Strategic selling see the world differently

What Makes Strategic Selling Successful

by Richard Gourlaycompetitive advantage, Selling skills, StrategyPosted on No Comments

Strategic Selling

A good business is based upon a clearly defined business strategy.  Strategy is the central or macro plan for any business. It the fundamental overarching plan which everyone inside the business is pulling towards.  A business with a clear strategy in place knows where it is aiming for in its market sector. That clarity and purpose enables it to build a culture to support that. A key element of a successfully designed business strategy is that it translates into a clear sales strategy. That is the definition of successful strategic selling. 

Sales Strategy What is it?

A sales strategy sets out clearly what the business intends to achieve and how.  Rather than just setting out a simple cold and unexplained turnover goal, a raw number, it defines the market you are in. A coherent sales strategy combines a set of strategic metrics which build to a complete set of outcomes. A sales strategy is a clear direction to take for all business activities. It identifies: –

  • The structure and make-up of the market you want to succeed within.
  • Key major market drivers – what’s driving market’s existence and development.
  • Market dynamics – what’s setting the pace of change and evolution of a market 
  • The profile of the major market players and their position in that market.
  • And ultimately the optimum customer profile for your target audiences.  

Strategic selling is a sales framework that firstly identifies the market structure that you are operating within. While that sounds obvious, it provides that clarity of purpose that involves everybody within the entire company Ensuring that everyone is pulling in the same direction at the same time, a clear sales strategy unites a company behind the strategy. A sales strategy is not just for the sales team, it is for every department to be aligned with. It enables a sales team to build companywide cross-department relationships with multiple-decision makers in a potential customer’s organisation. It creates a buyer-orientated approach that focuses on the value the entire solution provides to the whole customer. This contrasts to transactional selling which focuses on just the product itself. 

Strategic Selling in B2B Environments 

Strategic selling it is particularly effective in B2B sales environments. This is where there are often multiple decision-makers coming from different departments that engage with the company. It moves selling from a salesperson’s role to a company wide responsibility.  

Strategic selling aligns the company towards the entire customer’s needs and expectations. An average customer decision typically involves seven people, all from different parts of a business.  Each potential customer comes with a set of unique specific needs, budgets, and decision-makers all in the mix. That’s why a well-defined sales strategy is essential to target and support winning over all the decision makers within target company.  

Long-term Success

Strategic selling is focused on creating long-term, mutually beneficial relations with target customers. It breaks down complex sales processes into simple actionable steps which evolve as the partnership with each client develops. While traditional selling focuses on the narrow and immediate benefits of the product, strategic selling’s emphasis is on the complete value it provides to the customer over a long period. 

Strategic selling is mainly applicable in B2B organisations where there is a high value stream relationship. Often there are multiple decision-makers and an evolving relationship or partnership between the two companies.  Selling strategically is therefore a business culture tailoring the product and or service that gives the optimum solution to all these problems.  

Strategic Selling Approach 

A strategic selling approach requires a good understanding of the market and who the key players. That knowledge also identifies who will resonate most and align with your brand best. This market alignment is fundamental to strategic success. Prioritising and focusing resources on target customers and their value streams. Where a company can add value is where they might positively respond and engage with you. It is an essential to understand behaviour traits, and as identified above, what is driving their sector within a market. This is where customer competitor assessments identifies opportunities for possible company entry. Even if it is no clear opening or immediate need for your product entry.  

A company market entry strategy is an approach that focuses on building alignment rather than peddling product. We align with and understand the target client landscape and strategic challenges they are facing before trying to sell. Learning how we can work with them to resolve them, putting us in the driving seat in their solution search. 

By developing a tailored and even joint solution, we skew or even actively remove the competition from the equation. The most obvious point is where a target customer wants to move into a new venture, or market area. That opens an opportunity to develop an entry strategy with a partner. This can be undertaken either as a joint venture or as their preferred partner. This locking in is the most obvious model. For strategic selling it can at any level of development of the target customers business evolution. Whether that be scaling up, service evolution, cost reduction, adding new value; the opportunity is there if a strategic selling culture exists.   

Classic Drivers Customer Change

Growth: The target customer is essentially aware of the desire to grow within a market or segment. Where their existing model is not suitable or competitive enough, so they will look at alternative models to get growth within their market. 

Problem Solving: The target customer has an issue, or an underperformance with their existing model. This is where they maybe open to new ideas and solutions. This is where they are researching how do something different to remove know pain points.  

Passive Observation: Here the target customer does not see a performance gap between what they desire and the reality, but they are aware that change is happening and potential for their position to become eroded opens doors for possible exploration of new approaches. 

Key Elements of Strategic Selling 

The key elements of strategic selling start with developing a strategic mindset by the leadership team. That clarity of purpose and position within a market, typically a developed or mature market, where there is a structured market with major players either in place or emerging. Without that foundation stone strategic selling is unlikely to be achievable.

Win / Win / Win Culture

Strategic selling identifies the triple win culture (Win / Win / Win), the customer wins, you win and the relationship between the two companies win. This triple bottom line is at the heart of strategic selling. It builds multi-level relationships across the target customer, a collaborative sales process involving identifying and removing the customer’s pain points with them and finally uncovering the real value of the relationship of the partnership with them.

Decision Making Unit and Process

The second key element of strategic selling is that it involves working throughout the entire decision-making unit (DMU). This shift moves selling from a 121 narrow transactional engagement, the traditional selling model, to one where the entire DMU are identified and actively engaged throughout the sales process. That really means not just for the sales period but as part of developing a long-term relationship with them.

Understanding that while other stakeholders may not be actively engaged in buying but are in the decision-making process of whom the business works with, and what criteria buying decisions are made upon is vital for successful strategic selling.

The second element here is for any target customer to know their Decision-Making Process (DMP) how do they buy? No two companies have the same process, in steps, time and people engagement.

If strategic selling is going to be successful then it’s not just about the people but the process they go though, step-by-step and language they use which you need to know inside out. How do they score and decide? Who has what influence over whom and when?

In simple transactional selling the decided decides but in complex B2b sales there are multiple voices and different levels of power and influence which the decider must engage with and respond to. If many cases the decided is there to sign-off on a decision rather and make it.

Customer Centric Approach 

This then leads to the third key element of strategic selling, implementing a customer centric approach. Meeting the unique needs of that customer, tailoring existing processes and sales approaching aligned with the customer priorities and needs to enable them to achieve their goals. The final part of this element is an on-going relationship. Not just a engage when selling approach which is the definition of transactional selling. Strategic selling continually engages and aligns with the customer. This is why it works most effectively with emerging and maturing markets and large players within it.     

The Personalised Sales Strategy for each Target Customer 

Strategic selling’s key output is the personalised solution which is presented over time to the target customer. It highlights firstly good alignment between the two companies and the measurable impact it will make to the target customer enabling them to achieve their short and long-term goals. 

The win/win/win mentality should be at the heart to the solution, identifying how your USP’s could with your approach will solve and add value throughout the target customers’ business. 

Strategic Selling Solution 

Strategic selling solution focus’s a whole company approach tailored to the target customers’ needs, addressing all stakeholder concerns and how you will support the customer throughout the relationship. In complex B2B markets an effective solution highlights the key must have elements that the target customer has identified to you. While also focusing on the ongoing relationship and the next stage development of the relationship. 

That move from a transactional relationship to strategic selling involves the whole team engagement and long-term often multiple project and product development. This creates a strategic alignment between the two companies develops within a market segment.  An effective solution highlights these elements and draws in the entire strategy not just the immediate product or service in question. 

Strategic Selling Summary

Strategic selling is a clear business strategy. It relies upon developing a culture of long-term relationship building with large complex companies in maturing markets. Targeted customers ideally need to be in the early adopter or early majority element of the market where the value-added elements can be easily identified.   

Engaging with target customers must be undertaken throughout the company. Not just at the buyer selling point but from top down and throughout the decision-making unit. Identifying not just immediate needs, but longer-term strategic goals and target customer development plans, identifying stakeholder needs and value requirements in the partnership. 

Once this is undertaken the presentation back to the target customer must reflect strategic goals as well as immediate quick wins. This is most effectively when seen as a multiple step or phase building programme, often by finding the door opener and trust builder before trying to move into the longer and more significant purchasing phases. Always focus on the value-added in the joint relationship and lifetime value which will out compete any transactional relationship that transactional competitors can offer.   

Like to know more then get in touch with Richard Gourlay here.

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In Business Growth is not always Good Growth!

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business mission, Business ValuesPosted on No Comments

Business Growth is not always Good Growth, it can be Bad!

For every business owner growth is the ultimate measure of success, except it isn’t! Not all growth is good growth, and bad growth can have significant negative consequences. 

Growth is seen as THE measure of success in business. Leaders are measured by what they deliver in results, and growth is the simplest measurement to communicate. Headline results of increased turnover are always eye-catching news but may not be good growth.  Turnover, for turnovers sake, is often the most dangerous result a leader can deliver.  Growth sounds like a good result but not all growth is good. 

When growth at any cost becomes the sole focus, then leaders open the pandori’s box for the wrong types of growth.  Growth for growth’s sake is a high-risk business move. It sounds great as a headline but often masks what is really going on. The short-term benefits of rapid growth often come with long term consequences for any business. This is the difference between good growth and bad growth, which need to be clearly understood by owners and directors.

So, what is Bad Growth?

Bad growth is unsustainable. It’s a short-term grab that looks good but does significant long-term damage.  Bad growth comes in many shapes such as:-

  1. In grabbing market share: buying a low value contract to win a new customer, which reduces margin sets a trend to lower margins.
  2. In opening the wrong type of customer: which pulls the business to somewhere outside its marketplace, stretching the brand into different unprofitable places.
  3. Over rapid growth by buying market share: with a low-cost entry offer or product which stretches the company’s resources, from financial causing unnecessary debt, to brand stretch damaging brand value to customer and channel trust breakdown.

The outcome of bad growth is that it stretches and pulls the company in wrong direction. Pulling a company in a wrong direction, is short-term thinking. If it is recoverable will take time, money are human resources to correct short-term bad growth. But here’s the other key problem that bad growth creates. If we incentives and measure only the growth, then we reward the people who created that bad growth. By giving them rewards and incentives to do more of the same, feeding the bad behaviour.  That creates an empowerment and acceleration off driving growth at any cost and at all costs.    

Growth at any Cost

That growth at any, and all cost, becomes a mantra which often overriders all other business and brand metrics. The first casualty is margins which become eroded, followed by key areas such as investment in new innovative product is sacrificed for cash cows. That in turn leads to brand position erosion as the brand moves from where it was. Which is where its existing valuable customers want it to be. To a new market position, which results in its former customers moving away to new brands. 

Causes and Solutions of Bad Growth

Bad growth is an outcome of poor leadership decision making. When directors, press the green button to go for growth at any cost they are the fundamental root cause of bad growth. Instead they should be developing a clear strategic plan for the business. Identifying a company’s its true value and long-term aspiration must to be laid out by its leadership team.  

Clear guidelines of what the business and brand stand for is a must be defined. and protected Growth has impacts and good assessment of the full impact should always be made. If a business outgrows a market growth rate, then how is that being achieved, and what is the long-term impact on the company must be fully understood.  

Bad growth is often cheap and easy, but destructive and expensive in the long-term. The classic phrase ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’ should always be at the forefront of leaders minds. Bad growth takes the company in the wrong direction, moving it away from its market position, and most importantly away its existing loyal and valued customers.

Bad Growth Business Impact

As well as driving the company into wrong markets or short-term grab growth, bad growth often also has severe and significant internal impacts. Firstly, on the company’s values and its people motivators. Bad growth does not feel right to employees, demotivating good people and putting strains and stresses on systems and people as they are pulled in the wrong direction. 

Often bad growth creates internal conflict as people and systems are set up for good growth in product development, operating systems and customer focused activities. Challenging these, or short circuiting them to override them for bad growth goals creates tension and disappointment, demoting and demotivating even the most loyal employees.

Growth is a complicated goal and rarely one where there is easy low hanging fruit. It’s not just about increasing sales or market size; it’s about building a resilient, sustainable, and innovative enterprise. 

So What is Good Growth?

In business good growth is inextricably linked to a sustainable expansion strategy. It must be beneficial to all stakeholders within the business and to its external stakeholders especially its customers and channel partners. This holistic approach that considers the long-term impacts on the company, its employees, and customers. Good growth is led by a clear long-term strategy planning. It creates a steady increase in turnover and profit reflected in market impact of new product and brand position retention and enhancement.

Defining Good Growth

We can all see good growth after it has happened. We see more of the right type of customer for the business. They are spending more and are happy to buy more and more frequently. Happy customers come back and want more of both the same but also products and services which they want to a company to supply. 

Good growth is where: –

  1. Alignment is strong between all stakeholders: with shared values and brand perceptions work hand in hand in growth planning and delivery.
  2. Good growth is sustainable: it is both manageable and self-sufficient in generating products and services which sustain the growth of the business.
  3. Ultimately it creates long-term profitability: throughout the business, not short-term growth but long-term profits, such as shareholder value.      

The signature of good growth are therefore sustainability, profitability, and alignment with the company’s core values and mission. Good growth reflects the inter-relationship of all these three factors. It’s a type of growth that supports and is supported by the company’s overall strategic plan.

Benefits of Good Growth

Good growth benefits the whole business. Not only does it support long-term sustainability It supports brand reputation, builds and develops customer loyalty, and motivates employees. Good growth is enhancing the businesses whole value as it fits within the brand values and adds to the whole of the business offering. Each off these three elements protects the business from bad growth drivers and practices.  

Strategic Thinking

All decision making starts with leaders focusing on long-term strategic positioning, which comes from a clear vision and strategy.  Good growth requires good leadership decision making skills, focused on looking at the whole picture and incentivising and motivating people on long-term strategic thinking. Typically, this is thinking out the business over timescales such as 3 to 5 years, depending upon market rate changes. This contrast with short-term grab thinking, which is often led by short-term grab bad growth habits of one year or less with motivators that reward or override big picture thinking.  

Leaders who foster good growth are adaptable and responsive to market changes. Good growth leaders are open to innovation and learning. In bad growth situations, leadership are often rigid, do not listen to feedback from customers and employees that could prevent negative outcomes. The outcome is more important than how they got there.

Conclusion

Good growth balances opportunities with threats to the business. It focuses on the three key elements of alignment, sustainability and profitability. A good growth culture ensures it is aligned with all stakeholder and company needs. It is sustainable so it can be replicated without damage to the brand, its customers and its future and finally it makes money for the business and enhances shareholder value.  

Don’t be led by people who over promise to grow your business, especially if they come from outside your sector or culture. If they don’t understand the sector and your market, they don’t understand good growth.

Richard Gourlay, experienced management consultant, leadership development and strategic advisor, director and NED to high growth companies. Author of book:- Strategy: The Leader’s Role by Richard Gourlay builds the skills which makes leaders successful in their business. #dumfries #galloway #scotland, #mentor, #castledouglas, #leadershipskills, #NED, #Director.

Growth planning in business

Turnaround Your Business: The Garden Rooms Case Study

by Richard Gourlaycompetitive advantage, Dumfries and Galloway, Exit Strategy, opportunity, Strategy, VisionPosted on No Comments

Case Study a Garden Rooms business in Scotland

Turnaround Your Business with Richard Gourlay

A Garden Room

Turnaround Your Business

The owner of a Garden Rooms business in Scotland approached me to turnaround his business. Operating in a potentially growing market designing home garden rooms, such as offices, bedrooms and gyms while also still building home extensions. He was struggling to run these businesses, spending most time running around firefighting and dealing with unhappy customers. To turnaround your business often external advice and active support is essential, here’s why.

The Situation

The owner was trying to run too much at the same time, which put him under: –

  • Financial pressures: no real financial model and limited systems in place. With little cost management or operating and margins in place, putting continual pressure of the business’s finances and margin impacts. 
  • Operational issues: with no operating systems in place each project ran differently, which lead to a wide range of quality and complaint issues, including legal disputes.
  • Quality issues: with staff firefighting onsite with suppliers to get components to site on time, impacting upon delivery times, production and cost and quality impacts.
  • People issues: of unhappy and unmotivated staff, no one really knowing what they were being asked to do and good staff leaving. 
  • Ultimately there was little customer focus and significant firefighting, unfinished jobs with a long list of snagging issues to be resolved.

Our Solution

Working with the key people we developed a clear business strategy and culture shift for the business, identifying the businesses core value proposition and a customer focused ethos.

This led to a complete process of change and focused team actions to re-invent the business around its core value proposition and improvement plans to redesign out all root cause issues within the business. 

Following this process we then developed a customer process map.  This identified every customer value added step and supported the customer through the entire process. With a new marketing strategy also in place we were able to improve: –

  • Customer engagement and acquisition which led to an improved Average Order Value (AOV) of 55% in one year.
  • Ownership of issues by frontline staff to get it right for the customer, reducing snagging and issues to a controlled minimum, with everyone pulling together.
  • The development of product improvement and a full product range to support customer retention and conversion, making the business the dominant player within the target market.

This Enabled

We worked with the owner developing his business and his skills to lead his business more successfully, providing support and guidance throughout. This was supported by clear business planning with the owner with a full strategic and operational business plan in place. 

  • Clear success goals shared with the team. 
  • A forward annual business plan covering every aspect of the business. 
  • Sales goal setting which supported and underpinned the financial plan.
  • A comprehensive financial and cashflow model to ensure the business is cash positive and profitable for the first time.
  • The owner was able to positively look at a trade exit strategy from this business. 

