Moving Parts in Your Business

If you are following along with the Small Business Operating System, then the focus of your business is on delighting the people in your business. All your energy and strategy should go to that. Your whole strategic plan should be built around that outcome - however you define and measure that outcome.

Almost every outcome you desire such as more customers, a bigger impact, more effective team, more time for you, more profit, bigger results will be achieved by delighting the people in your business.

Let’s break that down as we dive deeper into your strat plan.

People

The people in your business take a journey through your business that starts with Attraction, leads through Engagement and goes all the way to Delight. The tactics in your strategic plan must support those journeys and never interfere with them. In fact, your strat plan will likely include components that enhance those journeys as a way to get you closer to your aims.

The people in your business are the ones who are going to help you get what you want. They are the ones who will execute on and/or benefit from it (or not).?

Think about how you can bring them into the planning process.

People who have had a hand in the planning will buy into and work harder to make it work.

Every strategic plan does better with fresh perspectives and diversity of thinking.

You?

Your strategic plan is built on your overriding aim for your business which is a natural extension of your personal vision and values. That’s your starting point. It’s easy to lose your way as you work through your plan so make sure you haven’t:?

• put in more work than you can handle without a way to share that work
• strayed from your values
• jeopardized your profits or cash flow unduly - investment is one thing, recklessness is another
• lost focus on your vision
• traded expediency for impact

Customers

Delighted customers do much of your work for you. Almost any metric you want to move will be moved most easily by delighting your customers. It’s 5-7x less expensive to sell to an existing customer than it is to sell to a new customer so focus your 'marketing' on your existing customers. Customers leave most often because they feel unappreciated.

The stories of your delighted customers will attract your next customers. Better yet, come up with a way for them to tell their own stories.

Team

Team members will not stay with you forever. Your aim should be to make them better people who are sad as they leave, but who go on to become future partners, ambassadors and advocates for your business.

Use that thinking as you work through your strat plan.

Another great Branson quote, "Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients."

Your team cannot treat your customers better than you treat team.

Levers

These are the levers you use in your business and your strat plan will include ways to push and pull on them.?

Environment

Think of this as the logistics of your business.

This covers everything from how you communicate, where you hang out online, your premises, your backgrounds, your payment methods, your processes and procedures.

Every time you make a change to any of these, you are playing with your environment. You are aiming to make it easier, more pleasant, and more conducive to getting your people where they want to go on their journey through your business..

Experience

This is how you make people feel.?

What you communicate, what your interactions are about, how you work with people, how they change because of working with you.

Experience in this case is about them. Build ways to listen and engage with your people into your strat plan before making decisions about what ‘they’ want. Let them tell you. Listen closely and look for clues.

Value Exchange

This is the give and take of value between your business and the people involved.

Time and money are only a part of it. Knowledge, happiness, values, sharing, caring, information, wisdom. It’s the interplay between how your business can help people reach their goals, visions and needs and wants with how your business increases in value - in other words how it gets better at doing all of this.

There are things you can do like making it easier for your customers to talk and help each other that increase value for both of you. Look for innovative ways to increase your value exchange.

All in All

You can’t separate what you do in your strategic plan from what you do in running your business. It’s not a different track. It may contain projects that are short term, designed to give you a specific result, that you can, then, integrate into the day-to-day running of your business.

Think deeply about how to delight the people in your business as a way to achieve your strategic goals.

Updates

Our bi-weekly money talk session is at a new time this week in the free BOSC online community. I’m going on an adventure, so it seems like a good opportunity to experiment with a different time. There’s a lot there to parse out of that last sentence.