Breaking Big E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 282

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

An MBA for the SME!

Do you want to take your small business to the next level? Are you itching to achieve breakthrough success? Then it’s time to give your business a full health check with the Business Doctors. The Business Doctors are a network of independent business advisors who offer their expert advice and guidance to small business owners and entrepreneurs in every industry sector. In Breaking Big they will help you assess where your business is right now and take you through ten strategic steps to get to the next level.

Breaking Big is:

• Based on the concept of an "entrepreneurial bootcamp," it provides workouts to wake up small business owners and inspire them to kick their businesses into high gear
• A unique opportunity for entrepreneurs and SME owners to get back to basics and take a good look their core values and business vision
• Grounded in the authors' experience of helping hundreds of small business owners overcome real-life business issues, setbacks, and potential pitfalls

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

About The Business Doctors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: It's All About YOU!

This Is YOUR Business, These Are YOUR Opportunities

Stop Fire-Fighting and Get Inspired Again

Great Vision, Happy Customers

The Customer Is Always Right There

Love Your Staff

Part One: The Right Start

Chapter 1: Time to Ditch the Business Plan?

Get Inspired

Clarity Not Complication

No Death by Chocolate

Make Your Strategy Come Alive!

Start with a Day

Structuring the Day

What You Might Find Out

Chapter 2: It's the NOW Show!

How Does Today Feel?

How (and What) to Share

Finding the Common Ground

Motivation Matters

A Personal Journey too

Chapter 3: What Makes Your Company Tick?

Get Back to Basics – Get SELFISH!

Talk Time

More Than a Mission Statement

Good Enough to Eat

Some Journeys Are Harder than Others

What Value Are Values?

Values that Are Worth Having

Chapter 4: What Business are You REALLY in?

Forget Loyalty

What Are You Selling?

Who Is the Customer Again?

Think Through the Opportunity

Stop Selling

Get Ready to Feel Transformed

The Customer Conversation

Chapter 5: Are You Ready to Break Big?

Avoiding Invisible Limits

Thinking Big – Amazon

The Leader's Vision

The Believer and the Non-Believer

Why You Must Live the Vision

Time to Get Started

Taking Those First Steps

Moving On Up

Tweaking the Vision

Ignore the Knock-Backs

Part Two: Know Your Opportunities

Chapter 6: What's the Big Picture?

Snakes and Ladders

Setting Things Up

Putting the Theory into Practice

Old Industry, New Look

The Retail Revolution

Safe as Houses?

The Social Network

Evolution and Revolution

It's Time to Get Thinking!

Chapter 7: Do You REALLY Know Your Market?

What Is It That We Do Again?

Here's a Checklist for Starters

Nice (and Nasty) Surprises

It's Not about the Top Line

Removing Risk

Customers, Customer Types and Supply Chains

First, Second and Third Tier Customers

Start That Customer Conversation

Just Get Started

Chapter 8: Are You Ready to Look in the Mirror?

What's GIVE?

More Than Self-Analysis

G Is for GREAT!

I Is for IMPROVE!

V Is for VULNERABLE!

E Is for EDGE!

S Is for SO WHAT?

Part Three: The Wow Factor

Chapter 9: Are You Ready to Stand Out from the Crowd?

What's Our Offer Again?

A Winning Difference

What's the WRONG Story to Tell?

So What's the RIGHT Story?

Please Those Customers!

DANGER! You Can't Please Everyone

Better Is Often about Service Rather Than ‘Features’

Markets Are Always Changing

Keep the Customer Satisfied

Taking Those Smart Next Steps

Chapter 10: Are You Staying out of the Killing Fields?

A Targeted Win

How has Selling Changed?

Putting a Price on a Super-Service

A Different Level of Customer Service

Are there Any Downsides?

Understanding Your Particular Sale

Part Four: Make it Happen!

Chapter 11: How to Have Great Customer Conversations

Community before Commerce

Is Old-Style Marketing Finished?

Engaging with the Customer

Meetings

You Need to Listen!

Preparation and Structure

Do Some Business Models Make Face-to-Face Unnecessary?

The Sales Funnel Just Got Narrower

Chapter 12: Pressing the Reset Button

What Are You (Less) Good at?

Understand Where You Fall Short

Putting the Business First

A Blank Sheet Can Shock

Hard to do? Here's One We Made Earlier

MD – or Shareholder?

Director – or Manager?

Engaging with Staff

The Four ‘Rs’

The Fifth ‘R’

Simple Change, Big Impact

Chapter 13: What Gets Measured Gets Done

Have No Fear!

