Are You Working On Your Business?

By Larry Klimek
JKL Associates

As a Business Strategist for over 20 years and a past senior level executive, I have a unique vantage point of business owners and how they approach growing and building one of their most valuable assets – their business. If you look around at other successful organizations, including your competition, you too can identify some key or best practices that can move your business to the next level. The question is – do you execute what is necessary to take action and implement change?

To start with, many small businesses have “bookshelf” strategic plans! Once the basis and direction for the startup of the business, these guidance systems of: core values, strategies, tactics, goals and performance indicators have taken a back seat to the daily push and pull to keep the business afloat. In recent economic times, business leaders have had to stray away from these plans to manage the bleeding placed upon them by downturns in the marketplace.

With the vibrations of the business landscape moving toward improvement, now is a critical time for the leaders of small and medium sized businesses to put back in place one of the most critical business documents and that is the strategic business plan. You can have all the “Best Practices,” “Best Resources,”  “Best Product/Service” and even the most prolific customers, but without strategic direction or the glue to build a lean profitable entity, you have to continually start over and over again. This turnover in processes, people, products and customers cost the net book value of your business dearly.

As you and your business re-emerge from the lackluster past five years, there are a few items that you should be strategizing on to leverage moving forward.

• Are the core values and vision for the future still vibrant and taking the proper place in guiding decision making?
• What has taken place in your industry, market, and with your competitors that leaves opportunities unrecognized? Are you an innovator or replicator?
• Is your organization’s structure set up to not just continue to run the business, but position it for growth? 
• What resources are needed to achieve new results and not just more of the levels of the past few years?
• Are your strategic imperatives defined so that they have performance metrics to assess, re-align as needed and then drive forward to a new result?
• What level of risk of the current culture are you ready to exploit to move to a better, more agile future culture?
• How are your sales and marketing plans integrated to leverage the new sales arena including social media, the internet and constant shopping by all buyers?

Ultimately, the question for top leadership is – are you working in the business or have you set up yourself to work on your business? To build a business it requires more than just time at the office or with clients. It requires strategic involvement and thought-out tactical actions. Without a well-articulated strategy, you get stuff accomplished, but to truly grow your asset/business the alignment of effort to key imperatives allows you, the owner, to lead and execute at a performance level admired and supported by all of your employees.

This week, take a few minutes to pull out that bookshelf strategic plan, dust it off and check off those items you have achieved by holding yourself accountable to its original objectives. Then give strong consideration for re-invigorating the life blood of your business by once again initiating the guidance system found in an updated strategic plan.

If you believe that you need a trusted advisor to add to your business leadership, look for a resource that is open to not just asking the simple questions, but digging into the real challenges to core answers.

Larry Klimek is president of JKL Associates in Grosse Pointe Farms. JKL Associates strategically builds lean, profitable business and the talent to make them great. Visit www.jklassociates.com or call (313) 527-7945 to learn more.