.

What a Manager Needs To Do

A Manager must have several critical characteristics. One is “know-how.” Some managers arrive with some “know-how” intact–knowing what to do and how to do it—getting work done through other people, i.e. technicians. Effective managers will, as a minimum, have the ability to find out how to do that. Knowing how or knowing how to find out how is one of critically required skills of a successful Manager.

Another essential characteristic of a successful Manager is the ability to communicate and implement that know-how into processes and systems that will enable people to get the desired results.

The only effective processes and systems are those that will achieve the Entrepreneur’s vision. Those processes and systems are the tools the Technicians use to get the results that fulfil the vision. The Manager does not manage people per se. The Manager manages systems.

People respond to orchestrated patterns. Within those patterns (systems and processes), people can manage themselves! People are effectively unmanageable. Systems are not.

A successful business must begin with the vision. The effective business owner creates a compelling vision and communicates it throughout the entire organisation. The effective business owner lives the vision. The effective Manager transforms that vision into systems, and delegates the tasks to the Technician. The effective Technician operates within the system to create the results that move the vision forward.

A successful business owner does not wear all the hats at once. The owner of a successful business must practice the art of discrimination. The owner of an effective business must know what hat is appropriate at any given moment, what characteristics are essential when wearing that hat, and when it is time to pass it off.

In a high-performance organisation you devote 20% to 100% of your time purely on strategic work. We tell our clients in one of our initial conversations with them that the most important change they can make is to find 3 to 5 hours a week to work on the business, not just in it. Most owners complain that they don’t have the time for this. With some simple pointers we often show them that this is possible.  Clients who do this nearly always exceed their expectations. Others achieve some success, but fail to become all they can be.

An important aspect of establishing a high-performance environment is to hold monthly business development meetings. We suggest a monthly meeting held at the same time and place. This should become routine. Further, we suggest that each person at the meeting spend around 5 minutes answering these questions before getting to the rest of the points on the agenda.

1. What’s the best change or improvement in the way business is done that you have noticed this past month?

2. What issue/idea of yours does not yet appear on the master plan?

3. What issue/idea on the master plan do you consider our top priority?

4. What action plan will you pledge to write during the next 30 days?

Once this meeting has become a permanent part of your business culture, indeed a ritual, you can go on vacation. When you come back there will be no unresolved issues on your desk, only implemented action plans. Repeated and consistent self improvement has been the trademark of successful companies, enterprises, governments, and religions since the beginning of civilisation. If you don’t change the way you do and think about things, and improve these then you will fail or become obsolete.

Very often, when success in less than optimal, it can be traced to the client not setting time aside, religiously, to do strategic work. Some clients fail to meet regularly with their managers, and/or the managers fail to meet regularly with their employees. While some people refer to meetings as a waste of time, leadership means meetings. Your job as the owner is to listen (not to dictate or to dominate), to support, to inspire, and to provide your employees with all they need to get their well-documented and well-defined tasks accomplished.

From our perspective, monthly business development meetings call for everyone to write an action plan per month, forever. In time you will have so many ideas documented that it becomes an exercise in improving existing action plans. For example an action plan may create a standard for meetings, such as a published agenda, no more than four items on the agenda, and no more than 15 minutes for each item. Notice that the four questions appearing above find their way into this action plan. Notice that question no. 1: “What’s the best change or improvement you have noticed this past month?” sets up a positive tone for these meetings.

Over time, monthly business development meetings invariably result in every employee coming to realise that each of us has issues, we can’t expect others to solve all our problems for us, we need to prioritise, and take accountability for some of our own issues; to contribute, or to be silent.

Establishing a high-performance organisation not only requires that you continue on a learning path, but also that you enable those around you to grow. We advocate four steps on the journey toward creating this organisation: 1) Integrate the Vision, 2) Build the Structure, 3) Train and Provide the Tools, and 4) Quantify and Evaluate. Most of all, high-performance organisations create a game worth playing. They engage people fully and create an environment where they can use all of their skills and abilities to reach higher levels of personal and professional competence with each new challenge. So while it’s fun to win, the truth about great games is that most people just want to keep playing. Building a high-performance organisation is the best thing you can do to keep everyone in your game.