Turnaround Your Business

Revitalising, recreating or jest evolving your business is an essential requirement to become and keep being competitive within your market. Don’t wait until it is too late. The earlier a business leader identifies they could benefit from a strategic refresh the more options and quicker positive change can happen. To turnaround your business with Richard Gourlay then lets have a chat with Richard here now.

Business success supported by Richard Gourlay at Cowden

The Growth of the Garden Rooms Scotland Business

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Dumfries and Galloway, Exit Strategy, StrategyPosted on No Comments

The Growth of Garden Rooms Scotland

 

The Growth of Garden Rooms

2022 was a great year for Garden Rooms Scotland. A Dumfries success story, with business doubling over 2021 as more and more people look to add a garden room to their home.  The success in 2022 was not a one off, the confirmed order book in January for 2023 alone is more than the turnover achieved in 2021. 


That success is not just down to a great front of house team’s solution design mentality, or the construction team’s hard work in quality construction. Garden Rooms Scotland provides a whole business solution. So where is the growth for Garden Rooms coming from?     


The growth comes not from just a great company but also from several major factors within a market. The growth for Garden Rooms Scotland is no different.  For many established companies’ growth within the outdoor living space sector is significant and is here to stay. Well, at least for the next five years or so if all market projections are to be believed. Why garden rooms are growing, is not down to just one factor, but many inter-related factors which is why growth is not just a blip but a long-term trend for companies set up to maximise this growth market. In response Garden Rooms has built a business to meet that growth curve. 

 

Rising Demand for Garden Rooms


By far the biggest driver for people buying a garden room is in response to the demand for dedicated work from home space. While 2020 may have been the year of remote working due to Covid, it was just the icing on the cake in growth for the garden room market as work from home became the new normal.

Demand for garden buildings went up by 500% between January and May 2021 at the height of the Pandemic. But it was not a Covid blip, but an emerging long-term trend. A recent TUC survey discovered that more than 38% of people in 2022 in the UK now work from home at least one day a week. By 2025, it is estimated that 70% of the workforce will be working remotely at least five days a month.

The work from home garden office, provides a separate “workplace” replacing the kitchen table worktop. It not only enables people who want to their Zoom conference call in private, but want a permanent workspace differing from their home life. 

Modern buildings provide a series of tangible benefits over old refurbishments. From WIFI, heating and cooling, well insulated and functional design the space works for business people. Garden Rooms also provide a steppingstone to work but without the costly time and financial commute for many professional workers.  Garden Room offices also provide a tranquil workspace, looking out at your garden, creating calm and relaxed workspace, within a few steps of your home.

 

Space to Add a Garden Room

In places like Dumfries and Galloway, Cumbria, and Northumberland there is also space around many homes. Not just in rural housing but also in towns where many homes until recently were built with sizable gardens and surrounding spaces. This creates options for owners to utilise their spare space for an additional living or work from home space, either as accommodation or for a dedicated activity, from yoga space, music room to art studio. 

 

Diverse Outdoor Living

Another major factor for many people choosing to add an additional living space is that it adapts what people have saving them having to move to find extra space. “If only we had a …….” Is solved by installing a garden room. Just the cost of moving home is often as much as adding in a new room to an existing property.  Creating a new modern living space within an existing home is also easier as recent planning restrictions have been amended to favour garden room addition.  

Creating dedicated spaces within a garden also creates privacy and can bring a function to a garden as well as a focal point to a garden. Creating a separate functional space brings structure to a garden, adding new functionality to the entire living space without disturbing the existing home. 

 

Cost Effective Extensions

Starting with the cost of renovation, which has risen our of all expectations, due to labour and materials, with materials alone having risen over 40% since 2020. This makes adapting an existing house now significantly more expensive than adding a garden room option. A comparable construction cost comparison makes an equivalent extension typically 25% more expensive than installing a garden room. 

Coupled to that many older buildings have significant limitations in adaption. Think of old houses with thick load bearing walls, and limited internal room sizes and the attraction of a bespoke design with modern spacious living spaces, well insulated and quickly erected and the rationale for a garden room becomes self-evident.  

Garden Rooms Solution

Designed and built in Dumfries at their dedicated joinery shop, Garden Rooms are designed to be built as modular units which are then constructed onsite.  Bespoke design with innovative solutions Garden Rooms solves people’s living space challenges.  Using clever solution such as ground screw foundations and modular construction saves time and money for customers. This makes the time on site shorter and with low impact on existing gardens and customer’s lives. 

With two showrooms providing a huge range of garden room solutions, customers can visualise and select the size and features they value most in their new garden room. For 2023 Garden Rooms has added new products and features to extend the range and scale of what can be offered.  Garden Rooms is a business going the right direction in the right market at the right time.

To learn about how Richard Gourlay supports and develops successful businesses then contact him by clicking here

SaaS Growth business leadership by Richard Gorulay

What makes A Successful SaaS Business

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, content strategy marketing, start-up advice, StrategyPosted on No Comments

Successful SaaS Solutions Start with a Minimum Product Viability (MPV)

Achieving a successful SaaS Business starts not with a perfectly formed SaaS platform, but by achieving a Minimum Product Viability (MPV) SaaS platform. That is the essential first must have goal for any successful SaaS business. But an MPV SaaS solution is not just a working model: but one that delivers the real value proposition which your SaaS solution promises.

The ‘real SaaS MPV goal’ is not often fully understood as to what it must achieve to avoid pre-launch failure for SaaS businesses. Too often SaaS MPV’s are half hearted aspirational “nice to have features. Compared to a successful SaaS solution of ‘must have’s’ SaaS solutions. That’s what makes a successful SaaS business, they always start with a robust MPV.

Business leaders’ are often told that shifting to a SaaS model ‘build it and they will come mentality,” but they won’t come, if you don’t achieve a robust SaaS MPV. You won’t compete within your chosen market.  Just being an online SaaS product does not make your business achieve success. If the SaaS MPV does not actively compete, then it will not succeed. So MPV is often a misunderstood or omitted market entry goal. MPV means your software as a service actually wins target audience customers making you a player within the market. Once you get this right then you can look at your SaaS pricing model. 

Launching without a MPV

Too many companies start trading without achieving a clear MPV. They build it, launch their marketing and sales plan and start trading and hope. But their SaaS fails to deliver to their target audiences. Pressure on SaaS businesses is to get there quickly. That often leads to trials which do not convert. Channel partners do not actively resell, Uncertain customer acquisition plans and confused pipeline management. All resulting in SaaS metrics such as cost per customer acquisition continually increasing. That leads to high burn rates of cash and pressure on leaders to chase customers. Pressure to play catch-up replaces ensuring the SaaS delivers its fundamental goal, that of real tangible value to the customer.

The alternative risk in not looking to achieve a robust MPV is that effort, resources and personal energy are lost in developing the wrong elements of the SaaS business. Rushing to market, often means that the marketing and sales drivers forward leaving the core offering behind. This leads to over promising and a confused set of priorities. for the company. Resulting in leaders trying and patch together into a coherent product or service offering.

SaaS Require Robust MPV

SaaS MPV metrics must be clear. MPV must be a tangible goal with a viable product offering. If you take your service online is must do more than just exist. Now I am not saying it needs to be perfect. But a over-polishing a SaaS solution is one of those very dangerous assumptions we will come onto shortly, but simple migration of a product online is not a SaaS MPV.  

For Minimum Product Viability to be achieved, a SaaS solution must successfully compete within its market(s). It must win new customers for it to achieve MPV status. Too often the model of lower cost looks good on paper, especially to the accountant, investors and banks. Which is supported by competitor analysis and trend analysis but without any evidence of actually being able to win target segment customers.  

Don’t Hit and Hope with SaaS

The built and they will come mentality often leads to the knee jerk reaction from companies to offer discounts to customers to gain traction right from the start. The downside of that tactic is that the predicted customer revenue targets aren’t met if you give it away. Giving it away also means that customers do not value your SaaS offering resulting in:-

1. Poor customer quality

2. Low engagement and low retention rates.

3. Poor product development which damages the core SaaS product.

4. False success metrics driving poor service and innovation

5. A SaaS business with short term mindset

The other major challenge of giving it away on day one to gain traction is that once the opening price perception is set it is difficult to reset. Initial target audiences are typically early adopters who usually are your target premium customers, they expect certain valuable features within the MPV that tie them in, which if not immediately available mean that they will abandon the SaaS solution. It is also difficult to recover your market or premium market price unless you have large marketing budget to support the opening offer discount.        

Measuring MPV requires leaders to not only check it works (and that is never a given with IT) but also that it achieves MPV as an offering. Does it do what it needs to do for the customer.? Does it meet the complete customer requirement of the value proposition? So do not just focus on the pure IT but on the whole value proposition to measure the MPV status. Test it with pilot groups, measure not only it looks good, but does it replace what they were doing? If not it needs to do more.

Over-polishing your SaaS MPV

I have worked with several SaaS start-ups and migration SaaS brands who face the eternal problem of over polishing their MPV. Failing to set a MPV goal with a timeline means that many companies keep playing and tinkering with their SaaS product rather than get it out there.

The challenge is that everyone has thoughts, features and layouts they want to see, so the more people involved the more the pull and push from 3rd parties to meet their expectations or perceptions. The nature of every increasing committees is to tinker and therefore delay. Continuing to over-polish is a major issue for many SaaS businesses. They ask too many people to review it and each has a view, but continual reviews and tweaks delay the acid test ill it work in teh real world.

Everyone has an opinion and no matter how valuable it is the MPV goal must define the MINIMUM, not the optimum or the ideally would like. These should be in secondary releases onwards as upgrades and add-ons. An MPV must to have a launch deadline in place with clarity of what that SaaS will deliver and how it will be upgraded over time to meet specific needs. A soft Beta test launch to a target audience will test and validate the MPV objective, which if you have followed the classic MPV creation model (below) will enable you to get to market with a credible SaaS solution.

SaaS Business model

What makes a successful MPV? One that delivers the SaaS value propositions’ core elements. When entrepreneurs or leaderships teams are building their SaaS businesses model they must start by thinking through what are the core elements we MUST HAVE rather than those we would LIKE to HAVE. Those core elements must engage with their target audiences both directly and through whatever channels to market they intend to operate with or through.

That MPV, what you go to market with to prove the concept and launch your business with has to contain the MUST HAVE‘s that both challenge and disrupt the market your SaaS model is entering, if it is to succeed.

So the MPV must be robust, not aspirational. It must do deliver the core value proposition, not be full of we will do this at a later stage. The phrase “You never get a second chance to make a great first impression.” Defines the need for a robust SaaS solution MPV within any market. If it is not robust in delivering those core value proposition elements then it won’t challenge or disrupt the existing players whether they be physical or SaaS competitors. Lets look at how to create a Robust MPV.

Create A Successful SaaS Business

1a. Firstly identify the success criteria that will indicate whether or not the SaaS solution will be successful

1b. Then identify the business needs of the sector today and over the long-term.

2a. Map out the customer / user journey(s)

2b. Then segment the core user groups (called the actors)

2c. Clarify the journey end point (end goal)

2d. Then mark all actions the user must take to meet that end goal, and then simplify them as much as possible, less is more.

3a. Write down the action the user completes when using the product

3b. Write down the pain points for each action

3c. Write down the gains for each action

3d. Summarise the pains and gains into opportunity statements

3e. Use “How might we” statements or a similar method to summarise the pains and gains you have identified, prioritise and

4a. Use opportunity statements to finalise your core “must have” features and ensure they are built into a coherent MPV model.

4b. Provide a breakdown of the features to include in the product roadmap, identifying each feature element.

4c. Use a prioritisation matrix (or similar method) to prioritise features creating a complete MPV customer journey to build and launch with.

4d. Identify other features to be launched as 2nd phase onwards and use target customer audience or beta test launch feedback to validate these feature in subsequent launches.

4e. Identify Key SaaS metrics including UX, channel partner and disputer effect metrics to measure your MPV launch with.

Successful SaaS

Get your MPV wrong and it is difficult to make a comeback. Understanding your core audience (it may not be big but it must be defined and reachable). Many SaaS MPV are done below the radar, with soft launches to target audiences either directly or through selected or exclusive channel partners to provide validity of model and ensure MPV has been achieved.

Going big too soon is often appealing but rarely successful. Think about achieving viability then scaleability with a proven model to solve a tangible issue for a target audience and you are more likely to succeed. Research your target audiences’ specific needs and plan points and ensure that your MPV focuses on delivering the results they need, rather than trying to do too much. Add value and then keep on adding more value is what makes a successful MPV for a SaaS business.

Richard Gourlay

Richard works with SaaS entrepreneurs in developing their SaaS solutions, to learn more and contact Richard Gourlay click here now

How to Create A Successful SaaS Strategy & Pricing Model

by Richard Gourlaystart-up advicePosted on No Comments

SaaS Strategy: Where are we now?

Back in 2012, I wrote an article (on this blog) about the potential future of business in the internet age, called The Internet Tsunami. Back in 2012 as we emerged from the infancy of the internet I stated that the internet would become a major business channel for all business sectors not just music and insurance. It was no longer a passing fad.  Back in late 1990’s we saw the internet emerge from having been a research tool to something which people could experience through to the dot.com boom of the early 2000’s when money flooded in to this emerging market but the infrastructure and customer engagement platforms were not ready preventing online becoming more than a side show for businesses. So here is how to create a successful SaaS strategy and pricing model for your SaaS business in 2021.

After the financial crisis of 2007/8 as the economic bounce-back accelerated change in the economy opening the door to the internet age and it began to take shape. My article in March 2012 suggested that what we were seeing the beginnings of the permanent change across all sectors and markets, it was not just Amazon replacing CD music shopping, but that the world was going to change. So lets look at how to create a successful SaaS strategy and pricing model

The SaaS Tipping Point 

Now that the technology tipping point has occurred and it has become the dominant global force in driving consumer behaviour. This paradigm shift is when markets move in response to macro factor drivers. For companies going too early with any trend can lead them to commit in concrete to a technology which leaves them left behind as the internet evolves for example Friends Reunited: provided no interaction and on-going relationship creation, as Facebook found is what makes a successful online social media platform.

Go too late, and you miss the market shift and find you have been left behind with disastrous consequences. Comet sold electrical white goods and collapsed with over 20% of the UK market share through its 200 stores, but refused to see the move online for these goods by younger consumers, while Amazon at the time had already achieved 8% of the white goods market with no physical shops. 

If you can see a trend you have already missed it.  Once the tipping point in a sector then you are playing catch-up. So over the last 9 years the internet has not just become another channel to market for many goods, it has become the dominant channel for many sectors most noticeably in retail, but is now almost ubiquitous, impacting upon every market. 

The ability to take products and services online is now in full force with organisations inventing themselves, reinventing themselves as online (SaaS) business models. For many this is a result of a number of key factors, not least is about keeping up with your customers and the competition. But, other key factors such as the reduction in cost of developing online services, as well as the ability to upgrade services quickly in response to rapidly changing or evolving customer demands are other positive drivers of moving online.

Shifting to a SaaS Business Model

Making the shift to go to a SaaS solution is a strategic one, it should be based upon a clear strategic assessment of the market and customer needs and carefully planned out in a detailed business plan.  SaaS is not just moving your products online, going digital. That is an important step but moving to a SaaS solution model it is completely new way of thinking about you deliver, to whom and how.

SaaS solutions start by working out what the future will look like and if you can do more online than as you are today. From that strategic assessment if SaaS solution is the way of delivering real underlying value to your future (and current) customers then you need to develop your Minimum Product Viability model to move your business into the SaaS world. Click here to learn more about how to set up a Minimum Product Viability (MPV) by clicking this link here.  

Software As A Service – SaaS Solution

Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are now common across all sectors replacing manually made service offerings. For many businesses replacing, upgrading and being able to compete within their sector requires companies to move to SaaS offerings. Either bespoke designed SaaS from scratch using in-house or outsourced technicians or tailored from white label sector providers. Offering a SaaS solution to a market is not just a shift change in what an organisation offers but a whole new way of thinking.

First: Create A Successful SaaS Strategy

SaaS though is more than just simple a move online.  It requires a different way of thinking from traditional models. The changing nature of customer engagement, moves from the physical meeting to the online engagement, that requires companies to think and act differently. The nature of the service also changes as it becomes totally arms length customer centric. Customers choose when and what they want to use of the service (for example over 2,700 UK people did their tax returns on Christmas day in 2019, with over 30,000 doing them over the Christmas holiday period in 2019), this requires companies to resource supporting users when they need it not when you are open. 

Business to consumer SaaS models need to support consumers with planned engagement and support channels as well as developing SaaS loyalty strategies in place to retain and develop customer segments. For B2B SaaS models working across partner channels puts a set of different requirements in place in accessing target audiences through integrated service offerings through integrated software .

SaaS behaviours also require business to measure very different metrics to be successful,  many of which are new to companies not used to SaaS solutions, but if you do not measure them SaaS will fail to deliver the results you expect.  Here are some of the key areas for SaaS businesses to monitor and drive decision making from.

SaaS Solutions: Being a Disrupter

Disrupting any market requires your SaaS offering to target and penetrate precise target segments and disrupt the existing market.  Focus on measuring the disruption your new offering is causing. Are you reaching your core target audience with your new offering and taking customers from the competition, or protecting your vulnerable customers with you new offering. Disruption is about changing people’s perception and behaviour patterns. So it is important to measure the existing behaviours and their new behaviours using the SaaS solution. 