Beyond Dispute

Metrics that Matter

Big Business, Little List: Tesco and its KPIs

Getting Personal: how do You Measure Soft Skills?

Structure, Vision and Measurement

Change Is Everywhere: Learning from Online

A Shift in Vision and a Culture Change

Praise for Business Doctors

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

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This edition first published 2014

© 2014 Matthew Levington and Rod Davies

Registered office

John Wiley and Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com.

The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levington, Matthew, 1965–

    Breaking big : the business doctors’ no-nonsense guide to achieving breakthrough growth for your business Matthew Levington, Rod Davies.

            pages cm

    ISBN 978-0-85708-393-7 (paperback)

    1.  Small business–Growth.    2.  Strategic planning.    3.  Small business marketing.    I.  Davies, Rod, 1957–    II.  Title.

    HD62.7.L48 2014

    658.4'01–dc23

                                                                        2014011440

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-857-08393-7 (pbk)

ISBN 978-0-857-08412-5 (ebk)    ISBN 978-0-857-08411-8 (ebk)

Cover design by Dan Jubb

Business Doctors is a business support franchise, dedicated to helping small- and medium-sized businesses achieve their vision.

We are a network of experienced business people, passionate about sharing our skills and experiences.

Our aim is to offer ‘hands-on’ support to business owners, enabling them to overcome their individual challenges and helping them to achieve their aspirations for growth.

Whilst we operate within the consulting industry we are not traditional consultants. Our approach is different and involves getting into the nuts and bolts of businesses providing practical advice every step of the way.

Business Doctors has developed and helped transform hundreds of companies across a spectrum of industries, filling a gap in the market between the big four consultancies and specialist individuals.

The strength of the Business Doctor brand, combined with our holistic approach and alignment to government-funded support programmes, has helped us to become the fastest growing business support network in the UK.

We don't just coach – we get on the pitch!

The business was founded in 2004 by Matthew Levington and Rod Davies. They have built a national network of Business Doctors across the UK and are rapidly becoming recognized as the preeminent business support brand/service serving the nation's 4.8 million SMEs.

Matthew Levington

Intelligent, talented individuals who enjoy fast-paced, challenging environments make ideal business consultants and advisors. Matthew certainly fits the bill. A veteran of the highly-competitive and rapidly-evolving media industry, Matthew started his career in sponsorship and promotions at Piccadilly Radio. He quickly moved up the corporate ladder at EMAP, and was soon displaying his talents in a series of senior roles.

Matthew became Managing Director of Crash FM in Liverpool after its failed launch, and managed to reverse its fortunes by attracting the valuable (and fickle) youth market and the advertising revenues that follow. Matthew moved to Chrysalis stations Galaxy 105 in Yorkshire, followed by Galaxy 102 in Manchester, one of the UK's largest radio markets.

Matthew revived the underperforming Manchester station with bold, carefully calculated strokes that included the appointment of a senior management team, relocation to the city centre, and a determined focus on building a profile amongst the city's advertisers, businesses and communities.

Matthew's relevant business experience and talent for turn-around led him to found Business Doctors Ltd. with Rod. This unique opportunity to promulgate his hands-on style and to have a major impact on clients' bottom lines made Business Doctors the ideal venue for Matthew's many competencies and talents.

Rod Davies

The Management Consultancies Association (MCA) defines management consultancy as the application of knowledge, techniques and assets to improve organizational performance and implement business solutions. With extensive expertise, diverse experience, and a mastery of proven marketing and organizational strategies, Rod Davies has the profile of a premiere management consultant.

He has spent more than 25 years at the executive level of high-profile chemical, packaging, paper, stationery, textile and property businesses. He ran a successful paper merchant business in the Arabian Gulf. Rod was instrumental in turning around almost a dozen companies, from a £6 m carpet manufacturer to a £100 m division of one of the largest global integrated paper producers.

While he has proved himself exceptionally capable of helping companies to improve their performance, Rod's personal approach and taste for getting his hands dirty makes him so much more than a consultant. Rod rolls up his sleeves and collaborates closely with owners, directors and managers, seeing to it that they get the tools and knowledge they need to succeed, both personally and professionally.

This zealous drive to advise and empower led him to form Business Doctors Ltd. with his business partner, Matthew Levington. Rod and Matthew have crafted a Strategic Planning and Advisory service with a unique emphasis on people-led change.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost we would very much like to thank all of our Business Doctors clients that we have worked with over the last 10 years, for giving us the direct insight, inspiration and very rewarding experiences that have motivated us to write this book.