If you would like to learn more about these aspects of business growth then please contact us.

1. An entrepreneur is an inventor. Not all inventors are entrepreneurs though. What do I mean exactly?, well entrepreneurs look at the world with open eyes and and asks “what’s missing?”. Once identified the entrepreneur thinks about how to fix this gap. What an Entrepreneur does next is to create a new business instead of new products.

2. Entrepreneurs do not buy business opportunities, they create them. Sorry guys, this includes franchises. You may be successful in a franchise, but your creative juices are stifled by the rules of the franchise. For the true entrepreneur who is creative he/she will be doomed to disappointment as the entrepreneurial passion is doused by the rigours of the franchisor. Franchises can become successful jobs for those that buy them.

3.Invention is contagious. People love the feel good factors involved when other people experience their invention (business). The more significant the invention the more likely it is to succeed.

4. An entrepreneur measures the success of the business by its growth. The faster it grows, the better the invention. It shows that people love to interact with this business. Those that do not experience this growth should not continue as less and less people will want to interact with it and will ultimately lead to financial ruin.

5. Everyone can become an entrepreneur. Everyone can create and develop an new invention if they follow their passion. In order to achieve this an entrepreneur needs to develop patience while developing the skill to drive the invention forward. This calls for the practice of developing new business ideas before actually implementing them. Entrepreneurs are made, not born.

From the above it is clear that many business owners are not entrepreneurs. Many business owners actually own a job that pays for their current lifestyle. It is important to realise that entrepreneurs create businesses for their clients and staff. They create a culture that everyone wants to be part of and are excited by it every day. When this happens the entrepreneur can stand aside and let his business boom with him/her only steering the business in the right direction.

1. All businesses need a vision. This is vitally important because who will follow you if you cannot clearly tell your employees, financiers and significant others where the business is headed?

2. All visions are both personal and impersonal. These visions are both of the owner and the business itself. If these are not aligned and in harmony with each other there will be problems for one or the other down the road.

3. Every business is an organisation. An organisation means that you have interactions with people both outside the business (customers and suppliers) as well as within the business (staff and contractors). It is important to remember that it takes organisation to make sure that you get the best from all people involved.

4. Every organisation is an organisation of systems. In order to create a synergy between all the aspects of business there should be systems in place that makes it easier for your people to deal with the day to day issues and interaction with customers and suppliers.

5. There is a commitment to the customer. Customer service is not necessarily the most important part but making sure that you keep you word on what you would do in the time frame agreed will keep that customer coming back for more. Keeping your word becomes your brand. If your systems are not set up to ensure that you keep your word then what are you going to do about it?

6. Become a master of the money. Everyone in your business must understand the dynamics that money has on the business. How do sales or lack of it impact on the business?, how efficiently are we making these sales?, what are the implications of spending too much on items that don’t produce those sales? If money is not measured regularly then your business will be facing a crisis over the short to medium term.

7. Your people are not your business. Conversely this is true too. The business has its own reality. It has to have a philosophy whereby its people can get what they want and provide the services that the business needs from them, which is to keep the promise to its customers every single time. The people need to understand this rule and be measured against standards and expectations set.

8. Your business is an idea. It is either a good idea or a bad one. If the latter then you need to get out as soon as possible as there is no point in continuing. This will gradually wear you down and put a strain on your relationships both in and out of business.

9. No-one knows your business like you do. If you can find people who do then you are in the wrong business! You need to inspire, train and coach your people so that they want to know what you know about your business. When your people know as much about your business then only will they be able to improve your business. Until that time they are a negative influence on your business.

10. A business must mean something if it is to make a difference in the world it serves. A business means something when the results it produces makes a difference to the lives of its customers and its people. Therefore businesses are set up so that the results help people achieve their goals and in doing so the business will realise its goals.

These vital sapects of any business will ensure that a business will continue in the long run.

Call us if you want to exit your business for the maximum value.

Here is the link to the recent article in the New Zealand Herald.