The Four Pillars of a Business

As things pile onto your plate each work day, it becomes an overwhelming challenge knowing what and how to prioritize. Four pillars stand as the foundation of a business that ensure your team is consistently effective and lead to overall success. Without having each of these pillars solidly standing at the base of your business, the organization becomes destined for failure.

THE FOUR PILLARS OF A BUSINESS

1. Human Capital

2. Revenue Lines (Products/Services)

3. Customers

4. Financial Transactions

Human Capital: The people on your team are your most valued resource and the engine behind it all. Without the right people in place, from the top down, and the right culture to bring them together as a team, the business will inevitably struggle. From a business of one to an enterprise of thousands, human capital development is critical. Skill-set refinement including communication, writing, listening, documenting, following up, managing, prioritizing and self-awareness are imperative to consistent success.

Revenue Lines: The products and/or services of a business are the foundation of sales and growth. What problems do you solve? What value do you add? How do you differentiate your offering? Revenue lines must concentrate on product development, research and development, vendors, sub contractors and strategic partners to ensure new lines are developed, while sustaining existing lines.

Customers: Your customers are your source of energy for your organization. Maintaining and strengthening customer relationships is pivotal to growing any business. If your customers don’t rely on you and your product or service, you need to change your strategy.

Financial Transactions: Organized management of a company’s financial transactions and related information provides the groundwork for data analytics, dashboards and forecasting. A critical component of running a successful business is knowing your numbers. Advancements in technology over the past few years allow real-time transaction data and enterprise organizational awareness. This insight is critical for growth. Many companies are breaking away from their current process and relying on new mobile app reporting of financial strength and KPIs to ensure the alignment of interests and needs.

Businesses need leaders who are focused on balancing these four pillars. All activity within a business must directly support every member of each team to consistently connect their strategic tactical activities to one or more of the four pillars. To avoid the dangerous waters of distraction, all marketing initiatives should be directly measured and correlated to sales. Do social media posts really work and drive a call to action? Are the activities correlated to customer acquisition and sales? Do sales calls strengthen customer relationships? Are the conversations valuable to the customer? Do the team meetings improve employee morale? Are your KPIs tracked and managed (in real time)? If you can’t answer these questions, the four pillars of your business are not likely even.

Time remains the mutual enemy of organizations and individuals. As productivity gains move to the next level, you must ensure your organization has the necessary time management tools and culture to adapt and evolve. The foundation of business proficiency is a balance of the time spent on the four pillars by an organization to ensure the plane supported above is level. If any one area is neglected, the business will become unbalanced and stability will be at risk. Quite simply, if the four pillars aren’t stable, the table will fall. Is your daily business activity tied to one or more of the pillars?