Just shifting your existing customers online maybe a strong defensive strategy if your are the last to move into SaaS, but that is not a disrupter. To disrupt a market you have to do something which changes the game. Changes the structure, the dynamics and the value proposition within the target audience. 

SaaS solutions MUST do MORE than just Match Your Off line Offering

SaaS solution need to offer more to customers within their sector. Providing a genuine value-added solution must be designed and built into the SaaS solution. Either at the start or as a planned upgrading rollout plan. If your Minimum Product Viability (MPV) assessment provides compelling evidence of the potential to move online, just migrating offline to online business activities will not succeed. SaaS businesses must find, connect and engage with customers in a completely different way than their offline equivalents, even if they are the same customer base being migrated across by the company. That customer experience must reflect the culture and value which the audiences has and wants to experience for it to be successful. SO SaaS businesses must actively drive engagement, create direct and indirect communities, offer advice and support and actively monitor audience segments value experiences to enable SaaS to add real value to target segments. 

Building more into a SaaS solution can be undertaken at low (or no cost) if planned in at the design stage. `Good forward thinking strategically thought out SaaS solutions can design in actual and anticipated customer needs at low or no cost. Building into the SaaS platform forward evolution so that they can evolve in response to customer evolving and emerging demand, overcome competition short-term and long-term responses and to life-time evolution needs.

Being able to add in and evolve a SaaS solution to a complete solution is essential so it offers a complete long-term solution, not just a quick fix. That requires several micro launches, (evolutions) to meet theses needs and to enable the SaaS solution to add more value (value proposition). 

Measuring why, where and who is using the site for what as well as forums and associated features will tell you the full value you could, should and must offer. Often support functions such as help desks, brochures, technical information, upgrading options and associated activities are always areas where doing more can be seen, but only if you measure them! What about training and certification of users and channel partners, and the whole range of other activities which these intranet offerings can also provide?

SaaS Success: Target the Right Segments.       

Moving to SaaS is not a straight line. Build it and then just sit back and watch customers come onboard, is how SaaS is sold to CEO’s in shifting their business to a SaaS solution. But that is not how SaaS adoption works. Adoption curves matter. So identifying who, why and when segments will move over to a SaaS offering is vital for success. Being able to anticipate and plan around customer acquisition by customer target segment must be planned out and executed in dissectible phases.

One major challenge is that the key drivers of a SaaS solution within an organisation may well come from specific user segment(s) within an organisation. Identifying the pain points within a target audience is therefore vital. Who will adopt your technology when is an important element in designing your market entry strategy.

Saas Adoption Curve Modelling

Who are the core target segments that SaaS solution should be targeted at?  This central question is often lost in the generic answer everyone! But it is not. SaaS solutions must add value to everyone, but they must be focused on converting target businesses strategic target audience. That focus must be at the heart of the SaaS solution design and implementation, if you win more great but your focus is to move the brand’s customer base. 

For success SaaS solution moves the brand’s position, its profitability and its performance by acquiring new higher value customers. Higher value customers in both B2B and B2C environments for mainstream players are usually found higher up the adoption stream. So laggards find growth in volume and value in the late majority (see below for market adoption curve and total market size modelling). Late majority players can already win downstream laggards but need to expand by either growing with their sector or by moving into early majority customer segments, and likewise early majority customers look at high value (but smaller total volume) early adopters. 

Adoption Curve and Total Market Segmentation

The key measurements here are to identify the precise target segments you intend to win, and measure that  as your metrics of success. Do not just measure total customers as this can inflate your SaaS success. While measuring total numbers always looks good. It may not be profitable growth and can often lead to SaaS platforms being pulled into chasing total numbers not focusing on developing profitable long-term customers. This is typically seen when a new SaaS platform has to buy its customer growth, so people see the growth as success, but it can be burning through their cash reserves as they have focused on the wrong metrics. 

Profitable target customers support growth of a SaaS solution. This must be measured to see if the strategic goal is being achieved. 

SaaS Strategic Pricing Models

For a SaaS business to succeed it needs to get its pricing right, there is no bigger strategic decision to take. There are several ways to price your SaaS solution which we can break down into 6 key models and a couple of common variants. Choosing your pricing model will reflect the market you are in, your strategic business objective, the nature of the solution you’re providing and the designed rollout of your SaaS value proposition solution you are offering.

1. SaaS Flat Rate Pricing

The most common and simple, often replacing a previous non-SaaS solution. It is simple and effective, easy to use price to incentives by allowing target audiences to compare the value proposition. The difficulty in this model is that it is difficult to add value to target audiences, such as high-use or high-value customers.

Some SaaS pricing models then try to add premium models to this, by adding a second solution to enable extra features and pricing to the offering, but this often creates technical challenges and is difficult to migrate customers across to. 

2. SaaS Usage Based Pricing 

Usage based pricing is popular and provides an ideal way to price your SaaS solution. It enables pricing scaling, the more your company use, the more you value you consume, the more you pay. It allows low cost acquisition and then scale-up in pricing towards target audiences. Ideal for B2B solutions, usage based pricing works well as disrupter within a business service sector.

This also enables additional levels to be added and funded through growth as usage drives demand.  Usage based pricing also reduces and often removes barrier to entry as the SaaS platform accounts for a wide-range of customer segments, from new entrants through to high demand heavy user groups. 

Usage based pricing does have some limitations. The moving up levels (and down) can be challenging for customers to see what they get for the price they pay. The key area of concern for a SaaS Solution using this model is that monthly revenue, a key metric will vary and is therefore not popular within the sector as predictable revenue is often a core demand for investors.   

3. SaaS Multiple Tiered Pricing Models

One of the most effective models as it allows the SaaS platform to be priced to target audiences using tiered pricing. Tailoring different packages around target audiences enables the SaaS platform you can appeal to multiple audiences. This has a key secondary advantage in revenue generation as you maximise revenue across all channels to market. It also allows simple clear and honest upselling opportunities as well as add-on pricing with new features/levels being added in response to changing demands. 

Key factors to be be aware of here is having too many pricing levels. Just because you can does not mean you should. 3 is optimum and 5 is often seen as maximum, the more you add the higher the abandonment rates and the lower the effective of marketing campaigns. 

The idea of dynamic pricing, too many tiers leads towards a platform that looks like usage pricing which dilutes and degrades the tiered pricing focus on key target segments, vital for strategic success of a SaaS solution. The other downsides of too many packages is that trying to over target segments damages the focus on the tiered model, confusing customers through too many choices and damaging price effectiveness by not reflecting tiered pricing to deal with heavy use customer groups.   

4a. SaaS User Pricing

The fourth pricing model moves away form company wide pricing to the end user. This model is ideal for many sectors where simple pricing wins customers over. Wether that is a fixed annual or monthly fee, its simplicity and logic engages with SaaS platforms whose offering of a direct pricing model allows customers to sign-up as individuals. 

User pricing is popular as it is predictable in income and scales easily with numbers. This predictability makes it popular but needs to be internally measured by usage by individuals to see what value they generate from the platform. 

While simplicity makes it popular it is also its major limitation as a pricing model. Per user charges means that there is little opportunity to get group buy-in as one person can use the platform and share the results. The inability to signup whole teams as one limits routes to market through channel partners. It also means that churn becomes a major factor as it is harder to control churn as people relate use to value as an individual.    

4b. SaaS Active User Pricing

Is a variant of of user pricing but works by charging for people actually using the SaaS platform. It is seen as excellent value for money as it removes risk for purchasers as sign-up does not cost. This drives engagement and adoption as it is only usage which is charged.  People can sign-up but do not pay until they actually use the platform, it is ideal for enterprise business models. 

The downside of active user pricing is that it is difficult to grow outside specialist enterprise areas. Often premium priced as a live service it is difficult to encourage widespread adoption with teams or across sectors. For example accounting software is great in the finance department but off limited value elsewhere in a business.

5. SaaS Per Feature Pricing

A more recently developed and currently popular variation on the user based pricing model theme is called per feature pricing. Customers of businesses pay a subscription fee, a base fee with limited functionality which achieves MPV and adds real value and then differing premium priced add-on features which either replace the need for multiple upgrade options or allow a SaaS solution to adapt with its own specialist feature cost model expansion. 

This model encourages customers to upgrade to unlock additional functionality which allows segment specialisation and directly relates those functions to direct costs. Think about gaming models where users buy the core game but then trade up by buying additional features. This per feature pricing model allows sites to know their operating cost models and revenues of the base model, and enables cost scaling for bespoke areas that may take significant resources to develop. Sub-segmentation by feature is popular as it allows cost to value to be direct and then reverse rolled back into the SaaS site as it evolves as a cost-free upgrade.   

The key challenges of cost per feature pricing is that SaaS solutions can be pulled by small segments away from their core model to meet these minority groups. The other challenge of per feature pricing is that of customer frustration as key features are at a premium.  

6. SaaS Freemium Pricing

Saving one of the most popular and misunderstood to last is the freemium model. This model allows customers limited functionality the SaaS solution platform for free. This enables mass adoption through any market of the SaaS platform with a clear level of functionality which buys users in. It is ideal for large volume platforms such as social media channels as the model removes the key hurdle to volume customer acquisition. 

Freemium  gets customers bought in for nothing as there are no barriers to entry and this supports rapid expansion through and across channels, but it does limit value adding at the freemium level. Encouraging customers to trade up and use the additional chargeable features is teh real challenge  

Predicated revenue planning is the real looser here for companies. This makes it less popular with funding parties (and accounts departments) as conversion to revenue is undefined within this model.  To fund freemium SaaS models multiple funding systems are often adopted, such as smart algorithm advertising which is an ideal way to fund expansion.    

With freemium sites high churn rates and low loyalty rates are major drain factors to this model, both of which make traction and the ability to encourage customers to upgrade difficult. Funding to support the core functionality is often under pressure to keep it developing and engaging with the volume of its core customer base. 

Summary: Successful SaaS Strategy Business Looks Like Today

SaaS solutions are now mainstream to nearly all business and customer segments. Being mainstream though does not mean that the risks have disappeared, in many ways they have increased as expectations have accelerated as audiences demands have risen.  

Whichever SaaS pricing model you adopt understand that they all come with risks which need to be understood and actively managed within your planning.  

SaaS solutions must be part of a strategic process for leaders to understand and deal with. One area that many leaders do not fully appreciate is that building an experienced SaaS team around them is a prerequisite for success.    

Learn more read further blogs or get in touch to see how I can assist you.

Learn more at www.richardgourlay.com

Director Mentoring 6 Great Reasons to Be Mentored by Richard Gourlay

by Richard GourlayDumfries and Galloway, Innovation, opportunity, start-up advice, Strategy, UncategorizedPosted on Comments are Disabled

Richard Gourlay Director Mentoring

Being focused and clear on where you are going is vital as a director. Clarity of direction with a clear focus with your business puts leaders in control of their business.  Being in control ultimately ensures leaders are successful. But taking control is one of the biggest issues leaders face. Knowing where to start, and even how to start making positive changes to your business can be a real challenge.

Leaders Mentoring Needs

Successful directors must be able to create and make change happen. Making change is essential to make their company able to meet demands and expectations of its customers. So leaders must become change makers within their organisation to make it and keep it successful. Knowing how and when to make what changes is the many skills which leaders need to develop.  Being able to see the need, communicate it and deliver change is a major skillset senior people need to develop.  Leaders have to be able to move outside their existing comfort zone in taking people through change..  

Successful change makes a real bottom-line difference to your business success. But to go through change is often painful and difficult. This is where an experienced mentor makes a real difference.

A good mentor is someone who has not only been through change several times, but someone who also has seen it across multiple markets and with different types of people. A good mentor gets to know you as a person and gets to understand the real challenges the mentees are facing.  That’s why leaders find mentors who support them achieve their goals.  Richard Gourlay has been mentoring leaders for over thirty years. 

 

The difference between Telling Mentoring and Coaching

Mentoring is the process which supports leaders develop their skills by working with them in developing the mentees skills. Mentoring is a specific set of development skills where a mentor shares their knowledge, skills and/or experience, to help another to develop and grow. 

To see how mentoring sits between telling and coaching, see the graphic below. Mentoring is more effective than telling as it enables leaders to develop their skills through their real-life experiences. By talking through situations leaders learn and develop their skills, rather than being told what to do. Coaching on the other hand walks people through situations and provides guidance on specific issues. The greta advantage of mentoring is therefore that the mentee learns how to deal with business challenges  rather than being coached through situations. Why mentoring works for leaders by Richard GourlayAbout Richard Gourlay Mentor

Over the last 30 years I’ve worked with hundreds of business owners. Working with micro-businesses through to international PLC’s and I’ve identified that there are some key common factors that successful leaders do which ensure their success, while other business owners struggle to keep their heads above water. What I’ve learnt is that there are simple and logical steps that successful people undertake. These steps which make that something different in what they do delivers real results in taking the guess work out of their business success. This is the basis of effective mentoring. 

I’ve spent years refining those key steps into a programmes of business mentoring for senior people. My mentoring programmes  support personal growth. Mentoring creates bite-size action planning that develop people in their role. My director mentoring programmes enable people to develop their personal and professional skills. We develop key outcomes into sessions which develop a clear programme of development. Each programme starts by identifying mentees core strengths and areas to work on. This is then developed into a bespoke plan of what they need to do differently to be even more successful in their role. 

My Director mentoring programme

Taking the guesswork out our business success requires people making simple steps over time.  Mentoring support is usually a monthly process of development.  Each step is small and measured, typically spread over a monthly. People are held to account to make the change they want to see. By making each step happen leaders grow themselves and their team as their confidence and competence grows. Our bespoke programmes enable business owners to work ON their business effectively rather than just spending more time IN their business.

Below are some of the key things to consider in taking the guess work out of your business success:-

1. Mentoring: Know What to Work ON

Knowing what you need to focus on makes a huge difference in where to invest your energy and resources. I’m a huge fan of the leadership culture of working ON it not IN it.  If you are not working ON your business then how is it going to improve?  It is the leader who must make the business stronger.

How will you, or your business be ready and able to face tomorrow’s challenges without making change happen?  But you need to know what is important to work on within your business, and why!   That’s where mentoring supports you grown and develop as a leader. 

2. Directors: Why you are working ON your business

The only certainty in business is Change. Today that has never been truer. The pace of change in every market has, is, and will change at an ever faster rate. Changing market conditions, to customer demands, through to employee expectations have all created additional extra pressures on leaders to respond quicker. Accelerated changes within the business environment require leaders to adapt quicker and more effectively.

How should you respond to those changes?  Fast enough and effectively enough to take full advantage of those changes, without loosing site of where you are going and why. If making change is a challenge or if you have ever wondered how to make positive changes, then my mentoring programme will enable you to understand why and how to make change happen. Working on your business is the most valuable actively any leader can undertake and  puts you in the driving seat of your business.

3. Director Mentoring: Where to Grow

Every business owner wants to grow turnover, profitability or customer base, but how is the important question. Where is tomorrow’s growth coming from and how can you access it effectively and efficiently? This step-by-step mentoring programme will show you where growth is going to come from and how you can effectively access it.

What is good profitable growth rather than just growth. An important distinction which leaders need to recognise that all growth is not good.

4. How to Make Change Happen

Doing what we’ve always done is the natural default behaviour that people fall back into despite best intentions. Change does not happen unless you make change happen. Mentoring, working with an external advisor is an effective way to develop yourself offline from your existing line management structure. Being able to discuss personal skills development with an external mentor allows people a “safe space” to bounce ideas around, share frustrations and concerns enables people to think through making change happen.  

Change is always easy to talk about, but harder to actually deliver. Change is always necessary to achieve success. This step-by-step mentoring programme enables you to create the right changes, which deliver the right results for success. Every step involves a single simple activity which is supported by a template in a workbook to create your success.

 

5. Director mentoring Reduce the Risks

Taking your business from where it is today to where you want it to be tomorrow is essential to keep your business competitive and successful. But change involves taking risk, but there is an even bigger risk in not making change. Director mentoring programmes reduce these risks by evaluating and balancing the risk factors effectively.  Each step is focused around making sensible pro-active decisions which have been tried and tested.   

Being mentored by an experienced independent director allows you to talk through ideas and thoughts with a neutral advisor . An experienced mentor provides a sounding board for director decision making and will challenge your assumptions prior to you making a decision. This reduces risk and allows a director to talk through scenarios and likely consequences. This puts risk reduction and mitigation in place to manage and overcome those risks.  Being mentored therefore provides confidence and certainty in decision-making. 

Richard Gourlay is an approved MentorsMe mentor, click link to see Richard Gourlay MentorsMe 

 

6. Director Mentoring Effective Way to Grow 

Taking the risk out of your business success is all about taking small, simple but highly effective steps. Steps, sometimes small, but always forward move the business in the direction you want it to go.  I have designed personalised mentoring programmes to fit every type of person and business by size and sector and at every stage of its development.

Short bite size learning, on face to face or remote sessions support leaders lead successfully. I design a mentoring format with clear models (including  templates) suitable to each leaders specific needs. I then bespoke design it to enable you to achieve your success. Supporting your personalised mentoring programme are emails to help support you undertake each step and keep you on track. 

So if you want to take the guesswork out of your business success? Then this effective mentoring programme is specifically designed for business owners from start-ups to established businesses owners to take the guess work out of your business success.  Our mentoring programmes are a combination of online and face-2-face, depending upon your needs and location.

