Navigate your company like a car in 5 steps
Managing a company is like navigating a car. The navigation system needs the following things to guide you on your route:
- It needs to know exactly where you are at any time. The GPS takes care of this./
- It needs to know where to go. You take care of this, by entering the exact destination.
- It needs to calculate the route to take. Based on where you are and where to go. If you deviate from the calculated route, the navigation system will recalculate the new route to your destination immediately.
Successfully managing a company comes down to exactly the same! You need to have constant insight into the present status of your company (where are you?). You, as an entrepreneur, need to know where you want to go with your company. What is your ambition? And when you know these two things (present status and ambition), you need to determine the most efficient route to arrive at your ambition.
But how to translate this into your day-to-day operations? For this, you can follow a 5 step approach, that won’t take you that much time to go through. And that will make it possible to have your route constantly available very efficiently while managing your company.
Step 1. What is the present status of your company?
You probably think that you exactly know what the present status of your company is. With present status I don’t mean having financial figures about your company in a dashboard available. I mean whom are you serving, why do they buy your product, why is it still possible to produce your product and what is your revenue model? This is described in a Business Model. I prefer the Business Model Canvas (Alexander Osterwalder). Handled the right way, this Business Model Canvas will give overview and thus insight in the present status of your company.
Step 2. How do you market your company (successful)?
To determine this, you need to know what it is about your offer that makes customers buy your product. You need to know what makes your company, your product or service and you as an entrepreneur unique. These and other very relevant factors can be analyzed in a model of Verne Harnish, the 7 layers of strategy. It is, just like the Business Model Canvas, an overview of your marketing success on one sheet of paper and thus very insightful!
These 2 steps together describe your present status, where you are with your company.
Step 3. Where to go? Your ambition
I guess you don’t tell your navigation system that you are somewhere in Europe and need to go somewhere in Azia. The system won’t be able to calculate a route. It’s much too vague. It not only needs to know exactly where you are, but also where to go. In parallel with a company, the entrepreneur needs to know his ambition. In my daily work as a business coach, I come across a lot of entrepreneurs that not only don’t know where they are (with their company), they also don’t know where to go (what their ambition is). Some do think they know. But their ambition is vague, like navigating to Azia. They want to be the best, or offer the best quality. That’s not specific enough. How to navigate your company to be the best, when you don’t know what being the best means?
So, you need a specific and measurable ambition. A long term ambition that brings you all the way. You don’t tell your navigation system to go from Maastricht to Einhoven to Den Bosch to Utrect to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. You tell it to go from Maastricht to Amsterdam. You know your final destination. That’s also needed in your company.
There is a really practical approach to determining your specific and measurable ambition. I will provide info at the end of this article where to find it.
4. You don’t go to a place, you go to an address
The level of detail a navigation system needs is an address, not just a place. In parallel with a company, formulating a measurable ambition is not enough. You need to have more specific insight into your ambition. Only then you know to which specific point you want to navigate your company.
For this, a really insightful model is used, the long term Organisational Model Canvas. It is a combination of the Business Model Canvas and the 7 layers of strategy. It provides insight into how your internal organisational structure, your marketing and sales and your revenue model will look like when you have achieved your ambition. Again on one sheet of paper, so it gives overview and insight!
5. The route to take, your roadmap
Now your 2 most important touchpoints are determined: present status and destination (ambition). It’s time to calculate the route to take. This can be done in a roadmap. A roadmap is a combination of a goal tree and a milestone planning. You develop the roadmap in the following way:
- Envision your present time spent at the several categories of your work.
- Translate your ambition into a growth rhythm (your growth stages).
- Determine supporting blocks needed to realize your growth rhythm. Like marketing and sales, acquisition, partnering, product or service development, internal organisation development, …
- Determine actions per supporting block that are needed to achieve the overall goal of that block.
- Estimate capacity needed to achieve all this. Shuffle and reshuflle capacity, actions and supporting blocks until your roadmap is responsible. Meaning not over asking in terms of capacity.
- Estimate cash in. Is the roadmap responsible in terms of cash?
Now you are ready to navigate your company. Since the steps each fit on one sheet of paper (more or less), it’s easy to have a quick view on them, to determine the impact of choices you make to the future (ambition) of your company. This is crucial! Get a grip on the future by being able to determine what the consequences are of decisions you make. Each time this means determining if a choice will bring you closer to or further from your ambition.
By the way… these 5 steps together are your strategy. So, developing a strategy is not that complex. And this strategy will work for you if you are able to make a living document out of it. And that is what happens when you take the approach written above.
Interested in this approach? Read more about it on our website www.businessroadmaps.biz or subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.businessroadmaps.biz/en/newsletter/!
