Get Your Business Growing

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Jaime Yordan-Frau, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

To state the obvious, the marketplace has changed significantly in the last few years. In general, most of us have achieved survival of our businesses through wise and sometimes creative “juggling” while keeping our core the same. Now is the time to move forward yet to do so, we must realize that to achieve the growth and success we seek, our businesses must change to respond to the new marketplace.

Whenever businesses are considering change, there are three phases that must be contemplated for that change to be strong, sustainable and successful: Analysis; Decision-Making and Action-Taking; and lastly Review and Reinforce. For the purpose of discussion today, let’s concentrate on the first of these.

Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result or outcome. Sometimes when external factors suffer changes as significant as our economy has in the past few years, we must look deeper than just the actions we are taking. At times like these we must question the very foundation of our businesses to ensure that from the ground up our businesses are as strong as they must be in order to respond successfully to the new ways – the new marketplace that is rising out of these historical times. In order to give ourselves the best chance, we must allow The Analysis Phase to be comprised of engaging in objective and unbiased analysis of three areas: the external realities; the business platform, and the internal fuel.

Strategy #1 – Conduct an objective and comprehensive market analysis (general market and your specific industry) that includes future impact projections of several market change scenarios. This is the portion that looks at the external realities and how these impact your business. For those of us who have been in business long enough to have pre-recession performance records and market behaviors as a benchmark, this analysis will be especially telling. For those just getting on the entrepreneurial train, conducting a general market analysis and impact projection – and making sure your business foundations reflect this knowledge – is still a solid idea. Some questions you must seek answers to are: How are today’s conditions different from those present during your “best” years? How is the term “best years” defined and why? What percentage growth did your business experienced during these “best years”? What percentage of business decrease has your business experienced since then? What changes have been implemented since the recession started? What results have those changes achieved?

Strategy #2 – in light of your findings from strategy #1, Review your business entity (vision, mission and objectives) and structure. Are your vision, mission and objectives relevant to today’s market realities? Are your business objectives S.M.A.R.T. objectives? How will your objectives change to reflect the new information found out through Strategy #1? Has your “north” changed at all and if so, how? What must be the new direction that will take your business to better success – new vision, new mission, new objectives?

Strategy #3 – Evaluate and redefine your attitudes (yours, your employees’ and your business’). Give yourself and your business the gift of objectivity on this matter. It has been well evidenced that attitudes make for more than 75% of the indicators needed for success. It is also a fact that this recession has hit everyone hard in the areas of how we feel about work and our jobs. Evaluating in-depth and appropriately re-aligning attitudes could do wonders for performance – yours, your employees’ and your business’.

These three strategies are a critical starting point on which to lay the foundation to build a stronger organization; one that delivers better results and achieves higher profitability in today’s market conditions. 2010 is the year when small businesses will change the financial face of our Nation. Lead your business into a future that is better than its past! I look forward to “seeing” you at our next article. Until then, make this the best year ever – it will be a lot of hard work but … when is it not?