So get started today, make the first step and contact Richard Gourlay today to start your mentoring journey, just fill in the form below. 

Great brand by Richard Gourlay leadership and strategy

What makes a great BRAND

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business mission, Business Values, Dumfries and Galloway, opportunity, Strategy, Uncategorized, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled

What makes a great BRAND?

Despite what marketing people passionately believe most people don’t think about brands, they just get on with their lives. The coffee they buy, the supermarket they go to and petrol station they visit happen almost by accident. In Britain today we are too busy to think through these everyday inconsequential purchases, focused on saving time, not forgetting something or rushing from place to place on a tight deadline. So do brands matter as much as they used to and if so why and how?  Brands matter where consumers can value them.  In today’s wealthy world every product or service perceives itself as a brand, even if it is just a label. So what makes a great brand?

Consumer Choice 

Let’s start with the basics, the consumer has choices. Endless choices if they choose to use them. But in many everyday cases as in my examples above, the consumer sacrifices those choices for simple expedience. The inability to see (or value) brand differentiation, between Starbucks and Costa, between Tesco and Morrisons between BP and Shell, and yet they each fight for space in consumers minds through tiny differences which if we stop and think about do actually exist and we the consumer do actively value.

So much more than First Impressions 

So in today’s Britain, what is important about a brand? Is it the halo effect, the first impression, like the smile on the front of a car or is it something more, something deeper and more tangible? Ask the owners of Sunny D (the 90’s orange juice lookalike) and you will find that the halo effect does not last if your brand is not true to itself and to its consumers. Customers have to believe in a brand, it must tell the truth, be transparent and honest if it is to be successful. Gerald Ratner (former MD of Ratners the jewellers who said about his products “because it’s total crap”) also found out that in today’s world everyone must truly believe in the brand, not just the marketing department but the whole company has to believe it and most importantly practice the brands beliefs.

Clear Brand Strategy 

Being clear and precise is also important in the company’s messages for a brand to succeed, a strong undiluted brand message must enthuse internally but must also consistently connect with customers through touch points, look at Innocent, Dorset Cereals or Apple as classic examples of touch point. They also demonstrate a clear story delivered with passion about who they are what they do and why they matter. This focused and consistent message is not just a marketing message but an ingrained set of values which consumers buy into with passion. These brands not only position themselves as premium players in their fields and earn more but they also continuously find new ways to spread their key messages to customers, they have a clear brand strategy to achieve it.

Everyone Lives the Brand

Another vital aspect of any brand success is that the people within that brand demonstrate what they preach, they live that lifestyle, support that brand and contribute to its success. It is their lifestyle, it is a part of the way they and their brand do business.

Great brands go beyond the brand to understand its real value to existing customers but also to tomorrow’s customers.  Whether it is a family run local shop or a global supermarket chain great brands position themselves so they develop and hold a market position to develop long-term success.

Vision and Purpose

Great brands create, sustain and evangelise a culture which supports and drives their brand. Creating a culture which underpins an organisations vision and purpose is a key prerequisite for ensuring sustainability of a great brand. Sustainability of a vision can only be achieved if the organisation is supported by an underlying culture which fits with the brands ethos.

Great brands can only transpose from the innovative visionary founder if they create a supportive culture to sustain the brand. An effective and appropriate culture is one which supports the brand and ensures it is can sustain its market position over time.  Great brands sustain themselves through a great culture.

The culture of a brand, otherwise seen as the handwriting of the organisation, enables sustainability of the brand over time. Culture today matters from how people work together through to acquisition of appropriate talent. The right people are drawn to a brand they aspire to be part. Business partners focus on brands with likeminded cultures andante to be part of a great brand. In the exact same way customers aspire to be associated with a great brand.

Great Brands are not Labels

Great brands drive markets. By challenging them through innovation and changing perceptions. Labels on the other hand feed off brands by picking of successful innovations for downstream ‘me too’ market following customers. Great brands invest high proportions of their resources in driving markets forward, through innovative products and services. Great brands are seen to out invest other players more double the the market average.

Creating innovative pipeline cultures thinking long-term make positions rather than short-term tactical single product successes. Labels focus on creating  market winning season products, they act as followers often being low-cost alternatives to the brand leaders in any sector.  Brands focus on the longterm innovation which shift the paradigm of relationship with the customer through the brand.

Great Brands Add Value

Great brands also develop their own uniqueness, not just the product or service but the whole package is how we do it around here. There needs to be not only consistency but the brand hand writing and value on how they do it. The best brands always develop singular simple signals for customers, cutting through jargon to create clarity without patronisation.

For brands to succeed in today’s global markets these golden rules have never been more important as consumers have never had so much information, but if you follow these simple rules of brand success you can develop and maintain a great brand.

Looking for Advice  

If you want to develop your company’s brand and are looking for some advice on developing your company, its marketing, its sustainable competitive advantage then contact us at Cowden  to see how we can assist you, or read more about us in this blog or at Cowden

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Cowden Consulting is a strategic planning and implementation business which works in partnership with customers to grow and develop their business, contact us to learn more.

Posted 1st December 2011 by Richard Gourlay

Location: Old Glenstocken, Colvend, Stewarty of Kirkcudbright, Galloway

Labels: brand brand identity brand strategy brand strength branding business success marketing strategy strategic direction strategy sustainable companies values vision

SaaS Business make you own path by Richard Gourlay

How Steve Jobs changed the World

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Values, Dumfries and Galloway, Innovation, opportunity, StrategyPosted on Comments are Disabled

Strategy: How Steve Jobs changes teh world by Richard Gourlay

Apple’s founder and talisman, Steve Jobs has finally had to step down from running the world’s most successful company.  It is probably overdue that the world recognises this brilliant strategist who changed the world.  Here’s how Steve Jobs changed the world.

Had Steve Jobs just set-up Apple he would have gone down in history as a great inventor.  But to have done it twice over with the same company, while in the process creating the world’s biggest company, surely makes him the greatest ever.  Possibly his most important contribution was that he created markets and then the best products possible for those new markets.  Steve Jobs understood that the technology needed to work for customers, rather than expect people to work the technology.   

A Brilliant Visionary

As a brilliant businessman and strategist, he more importantly created world class products and ran the company that delivered those products to market. Most superb inventors just invent, and most great directors’ focus on leading. To do both simultaneously to such a high standard is an outstanding achievement.

Steve Jobs is so unusual because he understands that great technology does not sell itself. That to have great technology you have to be passionate not only about what you produce, but also about the world in which your products exist.

Steve Jobs a brief history

  • 1976 started Apple with Stephen Wozniak to make and sell printed circuit boards
  • 1978 launched  a new disc drive which made the money to invest in whole computers
  • Launched the revolutionary Macintosh computer in 1984
  • Ousted from Apple in 1985 and returned after creating NeXT in 1996 which Apple bought
  • Created Pixar with $5 billion in box-office sales, sold for $7.4 to Disney in 1996
  • Created the i-generation with more to come such as iCloud and entering the TV market

While to many who did not understand his holistic strategy, they looked for and saw flaws. They tried to stab the ego and even removed him from his own company (to play safe with what he had produced as a single new product).  He played the long game recognising that the world would not be changed overnight. This was his strategic master-stoke.  He got the timing right by understanding the big picture and knowing when to strike.

A Difficult Man To Work With

He has been described by those who have worked with him as wilful, irascible, temperamental and stubborn, to name a few.  But can anyone do so much without at least those characteristics to change the world?  Other words, which people often use to describe him, include perfectionist, insistent and mesmerising. These words are the ones which the world will remember for. These drove him and describe how he has achieved such global success.

As a manager he had difficult dealings with many people at all levels, from investors and employees.  Management and human relationships was not Steve Jobs’ forte. These difficulties made him human. They were simple human failings which showed he was not perfect, but not issues which limited his vision or aspirations.

Steve Jobs Stanford Address

In his Stanford addresss (click here to see it here) in 2005 he explained what made him, drove him and continued to motivate him to become the person he was. This address is one of the few times he spoke of the huge success for which the world will remember him for.

Steve Jobs changed the world.

He saw a world revolution in technology before anyone else, and saw how he could drive that change. Great strategic thinking not only thinking about change, but also the impact of that change will have. That’s what makes him simply the best. Other owners and directors were working on improving their share price, or becoming number one with their new product. Focusing on the today, this month’s or this years priorities, not on changing the world. Steve Jobs looked beyond the single product to look at the whole picture of what a new world might look like.

Steve Jobs drove Apple to rethink the world and in doing so became its biggest player. His line in recruiting John Sculley from Pepsi “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world”. This sums up his strategic brilliance.

Steve Jobs Visionary

Evidence of this brilliant approach comes throughout his career. From using Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire music to launch the Macintosh, through to his unforgettable iPod launch where with a huge back screen shot he casually produced it from the back pocket of his jeans! Steve Jobs has learnt how to successfully engage with audiences. Every product is meticulously planned with product lined up to two years in advance, with innovative marketing from start to finish.

Moving From Technology to Retail

From a business which started out a just selling technology, it is now seen as having the best retail environment. That retail environment created places people actually want to visit.  Apple shops where the focus is on excellence, not on pedalling technology cheaper than the next retailer.

Steve Jobs has always had an eye for detail. His artistic flare turned geeky boxes into works of art. Steve want on a calligraphy course which led him to have a non standard font, Apple Garamond created rather than traditional New Roman Times font. Something he goaded Microsoft about at a high school speech some years later. That attention to detail is what demonstrated his perfectionist approach and left the competitors looking and feeling like they were in the dark ages.

Think Different Campaign

Apple’s “Think different” strategy has worked so well since 1997 because it touched people who felt there was no alternative to Bill Gates’ Microsoft monopoly of software. Think Different also drove change for both the 50,000 Apple employees and allowing his strategy to infect and spread globally.  It was not only technical people who bought into Macs but a whole new generation of users, who found that there was a credible alternative that did more than just be a glorified typewriter.

While Apple was never one man.  Steve Jobs legacy will be difficult to estimate for many years to come as the world’s most successful businessman. The old adage, it is not what one has done that counts but what one leaves to grow, that is the measure of a man’s success. It will take time for the world to see his true legacy, but the following puts some numbers behind this success.

Since Steve Jobs comeback in 1997 Apple has sold:-

  • 26 million iPhones
  • 60 million computers 
  • 200 million iPods
  • 1 billion iTunes songs   

Apple is currently valued at $356 billion ($2 Billion ahead of Exxon). Making it the largest company in the world. Last quarter alone Apple profits more than doubled to $7.3 billion. Sales rose by 82% to $28.6 billion by selling 20 million iPhones, 9 million iPads, 8 million iPods and 4 million Mac computers.

Steve Jobs announcement of his retirement wiped $17 billion *(5%) from its market share. But over his leadership he has increased its share value by 9000% since 1997.

Leadership Development by Richard Gourlay

Great LEADERSHIP starts with your VISION

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business mission, Business Values, Dumfries and Galloway, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled

Great LEADERSHIP starts with your VISION 

Having a Vision for your business is the most important leadership trait for a successful leader to have. For leaders to lead they must have a strategic vision for their business. A clear future state they want to achieve. One which provides not only an optimum place within their market they want to be; but one which inspires, motivates and drives the organisation to achieve. Heres is why Great leadership starts with your vision.

Great leaders may be charismatic, they may even be likeable, but for them to be successful they must be able to communicate and inspire others through their vision. A vision is a future place within tomorrow’s market.

Leadership Vision

Leader’s must create a vision which is not only aspirational for themselves but motivational for the all stakeholders.

A recent survey of 1,439 chief executives and senior HR people from 707 organizations across the globe, found that the outstanding trait of successful leadership is the ability to create and communicate a VISION.

This is the single most important characteristic for success.  Amongst those interviewed a clear vision scored an impressive 92% amongst such high level people in business. This demonstrates just how important a characteristic this is in creating a successful leader.

Vision to make change in business by Richard Gourlay in this article: Great LEADERSHIP starts with your VISION

 

“Without a clear vision no leader can succeed today in business”

Creating a VISION

Creating a vision is not easy. Leaders are busy people fighting to keep their business on track, dealing with day-to-day issues and making decisions based upon facts and figures. That last point is therefore a real challenge for leaders in developing a vision. This is because there are no facts and figures about the future. The future, by definition is unknown. Instead leaders must rely upon a range of forecasting tools, from gut feel or by benchmarking agianst others, to develop their vision of what the future might look like.

Each of these options in forecasting the future are fraught with danger and risk. Both in terms of making decisions based upon inaccurate perceptions or the damage to their credibility as a leader. Following others through benchmarking is always the safest option for leaders. But this limits leaders to be a follower within any market sector, rather than to lead it from the front in their sector.

Great Leadership deals with Change

For leaders to lead, they must be able to deal with change. Change happens in-perceivably until it is obvious. Every day we grow older but it is only when we look back we see how we have aged. The same is true for a business in any market. Even when change is driven by disruptive new entrants, the change that enables new players to enter a market is caused by subtle sometimes in-perceptivable changes within a market. Change is everything and is happening all the time.  Subtle innocuous and minor alterations in a market can become future key drivers of change which create new opportunities are areas which leaders need to keep aware of and proactively respond too.

Change is the only constant in any business. The market is always moving either through Macro market factors or through Micro market factors. Good leaders need to be continually scanning and monitoring both and assessing likely positive and negative  impacts upon their business, their customers and their channels to market and value perceptions of their brand.

Great LEADERSHIP starts with your VISION using McKinsey7-S-Model to assess a company structure for leaders by Richard Gourlay

Challenges for Leaders Vision

Failing to validate and then alter a business model to reflect changes in the market towards the delivery of a vision. This is the single biggest single reason chief executives fail to succeed. 

Leaders have to carry people with them for their vision to be live. Poor communication skills are at the heart of why visions and therefore leaders fail to succeed. Leaders must be able to create, verbalise and rationalise to others their vision to generate buy-in and carry their senior people with them. Being able to visualise their vision and communicate it to a wide range of stakeholders often stalls or causes failure in strategy delivery.

For a vision to succeed leaders have to build relationships. This starts in developing trust in their future and develop a team culture all working towards that vision. The inability for leaders to invest in developing their vision often results in the lack of trust and development within the senior team.  This failure to develop leadership soft skills, is a major area leaders must invest in to improve their effectiveness as a leader.

Leadership is both Science and Art

Leadership is a balance between science and art. Creating a vision is often seen as an art, but for a vision to connect with senior stakeholders visions require a scientific rationale. It is the old adage we buy with the heart and justify with our head. A solid vision is both a visual message but one backed up with both direct and indirect evidence of that future state in which the leader’s vision sits. A successful vision pulls people together through shred valued values across the organisation what creates and sustains those values.

Great Leadership requires Communication Skills

The importance of being financial and operationally literate to the CEO role is always seen as core leadership skills. These hard skills are often key drivers of leadership assessment. Which is why so many CEO’s come from finance and operations leadership backgrounds. Today these competencies are seen as important for any CEO role.

In todays’ business environment CEO’s are being selected based upon having a demonstrated track record of delivering strategic vision. The ability to inspire others through delivering a strategic vision is now being seen as the most important track record for successful leadership.

Succession Planning 

The importance of succession and smooth transition is becoming more important element for successful leadership. Companies today are investing time and effort in succession planning. Well planned succession planning ensures long-term shareholder value and the ability of avoiding the football management culture of overnight change. Poor leadership choice often leads to cultural conflict and short-term reactionary thinking leads to rapid and unsustainable change. Both these mentalities damage the long-term sustainability of a successful business.  The leadership teams ability to develop successors who are able to support and follow through a vision is becoming an integral part of the CEO role.

Business leaders all recognise that talent management plans, including succession management have become essential for sustained performance in today’s organisations.

If you want to develop your company’s position then there needs to be a clear vision for it. Vitally answering the questions where it is going and why? If your are looking for some advice on developing your company, its marketing, its sustainable competitive advantage then contact us at Cowden.  Let us see how we can assist you, or read more about us in this blog or at Cowden.

Or learn how to plan your business successfully see our video to learn more:-  http://www.richardgourlay.com

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Strategy The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay

Cowden is a strategic planning and implementation business which enables customers to grow and develop their business.

What Matters In Business For Successful Start-Ups?

by Richard GourlayBusiness mission, Dumfries and Galloway, Innovation, opportunity, start-up advice, Strategy, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled

What makes a successful company in a market? Is probably the single biggest question a new start-up team must be able to answer. What factors make a successful business has always been a difficult question to answer. So what matters In business for successful start-ups?

The answer has always depended upon who is asking the question!

Unicorn Start-Ups

Dreamers look for unicorns with unique protectable offerings, such as Intellectual Protectable rights, a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).  These dreamers will invest in big step start-ups, market disrupters which will change the markets they wish to operate within. Step changing start-ups such as unicorns (are rare hence the name unicorn), but can reshape markets towards these start-ups. Think about Apple and Amazon and what they have done to the markets they operate within. Today these two are the largest (by value) companies in the world today.  

Unicorns need a unique angle, a technical platform angle, a defendable IP, or a unique (and defendable) operating platform. Even small start-ups can be unicorns if they can identify and control a unique position. Inside Apple’s early technologies was the British made ARM microchip, which propelled it into be a unicorn.  But unicorns are rare, and their window to get established is getting shorter and shorter as competitor awareness and responsiveness is constantly quickening.


