Are You Excited About the Future of Your Business or Do You Suffer With Mondayitis Every Week?

If you remember last week, we discussed Norman- a once proud business owner who after years of stress, firefighting and health problems decided to close his business down with the loss of 35 jobs. I suggested, that it needn’t have been that way and that there are alternative ways that Norman could have gone about building his business. What I would like to do over the coming weeks is to show you a step by step method for building a business that works.

One thing I would like to point out is that you can if you choose, miss out some of these steps, but the holes left in your business will mean that your profit, cash, time, team members and customers will be leaking out.

Let’s first look at why would Norman (or come to think of it, any sane person) would decide to start a business; after all, statistics tell us there is a massive failure rate... it could well end in tears.

For many people, they have a change in circumstances, for instance, redundancy or inheritance.  They now have the means to start their ‘dream’. For some, it could be they have the entrepreneurial spirit. For others it may be that they have had enough of making money for somebody else or they are fed up working for an idiot!

A big challenge when leaving employment and starting a business is lack of income and, in the drive to put food on the table and at least get earnings back up to the level they were when employed, many business owners take a few short cuts and turn a blind eye to a few business no-no’s. Most of these will be with the promise that “someday I’ll get round to fixing that.”  Problem is that, as the business owner gets busier, these important fixes get pushed further to one side because of all the urgent stuff that is going on in the business and someday rarely arrives.

It's around this time that a lot of people have the realisation that they are not creating a business, they are in fact creating a job. Working longer hours for less reward and with great deal of stress, in actual fact they are no longer working for an idiot, they are now working for a lunatic... themselves! They are stuck on the hamster wheel of business: sell,sell,sell, do,do,do, oops- got not customers, sell,sell...

So what can you do to avoid or overcome this stage of your business growth?

I believe you need to go right back to the beginning and to the thoughts that led you to originally start the business.

WHY did you take the plunge?

What did you envision you were creating?

What were your goals?

What was the timeframe for their achievement?

These questions are aimed at finding the motivation that drove your decision; if those thoughts fired you up then, they will almost certainly still fire you up now.

What can happen is that we have this vague idea of what we would like to create, which gets lost in our day to day 'busyness.' We get bogged down in the how or what we need to DO instead of focusing on what we want to HAVE.

So I am suggesting a better way for Norman to build his business would be to decide what he wanted to HAVE. What is his vision for his business and in what timeframe? Questions he might ask himself include:

How big is my business?

What does the business look like?

What geographical areas are we working in?

How many people are we employing?

What are we famous for?

How are we measuring success?

How do people who work for us feel about their jobs?

What do we refuse to do?

Why do people care about what we do?

What’s my role in the business?

Creating a vision is about finding what you would truly desire to accomplish, it should get you excited and at the same time be a little bit scary. It should make you feel proud, it should inspire, excite and enrol the people you want to attract into your business including your ideal customers, team members and suppliers.

Think about it... if you don’t know the destination, you are unable to give directions and, 

as the leader in your business, how will you attract followers if you are unable to tell them where you taking them?

A compelling vision is the starting place for defining the culture and DNA of your business. Culture, being the glue that holds your business together and effects the way people interact with each other and is ingrained in everything your values, your systems, your language, your beliefs and your daily habits.

Every business has a culture; the challenge is that it’s sometimes not the right culture to drive the business towards the business owner’s vision.

A few questions for you to consider:

How clear are you on your company vision?

What are you doing on a daily basis to make sure the company vision and culture are maintained?

What specific actions are you taking to show you are walking talking role model for your vision and culture?

Next Week

Now you have your clear vision we will look at the HOW you can achieve it.

Thoughts:

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”…Warren Bennis

“Where there is no vision, the people perish”…Proverbs 29:18

“In order to carry a positive action we must develop here a positive vision.”…Dalai Lama

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”… Jonathan Swift