All the examples, insights and shared knowledge featured in Breaking Big are drawn from the collective experiences of the Business Doctors Network – all of whom are accomplished business people in their own right. We are a ‘consultancy speak’ free zone so hopefully, you will appreciate that all of our thoughts and ideas are taken directly from the hands-on, front-line business experience.

No one individual (or business guru) has all the answers – at Business Doctors, we firmly believe that successful business is rooted in sharing experiences and knowledge without expectation of reward or return. Having said that we would like to acknowledge one particular person, Christian Annesley, who has helped us take a diverse collection of thoughts and ideas, and transform these into a coherent order of words that are hopefully easy to read and apply to your own business.

Christian Annesley supported Matt Levington and Rod Davies in producing Breaking Big. Christian is an experienced editor, writer and communicator. He began his career in journalism and these days spends most of his time helping businesses to tell better stories and reach out to the right audiences, whether online, in print or in person.

Introduction: It's All About YOU!

Running a business is often exciting but rarely easy.

If you are a business leader, you know that every day there are important decisions to be made and opportunities to be explored that make the best of your people and your company's commercial prospects. Those who are capable of making the right calls, for the right reasons, will see their business thrive – and enjoy the ride.

So, for the business leaders out there, how can this book help? First of all, Breaking Big isn't just another book of dry business theory – the world has enough of those already. Yes, it contains plenty of helpful advice and clear thinking, but you'll soon see that the point of these pages is to motivate and inspire you to take the right decisions based on the best possible insights into YOUR business and its customers. As the title of this introduction suggests, you'll find that this is a book about YOU and what you need to find out – about yourself and about your business – to achieve personal and commercial success.

Is there a formula we are about to thrust on you to guarantee success? Not a formula, no. To succeed you will have to go on a journey of discovery to work out what matters, and there are some tools that you might find useful to apply along the way. But this book has partly been written as an antidote to the usual business consultancy straitjacket: you know, the one which sees an ‘expert’ paid a small fortune to scrutinize the recent history of a company in order to produce a predictable report that identifies various points of failure that can be fixed – just fancy that! – if the consultant's specialist expertise is further applied.

This Is YOUR Business, These Are YOUR Opportunities

In Breaking Big we take a different approach. That's because there are far better ways to get to the truth of what a business needs – and all of them start by turning the focus back firmly on YOU, the leader in the hot seat. This belief and principle has always guided Business Doctors, the business-support organization that we first founded back in 2001 – and continue to develop and run today. Since those early days the basic premise of enabling structured self-reflection by business leaders, partly by asking the right questions, has been refined and tested by us in hundreds of different contexts. And guess what? It really works.

Don't worry, what you aren't about to get is page after page stuffed with self-help platitudes. The point we want to make – and the point that Business Doctors has always made – is that YOU know the issues your company faces better than anyone, and if you can only make the space and time to explore the challenge fully, with an open and positive mind, greater commercial success and personal fulfilment will follow.

Stop Fire-Fighting and Get Inspired Again

Where does a journey like this start? It starts without preconceptions and with a blank page.

Most business leaders think they know their business, having immersed themselves in the minutiae of its day-to-day challenges for many years.

The trouble is, that's what's holding them back. Nearly all company directors spend their days (not to mention nights and weekends) dealing with immediate operational issues. It means there is rarely a moment to step away from all the noise and activity to take stock of what's happening in a more considered way: whether what they are doing day to day is working for the business; whether it is using their talents and know-how and relationships effectively; whether it is keeping them energized and happy.

These are big questions that should not be ignored. After all, companies are usually started by someone inspired by a dream or a big idea. Rediscovering that inspiration or dream can be challenging, but putting it off isn't an option for anyone serious about this book's message.

Inspiration takes many forms, of course, so be as challenging and creative as you want when it comes to working out what exciting looks like. The point is, we can all agree that it's only once you know what truly gets you excited that you can plan for more of the same. That's step one on the journey, and something that we'll explore fully in the book's early chapters.

Great Vision, Happy Customers

By working out what makes you tick, you'll soon start working out what makes – or could make – your company great again. When did that ambition that you once had start to wane? Whether it was last month or last year, getting back your mojo and your self-belief is a wonderful antidote to the daily grind. As the love-him-or-loathe-him tycoon Donald Trump once said: ‘If you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.’

Once a bold company vision starts to come together again, so will the strategy that's needed to make it a reality. And here's where a bit of data-crunching and analytics, allied to some structured, customer-focused thinking, will really help.