Funding Start-Ups 

Traditional funders, such as banks want high returns with low risks, and owners who will take all the risk directly, or being prepared to 100% underwrite the banks so called investment.  Banks do not like, or take risks, which is uncertainty.  Which is why they avoid taking them, unsecured risks are not what banks generally do. So they may support a start-up with a loan based upon a sensible fully costed and robust business plan. 

Banks, who are most start-ups first point of call, often provide a poor place for people to start a conversation with about a business start-up. Start-ups looking for financial support, ideas and how to get a business start-up off the ground often left disappointed by the support which they receive.   

The risk reduction by definition reduces opportunity; in essence if you remove all the risk you also remove all the opportunity a start-up can achieve.  Start-ups often overstate their growth, understate competitor defensive activity and the challenges in getting established. Often start-ups can find better funding through self-funding options, alongside friends and family as stage one seed funding.  It is always best to start small, prove your concept and then go out to market for stage 2 funding with a proven pilot under your belt.  

Start-Up Entrepreneurs Solve Customers Problems

Entrepreneurs genuinely look at solving an emerging problem, the old adage is:-

“The secret of success is to find a need and fill it, to find a hurt and heal it, to find somebody with a problem and offer to help solve it.” – Robert H. Schuller

While the logical approach of bankers is to ride an existing market wave, true entrepreneurs look to create the wave. They are looking at a problem and identifying the ideal innovative solution for that problem’s resolution.

 

Researching Successful Businesses

So what makes a successful business model includes a whole variety of factors including the core idea, the experienced team, the market opportunity, market access, competition, scalability (the list goes on and on, depending upon who you are talking with) and what resonates with key stakeholders and target audiences.

Recently Bill Gross, CEO of Idealab decided to research this using his extensive range of business start-ups; 100 of his own, and matched by another 100, across a whole range of sectors.  His assessment started by analysing what makes successful businesses. He came across 5 key common factors and he cross-referenced those compared to businesses which have succeeded.

Bill Cross’s 5 keys for a successful business include:-

  1. The Idea: defined and coherent.
  2. The Team:  skills, experience, energy and how well connected.
  3. The Business Model:  comprehensive worked through covering the business need.
  4. The Funding – access to the right amount of money to achieve its core goals.
  5. The Timing – identifying the market timing to meet target audience needs.

The research results contradicted what many thought would be the results across the 200 companies he and his team analysed. This survey included global names such as Airbnb, Youtube and LinkedIn amongst the 200. His analysis showed that of all the factors which can affect success or otherwise of a business, success really came down to these few key ones. They key factors which are common across all markets, sectors and over time  are the defining characteristics for a successful business. But of all the factors one stood out throughout the survey.

Success in Business Start-Ups Relies Upon…

Timing is THE common factor in a successful business at 42%. It is the most common trait of successful company start-ups.

Team came in 2nd, with 32% and the Idea only came 3rd in importance with 28%.  The business model, upon which so many advisors focus their attention was 4th at 24% and the funding came in 5th at 14%.

Timing Is Everything for Start-Ups

The quality fo the idea is not as important as timing. Timing, the driving strategic factor can be identified initially through a thorough PESTEL analysis. Timing is the bottomline performance criteria in driving the success factor for a business.  PESTEL factors set the macro landscape a business operates and defines the timing of its launch. If the landscape is favourable then a business can succeed. I not, then even if everything else looks great then your chances are far lower, than if you get your timing right.

This shift from build and they will come, the old motto of every good idea, qualifies that statement by saying if the time is right then if you build it they will come.

What Matters in Business for Start-Up Success is therefore Timing

If you look at all  successful business over time, then it is always timing that matters. Knowing what to do when really matters for leaders to focus on. The world is full of ideas launched at the wrong time. But get your timing right and the world is your oyster.

From the launch of the internet and the creation of Apple, to the development of low cost airplanes to the launch of low cost holidays, timing is everything. 

The Importance of Research for Start-Up Leadership Teams is Vital

Leadership teams need to focus on answering the question their target customers ask, now. Timing is offering the solution the their customers will pay for today, not waiting for it or putting up with second best. If you can answer their needs when they need it, with what they need, then you are on the first rung to find success. Without good timing you are creating products and services no-one (or not enough people want). Timing is equally important for leadership teams to assess if your product / service can be accessed by the target audience.

Successful companies work with their markets to get their timing right in launching products and services that fit within a market. They can challenge existing customers perceptions but they must be the right product at the right time for the right customer if a business is to succeed.

See Bill Gross, CEO of Idealab Ted talk here:-

https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed

Like to know how Richard Gourlay can support your business to succeed, then contact Richard here or below.

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Do you have a vision or are you just a dreamer?

by Richard GourlayBusiness Identity, Innovation, sheffield, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled
Vision statement by Brian Tracy

 

Do you have a vision or are you just a dreamer?

 

No matter how big or small your business is without a clear vision of where you are going owners and directors often fall into the classic trap of just managing from day-to-day.  Do you have a vision or are you just a dreamer? Is a simple question which I ask leaders, and for many it is just a work in progress, in their head. But every business needs great leadership, and for that they need to create a clear business vision, which will make and deliver long term leadership success.

 

Creating a vision of the Future

 

Leadership is about investing time to create a clear vision the future. Putting in the effort and resources to see into the future and imagine how things could be. This is as important for success as having real passion for the business today and the determination to create something new for the future.

 

These three personal qualities of leaders are vital for successful companies and a vision statement, sometimes called “a picture of your company in the future”, but it’s so much more than that.

 

Vision Statement

 

Your vision statement is your inspiration, the framework for all your strategic planning. A vision statement may apply to an entire company or to a single division within that company.

 

The vision statement answers the question, “Where do we want to go?” What you are doing when creating a vision statement is articulating your dreams and hopes for your business. It reminds you of what you are trying to build. A vision statement is for you and the other members of your company, not just for your customers or clients.

 

Visionary goals should be longer term and more challenging than strategic goals. Collins and Porras describe these lofty objectives as “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals.” These goals should be challenging enough so that people nearly gasp when they learn of them and realize the effort that will be required to reach them.

Most visionary statements fall into one of the following four categories:

 

  1. Targeted – quantitative or qualitative goals such as Nike: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world” “If you have a body, you are an athlete.”
  2. Common enemy – focused on overtaking a specific firm, becoming the number one in that sector, such as Amazon: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
  3. Role model – to become like another in a different industry or market, the mirror role, Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) “Right from the beginning, I said I wanted to be more famous than Persil Automatic”.
  4. Internal transformation – creating internal vision, GE set the goal of “Becoming number one or number two in every market it serves”

 

While visionary goals may require significant stretching to achieve, many visionary companies have succeeded in reaching them. Once such a goal is achieved, it needs to be replaced; otherwise, it is unlikely that the organization will continue to be successful. The second most dangerous place for a company is to have achieved its only goal, the most dangerous place is never to have had one.

 

Creating Your Business Vision

 

Simple steps to creating your vision, ask some simple questions:

 

  • What will our business look like in 3 to 5 years from now?
  • What new things do we intend to pursue and how?
  • What future customer needs do we want to satisfy?

 

Write the answers down and focus on developing them into a coherent, motivational and purposeful message which can connect with everyone.

 

Then Question Yourself To Answer:

 

  • Does our vision statement provide a powerful picture of what our business will look like in 3 to 5 years from now?
  • Is your vision statement a picture of your company’s future, which everyone can interpret into their role?
  • Does it clarify the business activities to pursue, the desired market position and capabilities you will need

 

If your statement answers these questions then you have a vision worth owning and sharing. A vision must be motivational to everyone inside an organisation.

 

DO you have a Vision?

 

The classic apocryphal story to demonstrate the effectiveness of great visions is about the time President Kennedy visited NASA. During one trip he came across a cleaner sweeping the warehouse floor, and asked him what his job at NASA was. The cleaner replied “My Job is to put a man on the moon, Sir.”

 

Now I don’t know if this story is true, but it’s inspiring. In a facility full of high-powered individuals and great minds, even the cleaner was completely on board with the strategy. While you may not be planning to put a person on the moon, we can learn a lot from the story. It may sound ridiculous, but every business needs to be a little like NASA.

 

A great VISION can create an unstoppable company

 

Every organisation needs to have a clear vision, owned by everyone inside and outside it. An owned and shared vision creates and sustains great morale and internal strength for companies, which can become a powerful and unstoppable force in any market no matter how competitive.

 

At Cowden we focus on ensuring companies can successfully compete in their chosen or desired market.

 

Like to learn more? Then get in touch with us at Cowden.

 

Or learn more about creating your vision and how to lead your organisation with a clear strategy, but my book: click this link or the book cover below 

 

Strategy The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay available from Amazon click this link

Business mission or just a dreamer in business by Richard Gourlay #Sheffield, #Chesterfield, UK

Are you on a MISSION or just a dreamer as a Business Leader?

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business mission, Business ValuesPosted on Comments are Disabled

One of the most important pieces of any good business plan is to define what you do and where you are going as a business. If you do not define what you do and where you are going then why should people work with you or for you? Defining your purpose as a business is the clearest statement of intent any director or owner of a business can make, and yet one of the most misunderstood and avoided pieces of any business plan. This is the mission statement which everyone in a company should be able to relate to and believe in.

Why is it avoided? In my experience directors are most often frightened of making a commitment of what they stand for so as not to alienate any existing or potential customers who may not fit the proposed mission statement. This contradiction, not wanting to say what the primary goal of a business or organisation is, means that many company’s try to be everything to everyone, ending up being meaningless to everyone.

Mission Failure

This failure to define a mission is also one of the biggest limitations companies and organizations have in creating clear blue water between them and other players in their market. It is why so many companies struggle to stand out and then expect someone in marketing to try to answer that question sometime later. Marketing does not define the purpose of any business or organization, they may influence it, but it takes leadership from the top for a mission statement to be successful.

Missions fail if they are not believed in by the employees and customers, or experienced in how an organisation looks to deliver its products and services. They are not just slogan on a wall or a website.

Mission Statement

A good mission statement is clear, unambiguous, engaging and relevant to all its key audiences: namely its leadership, senior management, employees, shareholders and customers. A mission and a vision (but more of that later) provides a central definition of what a business or organization delivers.

Creating a Successful Mission Statement

Here’s a quick-step guide to creating a mission statement.

  1. First identify your organization’s “strategic advantage” what makes you successful. This is the idea or approach that makes your organization stand out from its competitors; the reason that customers prefer you and not your competitors, what makes you unique, what are your core competencies?
  2. Secondly, identify the key measures of your success. Key success measures by which you can measure, Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), typically pick 3 to 5 headline measures of performance.
  3. Thirdly combine your strategic advantage and success measures (KPI’s) into tangible and measurable goal.
  4. Define the wording, using clear language, until you have a concise and precise statement of your mission, which expresses your ideas, measures, and desired result.
  5. Now communicate the mission statement effectively so everyone owns the mission statement within the company, make it public and ensure it is owned from the top with passion.

Communicating mission statements effectively to everyone is a defining piece of making the mission live. After all the hard work in having one so often they are filed away, or framed and stuck on the wall and forgotten. Instead successful Mission statements are launched to everyone and owned.

I’ve run embedding program within companies to ensure that everyone inside businesses and organizations “own” the Mission and build it into their everyday activity.

If you don’t follow through then all the effort is wasted and the opportunity is lost, so remember to focus on making your mission statement memorable and relevant. The leadership also needs to own the mission statement and make it live throughout the company.

A Mission Creates Focus and Loyalty

If you do this businesses and companies can achieve significant improvements which can include: building higher loyalty from staff, higher levels of customer service; improved stakeholder and channel support and lower costs for winning new higher value customers. These are just some examples of the benefits from having and using a mission statement successfully at the front end, one other major advantage is that you have a foundation upon which to build your business plan.

Good Luck: Want to develop your growth plan, use my business planning tool kit, click here to Take the guess work out of your business success   or click this link to learn how to greta your own business strategy:-

Strategy The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay

Mentoring using teh GROW model to mentor directors

A good business starts with the EXIT in mind, THINK EXIT

by Richard GourlayExit StrategyPosted on Comments are Disabled

Here’s a simple question to any business owner, why are you in business? The flippant answer I often hear is to make money.  An honest, if not inspiring answer.  But there is a fundamental flaw in that statement which many business owners fails to comprehend. They start a business, typically through experience in, or a passion for the field or because they have seen an opportunity to make money, but fail to achieve that ultimate goal because they fail to plan their end, their exit strategy. Thinking through your exit plan from your business should start when you plan your business on day 1, not wait until the end if you want to leave on your terms. Learn more about a good business starts with the exit in mind, THINK EXIT

Are you YOUR business?

If you can’t get out making the money you intended to when you sell up then why did you set up the business in the first place?  You have a great idea, you work on it, and spend your energy (and life) building your business until it becomes you.  It succeeds and you enjoy the lifestyle it brings.  Then the real challenge of maximising that income to free yourself up and retire or do something else begins.

That final stage often becomes impossible because you are the business and it is you, its lifeblood, main cheerleader and driving engine. To any potential buyer, they see that you are the business, its key asset and real value. This is why buy-out clauses often tie-in existing business owners so that the value that the former owner delivers can be transferred to the new owner. This is a typical scenario of being a successful business owner.

Business owners are driven by the passion to run the business day-to-day. This often overshadows the failure to plan the owner’s exit strategy from the start. To achieve that, owners must build a business with the clear objective to enable the owner to get out and maximising the sale value from what they have achieved. Nearly all business owners focus on building a successful business, but not on making sure they maximise their returns from the successful ownership of the business they exit.

Exit Strategy Planning

The real payback from all that hard work in creating and setting up a business for an entrepreneur is the final payback. It is in the shareholder value being realised by a sale of that business. Few owners think about realising their shareholder value, being more interested in the Profit & Loss than the Balance Sheet when making key decisions about the business.

That approach is effectively summarised in the phrase; the turnover is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is king. This great motto in the running of any business. But it does not hold true in achieving exit strategy success as a business owner.

Exit Strategy: think like a Shareholder

Achieving shareholder success is the only motto to follow if you want to have a saleable asset.  Owners need to focus on developing an exit strategy which achieves their personal goals.  While profit and cash rule the day, building a valuable asset requires building shareholder value, through building sustainable long-term profitability.

Success in business requires owners to build a business which you own but are not concreted into the business foundations. Building a forward strategy for your business is a vital first step in building your exit strategy.  It is the old adage that you need to work on your business not in your business for success. This great motto underpins successful entrepreneurs.

THINK EXIT is Long-Term Thinking

Short-term profitability is always an important goal. But long-term share value is a strategic consideration which owners need to consider in building the value of their business. SO a good business starts with the end in mind, THINK EXIT.

If you would like to discuss this article further or further information about our services in working with business owners in achieving  successful exit strategies then contact us at enquiries@cowdenconsulting.com or see our contact page for further options.

Like to learn more about creating and leading a business, with a successful exit strategy in place? Then click here to buy the book with all the tools you need to become a better leader: Strategy The Leader’s Role by Richard Gourlay

Read more “A good business starts with the EXIT in mind, THINK EXIT”

Leadership Development by Richard Gourlay

Business Success: Starts with the END in mind

by Richard GourlayExit Strategy, StrategyPosted on Comments are Disabled

Here’s a simple question to ask any business owner, why are you in business? The answer to such a simple question can be very enlightening. The flippant answer is to make money: an honest, if not inspiring answer; but there is a fundamental flaw in that statement which many business owners fails to comprehend. They start a business, typically through experience in, or a passion in the field or because they have seen an opportunity to make money, but fail to achieve that ultimate goal because they fail to plan their exit strategy.  Planning your exit strategy on day one of setting up upper business is the hidden key to business success. So remember that business success: starts with the END in mind.

Start with the END in Mind: Strategy

Most business owners focus solely on profitability as their key measure of success. Yet making a profit from a business is more than just yearly profitability. It is also about building a business which is an asset that your target buyer is looking to buy. If you can’t get out making the money you intended to when you sell up, then why did you set up the business in the first place?

You have a great idea, you work on it, and spend your energy (and life) building it until it becomes you.  It succeeds, and you enjoy the lifestyle it brings then the challenge of maximising that income to free yourself up and retire or do something else with your success.  That final stage often becomes impossible because you are the business and it is you, its lifeblood, main cheerleader and driving engine.

This typical scenario of being a business owner, is driven by the passion to run the business day-to-day overshadowing the failure to plan your exit strategy from the start. That is building a business with a clear objective to enable the owner to get out and maximising their income from what they have achieved. Nearly all business owners focus on building a successful business, but not on making sure they maximise their returns from the successful ownership of the business.

Business success starts with the END in mind by Richard Gourlay strategy planner for business owners

The END in mind

The real payback from all that hard work in creating and setting up a business for an entrepreneur is the final payback, the exit payoff.   It is the value creation in within the business, the shareholder value being realised by a sale of that business, which makes al the hard work worth it.  Few owners think about realising their shareholder value. Most being more interested in the Profit and Loss than the Balance Sheet when making key decisions about the business. That approach is effectively summarised in the phrase;

Turnover is vanity,

Profit is sanity but

Cash is king,

This great motto in the running of any business successfully. Cash flow is the lifeblood of business success. But, this does not hold true in achieving a successful exit strategy. Success as a business owner is not measured by turnover, profit margins or the mountain of cash your business generates, but what the business delivers back to those who own it. So I would add to that classic phrase;

true business success is the shareholder value it generates.

