It’s Your Business: What Do You Want To Do?

The steps outlined so far will help you to stabilise your business. However, the point of a turnaround is that it should enable you to go on to rebuild your business. In order to be able to do this, you need to put in place a regrowth strategy. The steps involved in creating such a strategy are as follows.

First, think through what you want to achieve personally from the business and set your personal goal’s. Next, understand (as far as possible) the big ‘external’ forces that affect your industry and business and what opportunities and threats arise from these.

• What is happening in the business environment? (Carry out a PEST analysis – see below.)
• What forces are shaping the structure of your industry and how much money can be made from your industry? (See industry structure: ‘Porter’s five forces’ below.)

You must now understand your own business and its strengths and weaknesses:

• What products are you supplying into which markets, and what potential growth strategies are there?
• Where are your products in their lifecycles and have you got an appropriate portfolio of products?
• What do your customers want?
• What is your competitive advantage (based on what your customers want) within your industry and on which you can build?
• What is your unique selling proposition?

Finally, decide what strategy to pursue and then create an appropriate value chain and put in place an action plan.

Setting Your Personal Goals

To set your business strategy you will need a plan that matches:

• your ambitions for your business;
• your type of business; and
• the circumstances you find yourself in.

To produce a meaningful set of personal goals it is worth asking yourself three questions.

1. Why are you in business — what motivates you?

Is it:

• The sheer challenge, the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles and winning through, or beating the opposition day after day?
• A drive to be creative, using your business as a way of making your dreams real?
• Independence, in that you need to be free to operate in the way you want to, without being told what to do?
• A sense of security and stability where you are looking to feel you have ‘made it’ and are financially secure?
• A mixture of all the above and, if so, in what proportion?

2. What type of skill have you based your business on?

Is it:

• Your specific technical expertise, where you have developed skills as a doer or seller and want to exploit them to the full? (But beware of the administrative burden of running your own small business, which will get worse as the business grows in size.)
• Your general management skills, where it’s not your own specialism but your ability to manage other people that provides the basis for the business?

3. What are you trying to achieve by being in business?

Is it:

• A comfortable lifestyle with a good short- or long-term balance of work and outside interests?
• To building up or maintaining a stable business to hand on to the next generation?
• To build a business for sale to allow you to go on to other projects?
• To expand your business to be the biggest or best in the industry?
• To act as a provider of some special service or value, perhaps expressing some deeply held religious or other values (such as environmentalism), and perhaps even run deliberately as a nonprofit-making organisation?

Having a clear view of what motivates you, of what types of skills you have based your business on and of what you are trying to achieve in running your business is critical to setting meaningful goals.

Having established your personal goals, you will want to run your business to achieve these. You then need to turn these goals into a set of objectives that are SMART:

Specific.

Measurable – that can quantify the results.

Achievable.

Relevant.

Time bounded – are governed by deadlines.

This will allow you to specify the actions you will need to take in managing your business to achieve these goals and to start to prioritise your goals using the ease/impact matrix from Chapter 6 (Figure 13). So think through what it is you are trying to achieve and then fill out a table like the one shown in Figure 17.

Has this helped you to clarify what you are trying to do and the things you need to make happen to achieve this? Having undertaken this exercise you should also ask yourself the following questions:

• What are my key managers’/staffs personal goals?
• Are these compatible with my goals and my business strategy?

If there are major differences (Fred, in production, wants the quiet life, but your strategy calls for a significant expansion of the business), you now have an early warning of a likely management issue. This will give you the direction you want to go in. However, there will be factors outside your control that will be influencing your business and that you will need to analyse.