When it comes to growing your company, do you ever wonder if you’re leaving anything on the table? Jeff was a new client in the logistics industry when he confided in me that despite 20% annual growth, he had a nagging feeling he was leaving a lot of potential on the table. Just across town was someone we both knew in the same industry, but that company was had become a multibillion-dollar behemoth.
Thus, his thought, “What am I missing?”
It was after Jeff read my book “Growth or Bust!” for a second time that he gave me a call. It finally hit him just how many leadership and management basics he wasn’t following. Here are the things Jeff put into place that took his low eight-figure business to almost nine figures in just a few short years.
Quarterly Review of Strategy: Intensifying Your Vision, Divergence & Focus
Strategy, like a laser, can become sharper, more intense, brighter and more effective. Several areas of strategy can be reviewed and sharpened on a quarterly basis. The clarity of your vision can be intensified with greater detail.
What gives you competitive advantage — your points of divergence from the competitive alternatives — can be intensified as well. How and where you invest your resources — your strategic focus — can be intensified by strategically abandoning weak markets, customers, products, and practices and reallocating resources to areas with higher return.
Seven Essential Areas of Objectives
Objectives must be set in seven key areas:
1. Marketing
2. Innovation
3. Culture
4. Resource requirements
5. Productivity
6. Community, industry and social responsibility
7. Profitability requirements
Recalibrating your business’s targets quarterly and setting new objectives should be done with adequate input from your team.
The more this rhythm takes hold, the more your team will contribute innovations and improvements through new objectives.
Semiannual Review of Role Focus
All managers should have one-on-one realignment meetings with each direct report on a semiannual basis.
The “Role Focus 12” questions I created help to illuminate constraints and opportunities for an organization’s management team as well as keep everyone focused on dedicating an appropriate amount of time and focus to the appropriate objectives, projects and priorities.
Accountability to Growth Through a Board, Growth Advisers and Customer Depth Interviews
I’ve met dozens of owners who pointed to engaging and listening to their boards, advisers and customers as the top keys leading to their exceptional growth.
We all have blind spots, and having growth advisers and some type of board sharpens your leadership, strategy and execution.
Quarterly in-depth interviews with customers are one of the most commonly missed steps involved in developing strategy. These interviews should be a requirement.
Having a third party interview a sampling of customers quarterly will bring you innovations and new business. The founder of strategy, Peter Drucker, said that if you’re not listening to the customer regularly, then you’re not doing strategy.
Growth is relative. Not all businesses can have the exponential growth that my client Jeff had in just a few short years. But odds are that you know right now what type of and how much potential growth your company could experience if you execute accordingly. The key is to use the best practices above and get all you can out of all you’ve got.
Contact me for a free copy of “Growth or Bust!” as well as a free profit improvement assessment to gain insight to what you might be leaving on the table. You can learn the fuller details related to the tools Jeff put into place to achieve a quantum leap in growth.
Execute strategy as a quarterly process within your team, and you’ll begin finding more and more hidden opportunities that facilitate business growth.