Why? Because any vision for success has to be based on reality and hard facts, rather than gut instinct. Entrepreneurs aren't always brilliant at the detail, preferring the grand plan and the big idea, so some outsourced rigour is what's called for here – and there are few clearer disciplines in business than the bottom line: love all your customers, by all means, but which ones make you money and which ones don't?

A clear-eyed analysis of the reality – of each customer, if necessary, and certainly each product line or service – should get you closer to the truth of your business vision and its prospects. What you find might be surprising or even shocking, but the effort will definitely pay its way. And it's what a large part of this book is about.

The Customer Is Always Right There

Some things are worth repeating. If there is one theme that Breaking Big returns to again and again it's the importance of the customer. Much of what follows pays the customer lots of attention – and then heaps even more on top.

We make no apology for this: a strong business needs to grow its sales to stay strong, and sales require customers that will buy and buy again. As we've already said, it's absolutely crucial that this quest for sales is aligned with your personal values and enthusiasms and the principles of the business, but equally it's fundamental that neither side of this equation suffers neglect:

Understand your vision and what makes you different and special.

Know what your customer is buying and why.

Love Your Staff

Our final word of preamble, before we leave you to dive in, is about the importance of managing and supporting the best people you can find the business. It sounds obvious, but plenty neglect this and suffer the consequences.

Business is a team game, but companies rarely grow logically, because needs change all the time. This means it's imperative to keep a close eye on who is doing what in a company, and to ask yourself as often as necessary what else they might be better off doing (that includes you, by the way).

There is plenty more to this, and plenty to be done. We'll explore it fully in the book's penultimate chapter. Whatever you do, however, the basic message is this: you should do everything you can at all times to ensure your staff never feel like passengers. An unhappy member of staff is soon an ex-member of staff, which usually benefits no one.

By the way, the chapters that follow are best read in sequence and in one go, but Breaking Big can be treated as a reference book too. Dip in and out of any section or chapter and the advice will still hold true. What you really mustn't do, however, is leave this book on the shelf gathering dust, like an expensive consultant's report you should never have commissioned in the first place. Read it, act on it, and feel the benefit!

Part OneThe Right Start

Every journey needs a beginning. This is where yours starts.

Chapter 1Time to Ditch the Business Plan?

Sometimes it's hard running a business. Where are all the good people to be found? When you do find them, why are they so expensive? Who to trust? Why aren't we making any money again this month? How on earth have we just lost that key customer?

It might be understandable to feel bogged down from time to time as the obligations and issues pile up, but a successful business needs a real plan. That's what this book is about.

Question: when is a plan not a plan? Answer: when it's a business plan.

Don't worry, no more riddles of any sort, we promise. But every business has stories to tell and many of these stories find their way into – or are created for – business plans of one sort or another. But are they really plans that are actively used and followed? Very rarely.

Just stop to think for a minute. If your company has been around for even a few years, you are sure to have such plans sitting on your company's servers somewhere:

A business plan

you wrote in order to raise some bank money, complete with sales projections and growth plans that you've not necessarily looked at since.

A financial plan

you created to pitch to serious would-be investors somewhere along the way. Likely this plan is something you've looked at and acted on in small ways since, for all the detailed financial modelling that was included, and the careful business case that was made at the time to present a really investable company.

Be honest, though: neither these plans nor any others that you've created are live working documents, are they? They are written looking forwards, maybe, but most – or all – were created to fulfil a particular need at a particular moment in time, and their usefulness doesn't usually extend very far beyond that.

There are other ways to think about your plans though, and it's the creation of and commitment to a different sort of plan – a genuinely strategic, lived and acted-upon plan – that is at the heart of our thinking.

Now, we know that talk of strategy makes plenty of business leaders wary. After all, the world is full of high-charging management consultants who like to talk about ‘strategy’ a lot – and then send through a prettily produced document and bill.

But strategy does matter – and it mustn't be allowed to become a dirty word in business. In fact, it matters so much it's worth saying what it means: one useful definition describes it as the effort to align external opportunity with internal capability. And you should add to this our belief that the right kind of strategy is also something for a business and its leaders to follow and swear by, so it becomes nothing less than a living, breathing inspirational framework that guides day-to-day activities and behaviours.

Get Inspired

Is that too high-minded for you? For some it might be. But we think it's time you put aside any world-weariness or cynicism and started to look for ways to get inspired again – for your sake and the sake of your company.

Without doubt many owners of smaller businesses think that strategy sounds like something that's nice in theory but a bit corporate – and a bit irrelevant to the daily juggling and distractions of the reality of keeping the lights on and the show on the road.

But it's a fact that every company, large or small, needs a proper strategic plan in order to grow and evolve. If you accept this point – and you are reading this book, so we reckon you do – the next question is the biggie: how do you get there?

