How investing in the future will help your business grow
Why multi-front battles are important for succeeding in business in the long term.
I see a lot of small business owners plodding away on their day to day nitty-gritties constantly. There’s a lot of routine issues that keep on coming up every minute in business and which need to be resolved. These resolutions could be immediate or long-termers in nature. The business owners are best judges of what their businesses need at the time.
I’m sure a lot of business owners do think about such long term expectations from time to time. But putting things in black & white gives a lot of clarity both about possibilities AND impossibilities in their lines of thinking.
In our consulting practice, we have come across the common refrain that unless the immediate issues are resolved there’s no point in focusing in the future.
Nothing can be farther from the truth…
No doubt, it is imperative that they work on immediate issues affecting business. But such ‘transactional’ and ‘routine’ issues should not be addressed at the cost of ‘strategic’ aspects which impact business.
It is important to also understand various underlying reasons and root causes which create issues and resolve them. They could be related with people, policies or processes.
Whatever may be the case… not identifying, acknowledging, nor working on their resolution will likely impact the business directly or indirectly in the short term or long term.
But impact they will. That’s a given.
So, what am I saying here?
Business owners need to fight the battle on multiple fronts concurrently and define and launch a few actionable initiatives every day or every week regardless of whether they are immediately benefiting or not… essentially, they need to operate on different things parallely. They need to visualize where they see their business going one year, two years, three years down the line.
Day to day issues are innumerable and relate with sales booking, collections and pending dues, order tracking, production monitoring, purchase orders issuance, RM receipts, pending bills to be raised, accounting entries be passed, hiring people, providing them necessary facilities, documentation and filing, correspondence, legal compliance… the list is endless.
What about longer term imperatives like defining vision and values and putting it on paper, business objectives definition over 3–5yrs, brand building initiatives, standardization of norms and processes, hiring of long term contributors for the business, SOPs/systems definition and implementation, delivery capability enhancement, periodic open houses with all employees and so on.
All these (and more) need to be on the radar of the business owner.
They should operate at different “layers” in their mind-space at all times… so that ALL their decisions are in some way contributing to the long-term objectives.
Why do I call them layers??
Visualize your business over a 2–3 year timeline with different operations and activities occurring in their respective timelines. Some outcomes of activities/operations result on an ongoing basis, others take 2–3 mths to emerge or be seen, still others 6–12 mths or maybe even a 2–3 yrs. These are outcomes of decisions made ‘NOW’ and most likely linked to other activities etc. like a live organism.
For instance, a decision to hire an industry experienced Sales Manager will result in a series of new customer acquisitions, sales orders, collections, issue resolution, topline growth over a period of time. The decision was “instantaneous”, but the resultant outcomes are spread over a period of time.
I’m giving below a typical list of areas that business owners should have on their radar. The routine matters are already on the radar. The strategic ones most often get missed out.
Note: I’m assuming that product, customers and market related areas are already addressed by the promoter. Hence, they are not specified separately.
Time to Impact * — 1–3mth (immediate term layer)
Focus Areas (Rolling List) — Lead generation, Customer segmentation & acquisition, Sales order booking, Order fulfillment, Collections management, WC availability etc, Business & Revenue Modelling
Action Frequency ** — Ongoing action always
Time to Impact * — 3–6mth (near term layer)
Focus Areas (Rolling List) — Procurement & Supply chain development, Sales Planning, Production / Delivery Planning & Systems, Branding, WC gap funding, SOP/Process Definition, Tweaking business & revenue model, Quality standards definition
Action Frequency ** — Ongoing action always
Time to Impact * — 6–12mth (short term layer)
Focus Areas (Rolling List) — Roadmaps creation, Sales traction generation, Organisation Structuring, Market expansion, Higher sales, Profitability, Reporting & Control Systems Definition
Action Frequency ** — Ongoing action always
Time to Impact * — 1–2yrs (medium term layer)
Focus Areas (Rolling List) — Cost control, infrastructure planning, Funding strategy, Key resources hiring, Risk mitigation
Action Frequency ** — Bi-monthly / quarterly
Time to Impact * — 2–3yrs (longer term layer)
Focus Areas (Rolling List) — Growth strategizing, Growth Planning, Systems Enabling of business operations
Action Frequency ** — Quarterly
Time to Impact * — 3–5yrs (long term layer)
Focus Areas (Rolling List) — Equity Funding, JVs, Acquisitions, Market expansion, etc.
Action Frequency ** — Quarterly
* Time to Impact refers to the time taken for some result to occur from ‘initiation’ of any focus area or ‘decision made’ regarding them
** Action Frequency refers to the frequency at which the respective areas need to be monitored or actioned for better results
As can be seen there are a lot of things that are important and critical for survival, sustenance and growth of any business. They need to occupy the mind-space of the business owner constantly. Taking cognizance of and keeping your eye on them concurrently is important so that you as a business owner don’t drop the ball on your business.
Chasing leads and new customers who provide quick orders and timely payments is important but not by disregarding/delaying definition of sales targets for the entire sales team, or planning their monthly and weekly sales activities, or defining customer engagement conversations, or launching marketing campaigns etc. to enable them to book orders.
Likewise, fulfilling the current order books is important but not by losing emphasis on creation of delivery capabilities, infrastructure and systems to ensure that the business can survive and deliver at increased scale over a longer term.
#SurvivalofSmallBusiness
