Is your business a ship without a rudder?

We all have good ideas, we all want to succeed at what we do and most of us want our businesses to grow and be profitable. However we can sometime lose sight of exactly where we are going. I have worked for a number of organisations large and small that do not have a clear strategy for improving their business. Perhaps they have a vague idea of how to grow or reduce their costs, but often these initiatives can be undertaken in isolation and interpreted differently across departments. For example the MD of a medium sized firm sits down with her senior team one day and decides that the business has to make more money and fast. The sales director interprets this as sales, sales and more sales. He rally’s his team to go and generate as much business as possible. He produces an inspired sales campaign and sets aggressive targets for his sales force. Who go out and achieve record sales for the month by offering their customers incredible deals. In fact the deals are so good that sales increase by 30% in three weeks. Whilst this is happening, the operations director interpreted the instruction from the MD to make more money and fast and a directive to reduce her overheads. So she sets about consolidating three of her back office teams into two, thus giving a saving of 30% on direct labour costs. So sales are up by 30% and costs are down by 30%... all good so far....well not exactly, the increased sales have resulted in an increased admin burden and of course the back office staff is trying to work with less people than before. Orders are now taking longer process, customers are complaining, threatening to withhold payments and even cancel orders……not exactly what the MD had in mind! Of course something like this would never happen in the real world…..would it! So why didn’t it work? For a start the message was unclear and interpreted differently by two people. Both initiatives where good, but very disconnected. The both offered to make the company more money, but worked against each other and ultimately worsened the situation. So how could this have been avoided? Strategy deployment or to put it another way ‘everyone pulling in the same direction’ If the MD had set about a structured approach to grow sales whilst aiming to reduce costs; she could have aligned both initiatives to give a much greater net result. By applying a structured approach all stakeholders are aware of and can contribute to other initiatives. It can be tracked using key metrics and projects can be executed in the right order. If people are working on ideas that are not on the plan ask why? Strategy Deployment- the basics 1.Define the high level aims of the business but invite all the senior team to contribute ideas 2.Quantify the anticipated results from each idea 3.Select the ‘vital few’ projects that will make the greatest impact 4.Align all departments so the projects work together. 5.Agree what the projects will deliver and link back to the high level aims 6.Monitor and track as part of monthly board meeting If the company in the example had applied this structured approach, they may have come up with two very similar ideas as before, however the big difference would have been that both departments would have worked together and communicated better. Breakthrough projects could have been; Project 1- To improve back office capacity to meet sales growth plan, without increasing direct labour cost. Deliverable 1- Map sales order process and remove unnecessary steps to achieve 30% capacity. Project2- Develop a sales growth plan to utilise increased capacity in admin functions Deliverable 2- Increased sales by 30% be end of next period Both projects could still run in parallel, but would be linked and each department would work together to achieve the desired result. I understand that this is a very simple example, but I hope it has illustrated that strategy deployment can be a highly effective approach to make a step change in your business. I have led numerous workshops in many different industry sectors and witnessed fragmented businesses gradually start to work together to achieve more. If you would like to know more about how structured strategy deployment could help your business, please give me a call.