Achieving shareholder success is the key motto to follow if you want to have a saleable asset. Shareholder value reflects the true value of your business when you decide to sell up and move on.

Business Success

Business owners need to focus on developing an exit strategy from day one which will enable them to achieve their personal goals.  While profit and cash rule the day, building a valuable asset requires building shareholder value, through building sustainable long-term profitability. Building the business assets, the real shareholder value, needs to include strategies around Intellectual Property (IP), long term profitable contracts, strategic relationships and operational excellence that maximise the company’s value to targeted purchasers.

Successful Business Planning: Starts with the End in mind

Success in business requires owners to build a business which you own, but one you are not concreted into the foundations of its success. Building a forward strategy for your business is a vital first step in building your exit strategy, it is the old adage that you need to work on it not in it which underpins all successful entrepreneurs.  

Building the forward strategy to exit, is therefore different that just building a successful business. Planning from start to exit, means focusing on the exit strategy requirement of increasing shareholder value which is recognised as valuable assets by target buyer audiences.

Short-term profitability is always an important goal, but long-term share value is a strategic consideration which owners need to consider in building the value of their business. If you would like to discuss this article further or further information about our services in working with business owners in achieving  successful exit strategies then contact us at enquiries@cowdenconsulting.com or see our contact page for further options.

Business success in business supported by Richard Gourlay

WHY really matters in influencing consumers buying habits

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business Values, InnovationPosted on Comments are Disabled

WHY Customers’ BUY 

WHY really matters in influencing consumers buying habits in today markets. Back in the early 1980’s customers used to buy what companies made, went where they sold it ,and bought what they promoted.  That was the age of big marketing and sales budgets, when big adverts worked.  Driving demand through pushing products down channels, offering promotion and celebrity endorsement to generate business.

By the late 1980’s the age of the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) dominated: we are special because….. so you will buy’! So the world did as it was told: “we make what you want because we tell you want you want because we know about your needs”.  This relied upon trust in a brand by the public, which in a pre-internet world gave complete control to the brand and the consumer relied on marketing messages coming out.

People buy if they trust the brand they are buying from. In the 1980’s people trusted brands because no-one questioned them. A lack of information coupled with a belief in household names meant that people’s buying decisions were based upon a limited width of information upon which all buying decisions were made.

Today the world has changed. The sources of information have increased dramatically. The transparency required by companies is now at a level of how the organisation operates. Every aspect of what and how a company operates is under total scrutiny from a whole range of pressure and interest groups. Every aspect of ever action is recorded, analysed and evaluated. Business leaders today live in a totally transparent world, and the measures of trust are now very different.

Trust, the intangible combination of character and competence which all successful brands must develop and sustain is mad cup of a whole series of complex elements.  The importance of ethics in today’s business is an essential characteristic which purchasers expect their brand to portray in envy aspect of its behaviour. That makes it a key priority for leaders’ to focus on within their role.

Honest is Essential in WHY Consumers Buy.

Ethics came play such an important element of purchase decisions at the same time as the age of information changed what people could find out about a brand. As the internet began its infancy, the power of globalisation was laid bare by the internet. People asked as much about how companies did things as well as what those products did for the buyer?

Where products were sourced, made, shipped and by whom now became important. Why were the premium footballs, such as those which David Beckham kicked, being made by blind children in India for a few rupees. Why were the clothes models wore being made in sweat shops where workers earned less than for a dollar a day? Honest is now essential not just in how a brand portrays itself but in its complete supply chain, marketing activity and in its contribution to the world it operates within.

A Business Cannot Hide its Activities

The internet changed how the media could communicate, explaining how household names operated and could afford those huge marketing budgets. This forced companies to change their practises (and their internal policies) by educating and fighting back against the likes of Naomi Wolfs’ No Logo expose for example.  The brands who recognised that they could no longer hide their activities became more open and honest and developed trust, while those which did not, suffered public shaming and demise.

How business operated mattered, and so in response companies upped their awareness of their social impact and visibility through corporate social responsibility. How people did things mattered not just when the likes of Bhopal and Exxon Valdez disasters struck, but in everyday life.

Fair-trade has become a household name in consumer goods, with high street stores vying for credibility of having an ethical policy, supporting local goods and having transparent policies of how they operate. This gives more confidence but leaves companies open to further scrutiny and often to unsatisfactory answers to vital key questions, not at least within developing countries, who are now the fastest growing emerging markets for many brands.

Ethically; WHY should I buy from you?

The biggest question which consumers and business now asks people is why businesses are doing these things.  Everyone has become so empowered with information sources that people want to buy the WHY, not the what. Buyers want to understand the ethics of the company and importantly the people behind the decisions it takes. Customers want to know that these decisions accurately reflect the real cultural and values that company has, not just the marketing hype, which the brand portrays. Today this is the real power of the internet.

What’s the real purpose of the company, who and what is driving it and what does it really believe in and stand for. No longer is a small donation to a local charity enough to say it supports the community, customers want to know how much, who gets involved, is it company wide and deep or just a year-end tax saving. In today’s world the importance of ethics in today’s business cannot be understated for leaders to focus upon in their role.

Ethical Values Being Lived

In fact the world has changed completely, confidence comes not from what you say but why you are saying it. The educated and informed world means that it’s not just politicians who have seen their reputation tarnished but any business in any sector who does not explain it why factor.

It’s not just whistle blowers who expose mal-practice in today’s world, everyone is communicating through so many channels, from traditional word of mouth, through social media and beyond into a connected world, where reputations must be transparent. As everyone’s voice matters, being ethically transparent, open and honest is now essential if a brand is to be trusted.

Winning Life-Long Customers Requires Integrity

Winning customers is no longer all leaders have to focus on. Finding talented staff, channels partners and customers is now a multifaceted challenge for leaders to deal with. Ethical short-cuts damage brands reputation and those damaging allegations now stick, and become magnified to stakeholders as statements are now online, like a bad trip advisor review, it never goes. A tarnished reputation is exactly that.

No matter what sector you are in, understanding the  power of the internet in sustaining your reputation is essential and never more so than in explaining why you are in business and why you matter. The importance of ethics in today’s business has never been so important to establish and maintain.

So does WHY still matter. YES more than every before in a global world honesty, transparency and integrity matter in building and retaining trust with consumers more than every before.

Like to learn more, then contact us at Cowden or see our website or social media channels for more about Cowden Consulting:-

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Cowden services: business planning, strategic planning, business development, strategic marketing, Return on Investment, director development, director mentoring.

Cowden works with business leaders throughout the UK to improve their business.

Successful Leaders Plan Their Business

by Richard GourlayBusiness mission, Business Values, Dumfries and Galloway, Exit Strategy, opportunity, Strategy, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled

Business Planning

Business planning often gets a bad press.  Yet those who do sit down and plan their business are so much more focused, confident, and successful than those who float along with the economic tide. Successful leaders plan their business, so they can focus on leading their team to deliver their plan. Over the past ten years as a strategic planner we’ve worked with hundreds of business owners and seen how those that create a plan and implement it. Those that plan their business do so much better than those owners who try aimlessly lead their business on a wing, a prayer or a dream.  Successful leader’s plan their business, so that everyone knows where they are going what their role is in achieving that success. The way forward in business, clear vision and direction supported by a supportive culture and a clear business plan According the latest BERR report, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME’s) together accounted for 99.9 per cent of all enterprises, 59.8 per cent of private sector employment and 49.0 per cent of private sector turnover. SME’s really do matter to the British economy, and yet they receive little effective support from Government agencies despite being the backbone of the economy, employment, and innovation.

Why Business Leader’s Don’t Plan

“If you don’t make things happen, things will happen to you” Lanes Company Having questioned business owners over the last decade the reasons why owners have not put a plan in place and then executed it, the excuses range from not having the skills, make the time, or have the conviction of their thoughts. Owners know they should have a plan ‘we had one when we first started, but have not looked at it since’ is a common theme. The other is being too busy fire fighting to realise that preventing fires starting, is the best way to not have to fight them. Do business owners not see the value in developing a plan for their business? On the other hand, is the classic perception for business owners that frenetically staying alive is seen as being successful? For many not knowing how to plan is one major reason why people haven’t and don’t plan their business.  Where to start, and how to know what they are trying to achieve immediately puts people of planning.
Faults in Business Planning
Business planning is also often at fault here.  The most common reason new start up businesses create a business plan is to secure funding from banks, that’s when banks did fund business start-ups (now they just offer a high interest mortgage backed by the Government). Therefore, once people have received funding they no longer see the main advantages of planning (and the real advantages are not around money).

Business planning by Richard Gourlay creates a clear path and direction for your business.

Business Planning Skills – Have some GOALS

“The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.” – Lee Iacocca Planning takes time, resources, (grey stuff) not the executive trip to some exotic away weekend planning, but some time allocated to review where you are as a business, how your sector and industry are performing and what you want to achieve in the future. Whether it is looking at the next year or planning the next five years, everyone who owns or directs a business is responsible for setting its direction. However, just having a plan in your head, with the classic defence of ‘its flexible at the moment’ is either ducking the responsibility or deluding themselves. The only way to have a plan rather than a dream is to have it written down, turned (if it is not already) into an action plan which is resourced and owned by someone to deliver. Only then do businesses go forward in a deliberate purposeful way. Only then do the right things happen because you made them happen and only then can everyone, employees, shareholders, customers, channel partners and even other halves, see your dream, share your dream, deliver your dream. That’s when planning works. It is a written document, which lives within your company, and it doesn’t matter if you are a one-man (woman) band or running a multi-national Plc.

What Business Planning Delivers

A clear business plan is the result of a process. It starts with thinking, then writing it down. That commitment itself is a sense-check, it creates a reality and makes the writer accountable for their thoughts. By writing down your business plan a leader takes a dream and begins to make it a reality. Others can see, critically evaluate, and judge the business idea and review the opportunity the plan intends to address. By doing this a business idea is viewed in the round, looking not only at the idea, but the actuality of what needs ot happen across all busienss area functions to turn the idea into reality.
“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” – Robert Heinlein
business planning, business plan, the elements of a business model Planning provides focus in strategic direction.  It provides clarity of where the business is and where it is going as well as a vehicle for getting from where you are to where you want to be. Planning time out of the business provides time to reflect on personal and corporate goals, time to share and channel new ideas while reviewing existing activities. Planning in a structured and open format develops clarity of purpose and a clear understanding of the organisational and individual skills people have and can use to leverage advantage. Bringing in outside views widens the planning horizon, a fresh perspective to drive businesses forward. This is why many successful businesses use non-executive directors or outside specialists to help drive their business forward. That is one reason why so many people volunteer to get support from people like the Dragons from Dragon’s Den, they are looking for expertise and advice which gives them confidence to go forward as much as the money.
Plan More For Success
British business owners need to plan more often to keep being successful. Good planning creates and sees opportunities as owners and directors lift their heads up from the daily grindstone. How often should you plan? Well it all depends on the speed of your market’s evolution, but even stable and stagnant businesses should review their business every year, and not just a light dusting (add ten percent and change the year) but strategically review what and how well they are doing. It is only by looking for fresh opportunities and how to take best advantage of them, by planning your business around those opportunities, that companies successfully compete in today’s business environment.

Business Planning is not a four letter word

“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage” Jack Welch

The old adage, compete or get beat, is more relevant today than it has ever been. The rise of the Internet means there are no secrets, competitive advantage lies with those who can see an opportunity and adapt fastest to take advantage of it. Those owners and directors who see and go for opportunities become the stronger ones.  That is where good strategic business planning provides it real advantage. That’s why successful leaders plan their business to achieve that success. By orientating a company to where it can retain better, win new and develop existing customers companies that plan their success out compete in their sector, and equally importantly have everyone focused on where they are going. From the smallest to the biggest every business needs to have a plan that is written down, owned and guiding your business in the direction you want it to go. Good Luck
Richard Gourlay
@richardgourlay www.cowdenconsulting.com

Do YOU have a Plan for Growth?

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business mission, competitive advantage, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled

Do you have a plan for GROWTH? 

 
Leadership is most often identified as someone with a clear vision to grow their organisation. Having a plan for growth within your business is often seen as someone on a mission. With a clear vision of where you want to be within your market. By definition, that means looking for and focusing on growth.  All leaders must focus on looking for growth and development of their organisation if leadership is going to be seen as successful. But many leaders do not have a plan for growth within their organisation. So do you have a plan for growth?
 

Do you have a plan for growth? By Richard Gourlay leadership consultant. Leaders need a plan for growth

Do you have a clear vision of where you are going to take your business?  From understanding the market and its direction to where your business needs to be within those sectors, to profit from the growth within the market.  Leaders need to be strategically aware of their market if they are to find and focus on growth within their organisation.
 
Leaders must also redesign their organisation so that it can take advantage of growth opportunities, redesigning how a business operates to increase turnover and / or profits is at the heart of ensuring a leadership team has plan for growth.  Revitalising the sales and marketing operations is at the heart of acquiring more clients and developing improved relationship structures with customers and channel partners.
 
With a plan for growth leadership teams can reduce the amount of down time and focus their efforts on driving your business forward, with a clear vision of where you are going and why.  Successful businesses develop strategic plans to move their business forward, to grow and succeed, while being in control.
 
The first role af any owner or director is to have a plan, from star-up onwards (not for the banks) but for you to own and deliver. That plan needs to be kept alive, fresh and driven to focus on success and succeeding.
 
 

GROWTH needs a Strategy! 

A strategy is a researched approach by the leadership team, supported by a detailed plan of continual action steps to get the organisation to where you want it to be. The reason strategies are so vital is they keep things moving, and in business, if you are not going forward, you’re going backwards, and that can happen very fast.  So, if you want your business to be successful and/or pay you more, having a strategy that focuses on growth is a must!
 
If you have no formal strategy to take your business to the next level you need to refocus your priorities right now to create growth, here’s the first stage of a growth strategy framework:
 

Create a clear vision of what you want to achieve:

There’s an old saying that you can’t hit a target you can’t see. Well your vision is your target. Your vision needs to be very clear in terms of what you want from your business, by turnover, profit, customer type or all three? What’s your ideal position in that market, do you want to be known as the premier supplier of your product or service, or a low cost or niche player?
 
What about your personal goals to support your lifestyle?  You need to be very clear about what you want and what you don’t want. Have a clear focus that will keep you aligned with your long term goal for you and your business. Make your vision aspirational, where do you want your business to be within the net 3 to 5 years? What will it look like and what will the business feel like to be part of?
 

Looking for Growth

Starting with a clear vision for growth within a business is the simplest and most powerful way a leader can motivate everyone. Growth is about understanding the drivers of growth within your business sector.  Knowing where a market is going requires leaders to step out of the day-to-day operational detail and focusing on the drivers of your market.
 
Growth is fundamental to a successful company. Finding growth does not mean just looking for growth in turnover, growth in profitability is by far the most valuable growth any leader can find. Growth can also be found in winning new market entrants; cross selling penetration to existing customers; launching  innovative products and services or premium pricing of scarce products.  Other profitable ways to grow your business include driving demand of premium and unique products, where your business has or can create a competitive advantage.
 
Like to learn more about creating growth for your business, then get in touch with us through the links below.
 
Cowden provides Strategic Planning Workshops which enable owners to create their vision of what they want to achieve. Our SPW faciliated workshops provide the opportunity for owners to work on their business not in their business. To learn more about Strategic Planning Workshops (SPW’s) or contact us by clicking Cowden to discuss your needs, or go to our website www.cowdenconsulting.com to learn more about us.
 
Like to learn how to find growth for your business? Then why not buy the book on how to build your successful business strategy, with the step-by-step guide on how to build your own business strategy, click the book below to buy now.
 
Learn more click here to read more about Richard Gourlay 
 

Strategy The Leaders Role, by Richard Gourlay 

Like to learn how to build your own strategy: then get the book with step-by-step guild to build your own business strategy, click the link below.
strategy, leadership and vision in business by Steve Jobs

Values matter in BUSINESS more than ever

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business mission, Business Values, competitive advantage, Dumfries and Galloway, Marketing, Strategy, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled

Values in Business must be transparent

Business leaders face many challenges, some immediate and others which are not so obvious but can be far more dramatic to business success.  In today’s business world the way you provide your product or service and to whom, says more about you than how much business you do.  How you do your business now determines your current credibility and future success. Credibility is as much about your values in becoming successful as about the success you have. Values in BUSINESS must be transparent and lived by everyone inside the organisation.

Values matter in business like never before, by Richard Gourlay leadership consultant

For longterm success your values as an organisation as demonstrated by everyone inside your organisation matter to both existing, and potential customers, in choosing to do future business with your ad your brand. People have choices and they can now exercise them more freely than ever before, that means customers can access information instantly and make choices that are more informed. Examples such as Ikea’s staff misinforming undercover Times reporters about their sustainable and certified sourced products at a number of shops are one symptom of Ikea’s rapid growth and its underlying boardroom culture, allowing the core values to erode and trust in its reputation suffer. The damage to brand reputation from such as activities such as “greenwashing” create longterm brand damage as brands jump on popularity wagons.