That's what the book you are holding is all about. If this is our scene-setting chapter, those that follow take a step-by-step approach to the challenges of building and growing a business to achieve a vision that manages to align the personal aspirations of the leadership of a business with the real-world, day-in and day-out plan for that business.

Where exactly does inspiration or passion fit in? Right at the beginning no less: we think it's the starting point for everything. Companies are started by passion and belief. The point about creating a new strategy for the business as it looks now – however many years in you are – is to reignite that passion and belief for the business and where it is headed, and apply it in a structured way every day.

Harnessing all that know-how and enthusiasm anew is not something that's achievable in one giant, transformative leap. But by making lots and lots of small changes in many areas you will soon find you are in fact doing something big anyway. Once the journey is embarked on, with real enthusiasm and passion for where things are headed, you might be surprised how quickly positive change follows.

Clarity Not Complication

Here's a statement for you: many businesses start out relatively simple and get more complicated – and more challenging to run.

Fair enough – or not?

Sure, when you are busy juggling the priorities of business, things can FEEL complicated, but that's not the same thing as true complexity.

Business is usually pretty simple – and when it starts to feel like there is too much happening and things are out of control then it's time to make things simple again.

How? By getting on with creating that real-world strategy that starts with your passions and looks in detail at the business from all sides – at its strengths and weaknesses, at its products or services, at its customers and their needs, at its people, at the competition out in the marketplace, at your aspirations as a leader, and so on.

The purpose of this sort of analysis is not just to create an up-to-date list of headline points but to start drilling down into the detail and then to take some big calls on how things need to be – and to make the necessary changes.

We'll look at the nuts and bolts of this approach in the chapters ahead, but first here's another way to look at the opportunity you need to take.

No Death by Chocolate

Imagine you own a chocolate business. In the early days life is sweet. You bring out three luxury chocolate products and start selling them through a network of high-end gift and chocolate retailers.

Buoyed by your early success you later invest in selling direct – through a dedicated ecommerce website and through a network of retail outlets you establish across the UK. You also branch out from your luxury chocolate range into some middle-market and mass-market products, eyeing the prospect of supermarket sales and more.

But as the company grows and the opportunities keep popping up, you find that the challenges multiply too. Cocoa prices and the cost of other raw ingredients keep on rising, squeezing margins, while the complexities of producing dozens of confectionary products from a single manufacturing site for a growing number of customers with different expectations and cultures, and of overseeing dozens of retail branches across the country, with all of the staffing and property-related challenges that go with that, starts to take its toll. There is competition now coming from all directions, too, as others have moved in on the market niche you first identified and have undercut you on price. Suddenly things are not so rosy.

What to do? While most might just carry on working with the logic of the business that's been created, distracted by cash flow and staff and customers and all of those other things it is hard to plan for in business, really what's needed is a root-and-branch rethink.

Perhaps some data-crunching shows that nearly half of revenues are coming from just 4 products out of 24, or that web profits are sharply rising while the majority of the company's retail outlets are barely in the black. Or maybe it's the factory that needs to go as the economics of outsourcing manufacture to more sophisticated and efficient production facilities elsewhere make perfect sense. Or perhaps much of the value in the business really lies in the strength of its brand name and certain products and what's needed is a marketing campaign that makes the most of that feel-good brand to drive mass-market sales.

Whatever the challenges that are identified, and whatever the strategy that's ultimately adopted, the other point is that any change that's brought in has to be applied with clarity right across the business. Senior directors, middle managers, those running the retail operations, the marketing team, the accounts department, those on the floor in the factory – lasting change will only come if everyone understands the ultimate objective and the part they are playing in its delivery. Getting people involved creates accountability but fosters commitment too, particularly if individuals are being given real ownership and responsibility for their contribution. It's a theme we will explore in detail later in the book and it goes to the heart of creating a truly successful strategy.

Make Your Strategy Come Alive!

Getting started with any strategy can often feel overwhelming. What's the best first step to take? What questions should you be asking yourself and the rest of the board?

If this fills you with any kind of dread, we've good news: in our experience the main resource you need to get things moving in the right direction is TIME – just enough of it to set aside all the operational issues so you can stop and think.

Start with a Day

How long will it take? Well, a committed day is a great first step. When was the last time that all the company's stakeholders came together for a whole day to look at the medium- to long-term plans for the business? In all likelihood it was a while ago or has never even happened. Even if it is something that does happen on occasion, are such ‘away days’ really focused on strategy or do they see everyone involved talking shop and getting mired in operational issues?