Business Mentor: Research and exploration essential to growth

Q: I'm ready to focus on growing my business. I have excellent systems and a good product. I think I should put some sort plan of together, but where do I start? Is it worthwhile putting a plan together? How do I get everyone involved?


* Duncan Shand, director of the growth consultancy InsideOut, replies:

A: There are many places you can start. One of the most important is to find time for planning.

A recent Harvard Business Review study found that in a typical company the management team only met for three hours a month to discuss strategy.

The rest of the time was bogged down in everyday urgent jobs.

So it is important to find the time to research and explore ways to grow your business.

The next challenge is to get tough about reducing the time you're spending on the not-so-important tasks and delegate those that need to be done to someone else.

With that time saved, build a network of staff, customers and suppliers to spend time with, to better understand their ideas, issues, needs and how they relate to the future of your business.

Ensure you have time with your key team-members. Make sure you involve people from all parts of your business, as good ideas can come from anywhere.

Create a forum to get people talking about options for growth and their ideas. This will generate other ideas and the discussion will improve existing ideas.

Another option is to get people the closest to the customer, usually those in sales or customer service, to prioritise a list of all the things they would like done to improve customer satisfaction.

Don't fall into the trap of only focusing on the big ideas.

Every little thing that can be done to improve your business should be done.

But where possible the smaller ideas should be prioritised and handed over to the appropriate person to implement immediately.

Next, I'd focus time on six of your key customers and ask them what issues keep them awake at night, their vision for their business and what feedback they have about your business.

Check that they understand the full range of services and products your business can supply, and do this regularly.

Once you have had the conversations, rallied the team and collected all the ideas, you can start ranking, prioritising and testing them.

Don't make the mistake of being too critical about the ideas in the early stages. Give them time to develop and grow.

Use a little of De Bono's six thinking hats philosophy and only put on the black hat (for critical thinking) at the end when you need to evaluate whether these ideas can be developed into feasible growth projects. Now that you have a list of growth projects you're happy with, combine it with a list of activities you already use to grow your business, your advertising, promotions and referral programmes. Look hard at this list and divide it into three:

1. Those things you know generate immediate sales.

2. Things you know support long-term business.

3. The activities that haven't yet generated any sales.

From this last list, delete the ones that, deep down, you know aren't going to deliver sales and are not worth testing.

Put this energy and time into doing more of the proven tasks from the first list (those things you know work) and the new growth projects you have discovered from talking to your team and customers.

Now you are ready to combine all these elements into a plan.

Put the combined list into a spreadsheet, decide when each task or project is going to be done and who is going to be responsible for it.

This then becomes your growth plan, a key part of your business plan, and should work together with your annual budget.

Make sure you work with this plan on a weekly/monthly basis, that you and the team are making progress, and hold yourselves accountable to the agreed deliverables.

Use this as an opportunity to let everyone in your team know that you expect their ideas, inspiration and passion to grow the business.

Lastly, make sure you celebrate your successes and have some fun along the way.

* Duncan Shand, director of InsideOut, can be contacted on 021 447-775 or info@iout.co.nz

Answers are courtesy of small business sector specialist Sarah Trotman

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