Values Must Live in the Moment

Almost everything in life is in today’s world is in real-time and instantly communicated to circles of ever increasing influence and far beyond. A restaurant having  bad night can have a poor reputation before the starter has even been cleared away, as customers post live feed back to sites such as Qype or Trip Advisor. Therefore, before the waiter, maitre d’ or chef knows what’s happening the world outside, potential customers already do, through instant social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, and are cancelling their reservations in droves. Live experiences matter when they happen not in the apology afterwards.
Leadership teams must ensure that their business values are being lived ever day in what is called real time. The real experiences customers face every moment are the living touch points of a brand experience.  Asking employees to make decisions and to own the decisions they make is vital for  brand to live in the moment, but they have to be supported by the leadership team and not criticised for making the calls they make. If the call they make is in the best intentions to support the customer but is outside the experience you wanted to give the customer then that is not the employees fault it is leadership teams in designing the experience.

Why clean lavatories matter?

The old adage that if you want to know how clean the restaurant kitchen is, inspect the lavatories! This is because they tell you how the restaurant values cleanliness, is a great example of modern customer awareness of living values. Do you live your values or just post them on your website? Is the question customers want to know in establishing and experiencing trust with you, and your brand.
Seeing under the skin of a brand, or behind the marketing facade a brand promotes is now easy due to transparency in legislation, global media sources and a digital world. There are few places to hide as a brand in what and how they undertake their operations. From sweat shop labour, to brown paper envelopes down to paying influencers there are no places to hide, that’s why clean lavatories matter to customers.

Rail companies learning fast

A recent story of the man on the train talking too loudly causing enraged customers to Tweet complaints about his behaviour which was picked up by a duty manager hundreds of miles away who then contacted train’s conductor to track down the loud caller and asked him to quieted down.
This story is very much testimony to the growing demands of customer expectations, immediate online response, not waiting for passing train staff to react. This story is part of the reputation shift that train companies are actively pursuing to listen and understand customer’s real needs and expectations.
Values in Business must be owned and lived from the top.
The values that a business lives really matter to customers and to the brand reputation. Values are not bland statements in brochures, websites or company walls, but living attributes in how people behave (even when no-one is looking). Values start at the top, and must be owned, lived and driven by the leadership of an organisation. It is no-one else’s responsibility but the leadership’s to ensure they establish, spread and re-enforce those values throughout their people.
Learn more about strategy and how to build yours in your business, click here or on the book below.
Strategy The Leader's Role By Richard Gourlay
Strategy: The Leader’s Role by Richard Gourlay
Richard Gourlay strategic leadership consultant

What Makes a Great Brand (Part 2)

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business mission, Business Values, Marketing, StrategyPosted on Comments are Disabled

A Clear Brand Strategy

 
In what makes a great brand (part 2, click here to read part 1 if you missed it), we will look at what makes great brands’ stand out from others.
 
Being clear and precise is vitally important in the company’s messages for a brand to succeed. A strong undiluted brand message must enthuse internally but must also consistently connect with customers through all touch points. For great examples look at Innocent, Dorset Cereals or Apple as classic examples of touch point engagement. They also demonstrate a clear story delivered with passion about who they are what they do and why they matter.
 
This focused and consistent message is not just a marketing message but an ingrained set of values which consumers buy into with passion. These brands not only position themselves as premium players in their fields and earn more but they also continuously find new ways to spread their key messages to customers, they have a clear brand strategy to achieve it.
 
 

Everyone Must Live The Brand

 
Another vital aspect of any brand success is that the people within that brand demonstrate what they preach.  They live that lifestyle, support the values and aspirations associated with a brand and contribute to its success. It is their lifestyle, it is a part of the way they and their brand do business. This is something I learned at my first full time job at the then privately owned outdoor clothing brand Berghaus. Everyone lived and loved the brand. 
 
Great brands go beyond the logo, to understand its real value to existing customers and also to tomorrow’s customers.  Whether it is a family run local shop or a global supermarket chain, great brands position themselves so they develop and hold a market position to develop long-term success.
 
What makes a great brand part 2 Business success in business supported by Richard Gourlay
 

 

Great Brands Create Uniqueness

 
Great brands also develop their own uniqueness. Not just in the product or service but the whole package in how they do business. There needs to be not only consistency but the brand hand writing and value on how they do it. The best brands always develop singular simple signals for customers, cutting through jargon to create clarity without patronisation their audiences. That strategy creates and supports a strong company culture, which the leadership team must then sustain. Successful leadership teams revitalise that culture by refreshing their vision to focus on where they are taking their organisation.
 
Vision to make change n business by Richard Gourlay
 
For brands to succeed in today’s global markets then these golden rules have never been more important to businesses, as consumers have never had so much information, but if you follow these simple rules of brand success you can develop and maintain a great business.
 

Looking for Advice ?

 
If you want to develop your company’s brand and are looking for some advice on developing your company, its marketing, its sustainable competitive advantage then contact us at Cowden  to see how we can assist you, or read more about us in this blog or at @richardgourlay or contact Richard Gourlay
 
Taking strategic action to improve your business startup success

Where Does Tomorrow’s Business Growth Come From?

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business mission, Business Values, competitive advantage, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled

Business growth is not an accident. Why some businesses succeed and others do not is not by chance. Business growth requires leadership to plan out where they are going within there market.  All markets change through both evolution and revolution (think of those disruptive players in any market and the impact they have).  This slideshow explains why it is important for leadership to use business planning tools to effectively plan their growth. So where does tomorrow’s business growth come from?

Tomorrow’s Business Growth

In every market there is always new opportunities always arising. Markets do not go up (or down) equally. Some segments and individual customers grow faster than others due to their strategic or tactical successes. Knowing where external and or internal market factors are influencing or driving segments within any market is the vital strategic insight which leadership teams need to understand.  Even markets declining do not do so at equal rates. Change happens in every market so knowing where to look for positive changes within any market is a key skill for leaders to learn.

Growth and development of every market happens at different rates, in different parts of markets around the world. Looking out and at tomorrow is a vital element for leaders to undertake as part of their role.

Leadership is About Looking for Growth

Being successful in business is all about seeing the bigger picture and understanding future growth. For a business to grow and develop, the leadership team must invest time building it. That requires the leadership to step back from the day-to-day operations of the business and focus on working on the business. Like to learn more, click the slide presentation below to learn successful leaders work on their business to find growth.

If leaders aren’t looking for growth and the development of their business within the market then they need to develop these skills for success. The slideshow below will show you more or get in touch with Cowden today to discuss your business needs today, click here.

Where does tomorrow’s growth come from by Richard Gourlay Leadership must think strategically if it is to be successful in growing its business. If you want to develop your strategic thinking then why not start by reading my step-by-step guide on how to think strategically.
Strategy The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay
Leadership Development by Richard Gourlay

Strategic Planning Workshop is the model for successful Business Planning

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, business planning, Business Values, Dumfries and Galloway, Exit Strategy, Innovation, start-up advice, Strategy, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled

Strategic planning is the process of defining your business’s key priorities as a business. Successful business’s have clear priorities which their business as a whole unit focuses on to achieve. Each of these key priorities are defined within a business as a strategy. A strategy, a course of action which will deliver a pre-determined business goal. For leaders undertaking a Strategic Planning Workshop is the model for successful business planning, putting leaders in the driving seat of their business.

Successful business planning is about developing your strategic plan for your business based upon proven business development tools. The Strategic Planning Workshop pulls these together into a single process. This process takes the guesswork out of your business success.

Maximising Opportunity: Reducing Risk

Taking the guess work out of your business success is a step-by-step process which develops business owners skills to strategically plan their business.  Good strategic planning enables businesses to take advantage of emerging markets, emerging trends, develop and launch new products. Strategic planning also enables companies to make structurally improvements to their business to improve its profitability, reduce costs and enhance productivity.

Strategic planning workshop is a proven method of developing and implementing success see www.cowdenconsulting.com.

Strategy: Leadership Skills

Strategic planning creates a clear direction for a business take. Working on your business, not just another day in it, crating a sense of direction, for the whole team to take. Working on your business, from developing your WHY (Simon Sinek, the power of why) through to creating a strong sense of purpose and direction. Where you are going and why is a powerful outcome from a s strategic planning workshop.

Secondly for leaders the ability to discuss their personals goals and ambitions in an environment which allows open discussion and development of those linked to their business is a real focus for personal leadership skill development.

The third leadership outcome from a  strategic planning workshop is the forward plan of where the business is going. That creating of a clear focus supported by detailed action plans moves the whole team forward as one.

Strategic Planning Workshop (Slideshare about Strategic Planning Workshop)

Click the link below to begin the slideshow to learn the fundamental skills and how to undertake a strategic planning workshop.

Strategic Planning Workshop from Richard Gourlay

Strategic Planning Workshop

Like to learn more about what a strategic planning workshop delivers to business owners in creating growth, focus and direction then get in touch  and learn more. Enquries@cowdenconsulting.com or contact Cowden Strategy.

Successful Leadership starts with a clear VISION

by Richard GourlayInnovation, Strategy, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled

Successful leadership starts with a clear vision.  A vision is a is a mental picture of what you want your business to be at some point in the future. It is a realistic aspiration. That vision gives the leader and leadership team a clear focus and a long-term direction they want to take their business towards. If communicated well to the whole business it creates a common direction and purpose which pulls tams together and drives them towards that vision.. So primarily leadership is all about creating, believing and communicating a clear VISION, and certainly (but not exclusively), because it stops a business heading in the wrong direction, that’s why successful leadership starts with a clear vision. 

Great leadership is about planning your business using business planning tools to match their ambitions to the opportunities in their market. Without a vision, businesses often fall into short-term annual plan, rather than long-term sustainable entities.

Clear Vision

Successful business owners step back to work on their business not in their business. Looking at where they are going and why. A vision is an essential element in a leaders toolkit. It creates a purpose and must be communicated with all stakeholders and employees effectively. It is about being more than just a product or turnover. A good vision must combine not only an aspiration but elude to the values of the business.

Clarity is a powerful skill for any leader to possess. Clarity of purpose and direction creates not only certainty but also enables a wide range of stakeholders to be able to focus their personal objectives towards the leaders vision. Clarity is not simplicity, but quite the opposite in leadership. Being able to create a simplicity from complexity is the art leadership brings to a complex rapidly changing world.  A good leader simplifies problems down through having a clear vision of where they want to go and can explain the why they are doing it in a few clear and effective messages.   

Leaders Vision Must Identify Growth

A leaders vision is about todays business in tomorrows market. It is about demonstrating that they know where they are taking the business and its people within the emerging market within which they wish to compete. Identifying growth is at the heart of why leaders create a vision for their business. The market will look like this, due to these macro factors and that will create opportunities for us within these cohorts to which we have core competencies to deliver real value to existing or new customers. 

Growth is vital for all companies in every sector. That can be organic natural growth in pure numbers, or growth through cross / upsell as well as growth from diversification or acquisition as markets grow, evolve or mature. Growth can be through transformation of the business into a new entity as markets evolve and develop or the introduction of new products and service offerings. Growth is a wide ranging topic but at the core of all leaders role is looking for defining and developing plans to win that growth.   

Leadership Skills

Good visions also aspire to where the business will provide value to customers in the future. What are the opportunities within your market and sector over the next few years. Business Planning is a process of assessing options using tried and tested business planning tools, which provide robust and accurate options for business owners to grow their business successful.

For leaders to develop those skills they need to learn how to be strategic in their thinking which is why leaders often use 3rd parties to support them through a Strategic Planning Workshop.   

Leadership is all about VISION by Richard Gourlay

 
Strategy The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay

The way forward in business, clear vision and direction supported by a supportive culture and a clear business plan, by Richard Gourlay

Content Strategy: The future of marketing

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, competitive advantage, content strategy marketing, Innovation, Marketing, opportunity, StrategyPosted on Comments are Disabled

In a world of continual change seeing what is happening is often difficult to understand until the paradigm shift has occurred. Many companies are struggling to stay ahead or even in the game of online marketing. Many companies are moving towards online marketing content strategy or as marketing people call it inbound marketing. This major shift in culture and one needs to be fully understood. The importance of content as a strategy is the future of marketing.

Content Matters

I have just had an old-fashioned marketing communication from a well-known brand, asking me to make an immediate purchase offering me a FREE upgrade for a new phone. My automatic response is not to be interested, at all because they have not demonstrated that they understand my specific needs. That made me thinks and write this article to explain why in today’s online world that old marketing technique is now as un-effective as a double glazing salesman offering me 50% off! 

Content Strategy: It’s a complete shift not just an add-on

In a world where everyone is online all the time, the amount of information is drowning people, from Linkedin to Facebook and Twitter the rise of smart phone connectivity has promised much change to marketing but until recently only early adopters, high value and niche players could see what it meant to the marketing process.
Like many changes, it is not until the change becomes tangible does its impact become visual to many marketing departments that enables them to successfully influence a company’s marketing policy. This is considerably harder to convey when there is no tangible evidence of marketing results attributable to hard to track invisible marketing shift. Unlike the shift to direct marketing where direct connectivity between outcome and result can be seen through a transparent return on investment, online inbound marketing is struggling to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Content Marketing: Pace of change is outstripping current understanding

Currently content marketing relies heavily upon invisible and poorly understood online activities. Simply put, the rate of change is outstripping the knowledge base of the marketing industry, creating a gap between the understandings of marketing by decision makers. The routes causes of this is that not only are customers sourcing information in newer ways but the platform they are using, the Internet indexing is also changing ever faster, Goggle will make over 600 changes to way it scores content. Rapidly changing customer preferences, coupled with changing technologies and an ever changing platform results in the lack of certainty of what is working and why. By the time you’ve worked out what works it has already changed.
Content Strategy can create confusion.   
Content strategy marketing process, one that now focuses on creating online and open platform engagement, online PULL; rather than internally controlled PUSH marketing methods, traditional marketers often struggle to understand the process let alone feel uncomfortable with the concept. This is not unreasonable, given the history of marketing in the last 50 years has always focused on the traditional pipeline of generating and then controlling customer decision-making, content marketing turns that on its head. People investing in inbound marketing are asked to spend money on losing control of the potential customer by letting them make an open decision about how and when they engage with your brand.
In the mid 1990’s I remember designing a website to support a brand. No one was interested until it was live and people could see something online. A director then said, “That’s great let’s print it off and send it to all our customers”    

Dialogue NOT monologue

The inbound marketing process is about generating an open dialogue, rather than a structured marketing process. It lets potentials, prospects and suspects move in and out of your control while they select you, rather than being controlled by you.
The Content Strategy Process
  1. Listening – Online is now the first port of call for 78% of web users.
  2. Creating – Great content that answers need and demonstrates expertise.
  3. Engaging – Is about being talked about and developing a dialogue with audiences
  4. Transforming – Is about continual engagement, moving them from suspects to purchasers
  5. Growing – Requires creating perpetual momentum developing new and developing loyalty
Traditional marketing models of developing engagement such as AIDA are still highly valid but instead of just focusing on a immediate winning proposition through a grabbing hook, attach a liner and sink them in a simple linear model for winning customers. Content strategy marketing demands  multiple engagement tools which include cross referencing other parties creating competitive collaborative working to generate awareness, giving away FREE content in white papers coupled with fast and slow acquisition tools in decision making.
Content strategy needs to be explained better
Moving to a content strategy is about moving from PUSH to PULL, not about the Internet platform, it is about understanding the importance of open unrestricted dialogue rather than material generation and in reality it is not just about the Internet although this is where its impact is being seen today, but equally will encompass every marketing platform and process. The growth of mobile technology will further the pace and realisation of content strategy.
Like to know how we can help you, then get in touch, just click this link
Leadership in business is a challenge we can help with.

Have you felt the full power of the Internet Tsunami Yet?

by Richard GourlayBusiness Identity, competitive advantage, content strategy marketing, Innovation, Marketing, opportunity, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled
Has the world moved for you, or did you miss it? The world of business has shifted but many businesses don’t seem to have noticed the great shift in power away from companies to the customer. The internet is not a fixed service, it is growing and evolving rapidly and with it so are the tools and uses it delivers. What was once a way to replace your Yellow Pages has become the most powerful source of information the world has ever seen.  Have you felt the full power of the internet tsunami yet?
We all see the impact of the Internet in every market sector.  We see the growth of online shopping or the growth of smart phones and the online move of insurance and music online.  That shift and the corresponding growths of new consumers are just beginning to be understood, this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The next stage of the internet revolution has yet to be felt.

The Great Paradigm Shift: Internet Tsunami

As our understanding of this shifting paradigm slowly emerges and evolves.  It takes time for its impact to be fully understood and its impacts to be really appreciated. In the same way as the impact of the introduction of domestic electricity which subsequently facilitated the introduction of the radio, which spread communication did in previous generations. So the rise in power of the Internet is more than just our ability to look stuff up and buy consumer goods online.
This paradigm shift has certain key features, which makes the rise of the Internet generation far more dramatic in its impact to business today.
Unlike many previous innovations, the move online has been done in an infinitely scalable way.  Making markets financially accessible to company’s of any size and dimension using low cost everyday technology. The whole plethora of internet software platforms provide total engagement opportunities for businesses to reach specialist or global markets. Rather than being a premium service only open to the super rich, such as the introduction of the car, airline or a global consumer product range. A good idea, service or product can now be provided through the internet instantly. The availability of multiple open software technology platforms, has lowered cost and created universal access by braking down barriers across all areas of a global market.

The Internet is a Global Movement

This global shift, supported by governments and industry to reach and penetrate all and every strata of society and on an almost global reach is a new global phenomenon creating a universal shift.
Whether in New Guinea or Newfoundland, you can get a 3G signal.  Many countries like India and China just leapfrogged the copper wire landline systems of the 20th century through large parts of their country’s moving straight into the 21st century, avoiding unnecessary cost and rapidly accelerating progress throughout their country.  The Arab spring was not achieved by any three letter acronym news agency or Rupert Murdock’s media empire, but by new young mobile online generation who created, sustained and drove the rolling revolutions.

