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Good afternoon. Welcome to this Google Hangout. My name's Ian Sharp, my company is Khemeia
Consulting and this is 'Business At The Sharp End'. Today I'd like to talk about creating
a compelling vision which is one of the key things that hold a company back from growing.
Most business leaders will tell you that they've got a compelling vision and it's very clear.
But normally it's very clear in their mind. It's not usually very well articulated, it's
not very well communicated to their staff. And if you want your company to grow it's
really important that it is clear; it's measurable as well (which is a very straight forward
thing to do); and that in some way it's communicated to your staff. I don't mean just quickly,
verbally - but actually it's written down in some way. And there's lots of visual techniques
available to be able to do that. So, what we're going to talk about (or what I'm going
to talk about) is how do you go through that process? It's all too easy to set up a business
and to started trading and to start making money and to start being profitable and increasing
your workload and getting very busy. But is it scaleable? Can you grow? Can you increase
the number of sales your making? Can you handle all the paperwork? Because when you first
start up and it's just you, you have to do absolutely everything - from engaging the
sale in the first place, doing your marketing, writing your proposals, delivering the work,
writing the reports, doing the expenses etc, etc. Now of course you can outsource some
of that work to professionals like your accountant or you can engage a bookkeeper to do your
bookkeeping. But the truth is most of your business and your day to day will be on those
administrative things and moving the business forward. So you get your first employee and
you're sat together, chances are it's very easy to communicate what you're trying to
achieve from a task by task basis. But that's not really a vision. That's not really something
that allows people to orientate themselves in the long term to drive your business forward.
So what do you do? Well, if you get onto a programme like Growth Accelerator (which is
for high growth businesses) they use some visual tools. An Orbit is a particular tool
and then a single page plan to start executing the vision. and they're really simple tools
(and there are many others out there as well). A quick search on the internet and you'll
be able to find other visioning tools, I'm sure. But very, very powerful. So we start
at stage one we work with; where does the business owner want to be? What's the long
term objective of their business? Where are they going? Is it, they want to build a business
to a certain value and then sell it? Is it that they want to build a business to a certain
number of people or they want to keep on growing it and stay in the company with no real exit
thoughts? So it could be a financial motivation; it could be a number of people; it could be
certain market sectors; percentage shares of a market sector or something like that.
And recognising that is the first step in starting to create a vision. Where are you
going? What's the long term plan? Corporate finance guys will tell you that it's an exit
plan, but actually most enthusiastic entrepreneurs don't often have an exit plan. They have a
desire to build a business and another opportunity will come along and they'll create another
business and another business and another business.So where do you want to go? What
do you want to achieve?And working through that, especially with a coach or a consultant
can help you to define whether it's realistic (where you want to go.); or what you're going
to have to do to get there. So if you sell time or product, you know, in your lofty financial
goals many years down the line, how many products do you have to sell? Which markets do you
have to be in? How many hours do you have to sell? And professional services like lawyers,
accountants know that inside out. So they know how many hours they have to sell every
month to be profitable - and at what rates. Product companies, product companies tend
to base it on volumes of products. So they buy at one price, they sell at another price.
They'll buy raw materials, they'll process it, add value and then sell it on. And they
may well do that. They may well buy more machines, buy a big factory to create the capacity for
the market demand that they're seeing, but they still might not have an articulated vision.
And articulating that vision is a crucial point really. It's a crucial point because
it drives a lot of the focus of the business and without it, you may be doing very well
but you may be doing the wrong things. And it's certainly in your staff's terms, they
may not be focused on the right things to help you grow as quickly as possible if that's
your objective). So we would advocate...we would advocate a very clear articulated vision.
A coach or consultant would help you achieve that, and out of that comes a single page
document which shows you where your operational issues are to grow. And those operational
issues might be things like access to finance; it might be numbers of staff; it might be
specific training needs of the staff; it could be building capacity; working capital; sales
and marketing; new business development etc, etc. The list goes on. but the key thing is
to identify it early so that you can address it in plenty of time to allow your business
to keep growing. So those are a few quick tips - a few quick things that you need to
do to set and articulate your vision and communicate it to your staff. Hope you've enjoyed that.
I'll be back every Monday on Google Hangout. It's called 'At The Sharp End' and I'll reflect
on common areas of questions that we get asked while we're working with high growth companies.
There'll be some resources in the show notes if you'd like to visit the blog and look forward
to seeing you all next week.