Tag Archive for: #businessquestions

I received a reminder from my physician’s office this week to book my drive through vaccination time slot, which got me thinking about business health.

How is vaccination related to business?

A vaccine stimulates your immune system to produce antibodies, exactly like it would if you were exposed to the disease. After getting vaccinated, you develop immunity to that disease, without having to get the disease first.

This is what makes vaccines such powerful medicine. Unlike most medicines, which treat or cure diseases, vaccines prevent them.

Business planning is a quasi vaccine for your business. The act of planning stimulates your business immune system. Resiliency and immunity don’t just happen, they are learnt and built.

Which component of your business do you want to vaccinate this season?

  • Re write your Unique Business Proposition?
  • Clarify your company Purpose?
  • Set new short and long term goals?
  • Document the new strategies you have adopted through the Covid experience?
  • Revisit your Value statements – would it be helpful to restate the required behaviors and beliefs you need from your team to succeed in the months and years ahead?
  • Any changes in your products and services, fees, or your target market?
  • Time to refresh and strengthen your relationships with your business partners – your suppliers and/or distributors?
  • Are your departmental plans current for the next quarter, priorities identified and moving forward, or has your leadership team fallen back to reactive mode?
  • Is your organization chart up to date, capturing the changes over the past six months

Some of us tend to be vaccine and needle adverse. Working on your business heath can activate the same feelings of resistance. It can be nerve wracking to know it might hurt a little, even make us feel a bit sick, to find out things aren’t working quite as we want.

You know what they say, “an ounce of prevention”.

Stay Healthy!

For help with these questions or any other help you may need to improve your business health drop us an email.

We know C19 is “disruptive Innovation” on steroids. Every business has been disrupted, even those that are seeing revenue growth through this period. C19 has been the disruptor, and the best leaders will, and already are, looking at their business critically, using this situation to find new, innovative opportunities, both externally (customers, supply chain), and inside their companies (deployment of people, operating systems).

The challenge we see for many SME leaders is transferring their new ideas and evolving vision into a working plan.  A number of practical questions arise:

Where do  I start?

How do I get past this emotional reaction I and my team are experiencing in order to move forward with this work?

How do I translate my future vision into measurable goals?

What are the most important pieces to include in a high level summary of our future vision?

How far into the future should we plan?

How do I move from long term strategies to short term action plans?

How do I integrate new ideas with our current methods of doing business?

How often should I review and update my plan?

How do I maintain momentum when I need to make major changes (pivot) in the future?

How do I engage my team in creating and executing on the vision?

How do I include my values and cultural changes in the my new vision?

Who do I share my plan with and how do I do this?

 

The devil is in the details.

A lot of the work we do today is centred around supporting business owners in finding pragmatic answers to these type of questions. It has been a rewarding experience as working through these questions leads to tangible changes in business growth and leadership confidence.

I’ve learned that the act of writing a business plan is a powerful catalyst to self discovery and clarity.