The POWER of the Internet Tsunami

The result of the internet revolution is that the world has made a huge step forward almost overnight.  That has changed more than just the way we buy some products, it has in fact changed the way we think, and act.  This universal overnight movement has also solved the adoption dilemma for new technology.  For companies to achieve a launch of a new product or service they had to achieve a critical volume and this can now be achieved without geographic boundaries.  The internet creates multiple new routes to market, bypassing traditional routes to market, achieving profit without having to invest huge amounts of capital in awareness marketing.
The sign you've been looking for that values matter in business

Internet Empowered Intelligence

This paradigm shift has moved the way we think to such an extent that everything has changed. When in 1906 Admiral Sir John Fisher invented the Dreadnought battleship in 1906, he changed naval world overnight. At the time the Royal navy had 1,000 ships of the line, the introduction of the Dreadnought made them all redundant overnight. Suddenly, to be a superpower it was not the number of ships you had but how many Dreadnoughts you had and a new arms race had begun as every other battleship become redundant.
In the same way, the introduction of always available high speed broadband has made so much of business thinking redundant, not just in the collapse of use of directories such as yellow pages, dictionaries or our communication. Today people have empowered intelligence, the ability to become informed by scanning a QR code, or connecting to a highly rated source they can become more than informed, they can become actively empowered.

Internet Tsunami Continually Evolves 

The internet is now driving people to think and do things in different ways across many age and economic cohorts. Its not just the young buying music or consumers doing their shopping online, although both have delivered huge shifts in culture to these markets.  People’s first mental response to knowledge and decision making is now to click, look-up and become informed.
No-longer relying on our embedded historical mental heritage or through experts’ advice, people are now researching and networking their knowledge and our learning, widening knowledge and creating expert communities on almost every subject matter possible. For example to become an expert on social media you could do an online course or you could click onto Mashable and become an expert within hours. Anyone and everyone can become an expert, exposing consumer and business choice to new forces and opportunities.
You may have heard the old adage that there is more computer power in a simple watch today than on the Apollo 11 spacecraft which took man to the moon. People have at their finger tips more knowledge about companies than even the most informed company is aware off. Users groups, expert forums and review sites empower and drive decisions, in a far more effective way than traditional marketing channels can persuade customers.
In just in the same way that the Arctic Monkeys pioneered the music online community following, rather than through the plugging and playlist approval to get on the radio. Today the same today is true of consumer both in consumer and business markets.
The power of the internet is yet to be fully understood. For some it has been like a Tsunami, just as a record shop or an insurance salesman. To many others though it is an unseen force, they know its there but not what or how it operates and effects their business. But it is and it will. The sooner business wakes up to these changes the better placed they will be to compete without feeling they have one hand behind their back.
Vision to make change n business by Richard Gourlay

A good business has clear objectives and goals to achieve.

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business Identity, Business mission, Business Values, competitive advantage, Exit Strategy, Strategy, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled
For leadership teams planning a business is focused around the annual exercise of business planning.  Reviewing what went well and what did not, reviewing the overall performance of the organisation, its profits (or losses) and deciding what to do differently and what to keep the same for the forthcoming year. That’s why a good business has clear objectives and goals to achieve.
One key area which good leadership teams consistently get right is in rolling out the right measures, both soft and hard measures of performance inside a business plan. Cascading business plan objectives down to department and down to personal performance objectives are the vital element in implementing a business plan successfully. The key ones include refreshing the vision and connecting clear objectives and soft and hard metrics together to all levels of the organisation.

Business Goals

Having a vision is vital to be successful in the long term, but having objectives will ensure you get you there. Clear milestones for everyone inside your company, top to bottom are the essential component of a successful company. Every successful company has clear goals, strategic ones the outrageous ones (global domination) through to achievable tactical objectives.

Without clear (SMART, see below) objectives a company will loose focus on its goals. Poor or non-specific objectives companies can fall victim to strategic drift, this month’s whim and next month’s quick idea.  The failure to cascaded objectives at every level allows good people’s morale and confidence to fall. This is because they cannot see where how they are contributing to the company’s success. Everyone should know how they contribute to the business plan’s success. Failing to set clear objectives in a business plan creates a path to failure in execution and devalues the process of business planning and it becomes a waste of paper, time and effort.

Business Objectives

Objectives should be like a pyramid, with the big objectives at the top, but at every layer underneath there should be the sub objectives that make the bigger one happen. A well run organisation should therefore look like a pyramid, in terms of objectives, with everyone working on their goals which build up together to achieve the big picture goals. This form of management managing by objectives MBO, (not to be confused with a management buy-out MBO), allows people to focus on their objectives, which are aligned to higher goals.
Try not to have too many objectives to achieve. I always recommend no more than 5 per person. The reason why 5? Because it keeps people focused and not drowned in statistics. Even at the company level remember the old KISS concept of simplicity, if you have page after page of objectives some will suffer unless you can resource them. Focus on what really matters to the business, what drives performance and how are they made up. For people think about their Key Performance Indicators, KPI’s they are doing a good job if… Classical KPI’s usually include: revenue, margin, customer numbers, retention, growth, production, saving, are amongst the most common.

Setting Business Objectives

High performance companies often drive all their goals by setting team objectives which are then broken down into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each individual employee. Try not to give any individual or manager too many. An easy way to achieve that is to ensure they can remember and recall them with ease when you meet them.

The benefits of setting good objectives:

1.       Objectives define the entire purpose of your business (or unit) in a couple of sentences or bullet points or set of numbers.
2.       Objectives are often identified as key performance indicators at the individual persons performance.
3.       The objectives that you set determine the quality of the strategy or tactics that you will adopt.
4.       Goals allow leaders to Manage By Objectives MBO. This avoids time in argument and also helps in introducing a more participative management culture where employees are encouraged to set their own objectives.
5.       Clear KPI’s per person is a successful way to evaluate performance as long as the KPI’s are numerate or translatable into a numerate language.
Remember SMART criteria to define attributes of good objectives:
That is:
·         Specific
·         Measurable
·         Achievable
·         Realistic
·         Timely

Achievable Goals

If goals and objectives are not SMART then they are unlikely to be achievable.  Being better or good for example is too often quoted as a goal or objective, and while that is a statement of direction it is not a clear viable goal or objective. SMART goals and objectives are tangible they are a defined quantifiable number or a supported qualitative measure compared to an existing one.
Goals must be achievable. But for that to happen they must be quantifiable, either numerate or benchmarked compared to a previous number and deliverable within the timeframe to the standard required.

SMART criteria include:
1.       Both short range and long range targets should be set.
2.       Both quantitative and qualitative
3.       Clear. Put them in writing, to be achieved within a specified time frame.
4.       Measurable. So that they can be compared with actual results.
5.       Challenging. This is so that staff will put greater effort and be more motivated.
6.       Achievable. Avoid overly optimistic goals as this might be counter productive due to their demotivating nature.
Goals should be realistic, reasonable, reachable and beatable. Avoid hidden goals and don’t be over specific.
Hope that gets you thinking? Want to learn more then contact us or click here 
McKinsey7-S-Model to assess a company structure, by Richard Gourlay

The TOP TWELVE Business Planning Mistakes

by Richard GourlayBusiness culture, Business mission, Business Values, competitive advantage, Exit Strategy, Innovation, Strategy, VisionPosted on Comments are Disabled
Business planning is often talked about as a challenging process to go through.  Both to start a new business, or as the essential process of taking ownership of an existing business. Many business plans fail to achieve their objective, not because they represent a bad idea but because they fall into classic business planning pitfalls or fall over blinding obvious credibility cliffs. Here are the top 12 business planning mistakes, and importantly how to avoid them.
 

The business-planning process is in itself a very worthwhile pursuit, they take a lot of effort and resource. A business plan’s primary purpose is to convey an idea with a view to achieving a specific goal, most typically in securing funding. 

What makes a good business plan is less clearly defined.

Always remember that a business plan needs to be tailored to its target audience. If you have different audiences you will need to be able to flex your plan to that audiences specific needs. That means shaping it, edit it and amending it to achieve your objective.

Management consultancy by Richard Gourlay in Dumfries & Galloway
 
If you would like to know how to avoid these top twelve pitfalls and credibility cliff edges then click on the subject titles which are links at any time to see my step-by-step videos on how to avoid these pitfalls and credibility cliff edges.
 
Here’s the top twelve business planning mistakes I come across most frequently:-
 

1. Lack of Viable Opportunity

Every business plan needs to describe the opportunity in detail. It must also detail how that opportunity can, and will by this plan, be exploited profitably, effectively and successfully.  A good business plan can visualise the opportunity and articulate the company’s ability to reach a viable opportunity, this is a credibility cliff.
 
Tomorrow is a difficult place to plan for, but being able to identify and make that opportunity viable is the most critical test any business plan has. It is also the most common reason they fail. Your executive summary and the wider plan describes the viability of the opportunity in terms such as:-
 
  1. What is the problem which people  will pay to have solved?
  2. Does your solution solve this issue for a specific target market?
  3. Why would someone buy your solution over someone else’s?
  4. Why are the benefits of your offering so compelling?
  5. Can you reach that target market with a compelling message quickly and directly?
 

2. Unbelievable / Unsupported Financial Numbers 

Where any assessment of a business starts and often finishes is at the numbers, specifically on the projected Income Statement or Profit & Loss. Projections are just that, but they are vital and must be based upon clearly stated assumptions. Many business plans are written with numbers which just do not stand up even to a first glance.
 
Dream numbers: in overestimating income and understating costs.
 
Your numbers have to make sense and be realistic, if you are a new start-up then they must grow rationally from nothing, but costs will be incurred before turnover is generated, these need to be realised and recognised in your financials.
 
 The financials must also make sense and be presented in a format which presents a clear case for the investment and the return you will deliver. Ultimately, they need to be credible, defensible and consistent.
 

3. No Accessible Route(s) to Market

 All opportunities are only prospective ones without evidence that the target market can be accessed profitably, this is a big cliff to fall over. 

Entrepreneurs are inherently product focused, concentrating their energies on ‘the winning idea’ to the exclusion of many other important elements such as how they intend to access their customer base, a classic cliff edge for any plan.
 
“Built and they will come” is a great dream but a poor plan.
 
A business plan must include a comprehensive, credible and costed analysis of how the company is going to access their target market in a cost effective manner. Too many plans focus on the product not the market opportunity, they focus on teh solution not the problem they are solving.
 
For that to happen your plan needs to really understand the target customers, their needs, and purchasing priorities. Turning historical data into information and drawing knowledge from it ascertain insight into their future purchasing habits. Only then can you demonstrate cost effective routes to market within a business plan.
 
 

 4. Executive Summaries Which Aren’t

Somewhere between a pitfall and a cliff edge, is the failure of the Executive Summary, to be either a summary or aimed at executives. The only part of any plan that will certainly be read is the Executive Summary and yet they rarely provide an effective summary of the business plan. A good plan highlights the key proposition of the plan and sells the proposal.
Too many Executive Summaries either throw everything down in a jumbled mess, making them pages long and randomly pulling facts together, or they are so bland they say nothing!What’s a good Executive Summary, one that states the proposition clearly and succinctly, a page is sufficient for any plan.
The Executive Summary should clearly explain the whole picture including what investment is required and what it will deliver. The point of an Executive Summary is to inform the executives, so many it punchy, outcome focused and only ever write it at the end.

5. Over Estimating Turnover  

Another associated key element of the plan which relates to this element is the estimations of projected turnover.
 
While every business plan talks in positive terms (hopefully).  The obvious and persistent danger is that the innate optimism of all entrepreneurs and their tendency to exaggerate every business opportunity. If you have no established routes to market then you need to identify the start-up period within your turnover and cost model. This has major implications for cashflow and on where investment will be needed.  Experienced investors will expect that you have taken into account. 
 
This pitfall is most easily managed using a realistic method for estimating income is to calculate the number of customers the business intends to capture and the average revenues. These two averaged inputs are easier to calculate and also to justify within a business plan.
 

6. Absence of Clear Objectives 

I could have put this pitfall at number one very easily. What is the main purpose of the plan? 

If the plan’s objective is to seek funding then it is vitally important to clearly describe the investment opportunity. While the plan describes the concept in detail, it must also address the primary purpose of the plan. So many plans fail to make it explicitly clear what the company’s needs to be successful or what the investment will mean to the company.
 
A good business plan answers the following key business planning questions:
  1. Why investors should investing in this business rather than anywhere else?
  2. When will they recoup their initial investment and how and when it can be realised?
  3. What is their expected return on investment?
  4. How the company has managed all aspects of risk? 
  5. Is the investment merely cash or do they need to bring other assets such as expertise to the table?
If you can answer these key questions, the intended audience will feel comfortable and be able to recognise that they fit the brief.
 
 

7. Non-Existent Cashflow Management

Particularly relevant to a new business, this is often an invisible cliff edge which business plans fall over on, is the ability of the business to articulate the differences between cash and profit. Running out of cash is the highest risk any new business or re-engineered business faces.
 
Good, positive, and conservative cash flow management is vital when businesses pursue investment opportunities where there are significant cash flows out, in advance of the cash flows coming in. This is the classic business plan cliff, which sends potential investors running.
 
If a business plan’s financial model is based upon selling on credit, then they receive the cash in the future, but need cask to pay expenses before that income hits their account, then they have a cashflow risk. This outflow of cash is the single biggest reason companies fail, its not margin, its rarely the product, it is invariably that they run out of cash.
 
 

8. Non existent Management Teams

Throwing a few CV’s into a business plan does not create a delivery team. Likewise a generic organisational chart with missing pieces and To Be Confirmed (TBC) is not going to inspire confidence  with investors to part with their cash.

Entrepreneurs can often sell an idea but they do not always inspire they can select a balanced team of people with the right skill mix, from the financial management to key leadership roles and the right operational team to deliver your ambitious plan.

Having a structured management team with operational structures is essential for success. Track records matter, as much as having clear roles and responsibilities laid out in delivering the operational plan which underpins the business plan.

9. Poor Evidence of Demand

A significant area of concern when planning is justifying the sales forecast or demand levels for a product or service. This breaks down into the two main elements used in forecasting: the use of historical facts and the dependency of subjective assessment.
 
Sales forecasting, is the vital tool to identify the basis of all projected revenue figures that can be considered credible in the wider context of the plan. Unless there is verifiable demand for the idea, the risks grow out of all proportion, particularly if the initial start-up or investment costs are high.
  
Minimising risk in a business plan is all about gaining an understanding the potential demand and how the company will with this plan create or drive that demand rather than concentrate on ‘the product or the idea’. This classic cliff edge is a silent killer for investors, they don’t believe in it.
 

10. Gaping Inconsistencies

An effective business plan needs to be consistent throughout as all the various strands are brought together into one single entity, the plan. It is pitfall which entrepreneurs gloss over, but investors relentlessly prod before committing to any plan.
 
If there are multiple authors of the plan the risks of inconsistencies will exponentially increase. Extrapolating data can also cause problems, using research data and then jumping from possible market size to sales potential and then sales forecast are classic pitfalls which need to be thought through.
 
Presenters of the plan must have a simple narrative that runs through their plan, using key facts and staying ‘on script’ so as to ensure that a cohesive story is communicated. The numbers must also be consistent with the broader content so that there are no contradictions between them.
 
 

11. Not Appreciating the Competition 

There is always competition. Yet the number of times the phrase “there are  no competitors” appears in plans is considerable.
 
It does not matter how unique the proposition is there will also be some other business competing for people’s money. While there may not be a direct competitor it will certainly be a transfer investment that customers will be making. The business plan must recognise where the customers invest is coming from. If competitors are not identified in a business plan then the only credible assessment is that the company has not been diligent enough in its research.
 
Also remember that no company lives in a vacuum, as soon as you launch (or before) the marketplace will change. What will the competitive landscape look like in a few days, weeks, months or years?  Can you create or establish significant barriers to entry for likely competition.  Otherwise it is likely that a successful market entry will be followed by better-placed competitors with greater resources, etc
 

12. Throwing Your Plan Out Too Soon

You never get a second chance to make a great first impression.Your plan needs to be right the first time and the content needs to be accurate, clear, concise and correct.
 
More often than not business plans need to be completed by a certain date and hence the final stages can be rushed, a classic pitfall.
 
Consequently, in many instances the final output does not do justice to the plan. Attention to detail at the end is vital, so ensure you have a completed plan with references and formatted correctly. Also ensure the content of the plan has been edited down to a digestible size, use appendices for details.
 
Get someone removed from the process to proof the plan. If a presentation is part of the process, it should reflect the Executive Summary.
 
 

In Summary The Top 12 Business Planning Mistakes are caused by:-

Business plans by definition have a purpose of communicating a course of action so make sure they do that primary role. Support inevitably means resources with the primary aim of the plan often being to secure financial investment. Explain what the investment will be used for and how it will be protected from these classic pitfalls.
 
Writing a successful business plan is all about preparation, about being as thorough in your research and planning as is possible. By avoiding the cliff edges and pitfalls above, the chances of the plan objectives being met increase substantially.
 
If you would like to know how to avoid these classic business planning pitfalls then why not click through to my step-by-step video: How To Take The Guess Work Out of Your Business Success, click here. Or read more about strategic planning and business planning in my blog, click here.