Commercial Readiness

LATROBE’s Commercial Readiness portfolio helps business owners make their businesses more effective, more efficient, and more profitable. This is a great time of year to consider these things because 2018 is around the corner, and by setting your business goals now, you’ll be able to hit the ground running. So if you want to grow your business, here are some things to consider.

Plan

It’s common for business owners to go into business without first deciding what they want to accomplish and how they plan to accomplish it. Instead, these business owners—and I may be describing you—simply hope to sell their products and services and make money, and while this is a common business practice, it’s hardly an effective one.   

Business success requires planning, and you need a strategic plan, which lists your goals and explains how you will accomplish them. Your strategic plan includes strategies, and there is a comprehensive (overall) strategy for your business and strategies for each area of your business. Each strategy has accompanying goals, with short-term strategies (1 year) and long-term strategies (3 to 5 years).  

Your strategic plan keeps you focused on what’s important. You’re faced with a never-ending list of tasks to complete every day, but by keeping your goals in mind, you’ll know which activities will help you meet your goals and which will not, so it will be obvious which tasks you should spend time working on. Your strategic plan will answer questions like this:

• What are my profit-margin goals?
• What do I want to do next month? Next year?
• What is my sales goal?
• Which customers am I pursuing?
• Which customers provide the biggest profit margin?

Get Help

Nearly every small business (more than 96%) is run by one person: the owner. These are single-person businesses. The remaining businesses (less than 4%) are employer businesses, which means they employ at least one person in addition to the owner. Here’s why it’s important that you scale-up and become an employer business.

Annual revenue for single-person businesses averages $18,000; for employer businesses it’s $1.5 million. Scaling-up and expanding your business capacity simply means you’re not doing everything yourself. It’s not possible for you to go out and sell and market—and be the face of the business—then be expected to do all of the work. You can only do one thing at a time, so when you’re working on one task, another task isn’t getting done.

Do what you do best and get others to do the rest. If a business owner is an introvert, is it a good idea to have them make presentations before groups of people, with them sweating and stammering because they’re nervous? Or would it have been better for them to have spent that time doing what they’re good at while having a polished speaker make the presentations?  

If you want to grow your business, your strategic plan might have questions like these:

• How do I scale-up to become an employer business?
• What talent or expertise do I need on my team to offset what’s lacking?
• Who do I need on my team to help me accomplish my goals?

Conclusion

If your business strategy is selling as many of your products or as much of your service as possible, you don’t have a business strategy; and if you take pride in being a jack-of-all-trades, you’re probably not making much money. As 2017 comes to an end, create a 2018 strategic plan and assemble a team. Your business will need both to realize its potential.

Finally, have you ever said you’re going to take your business to the next level—but don’t know what level it’s on now? We can help. Few business owners view their businesses objectively, but in order to grow your business, you have to do just that. FLITER^® is a business operations and management assessment we administer that will assess where your business is and show you how to take it where you want it to go. To learn more, visit http://www.fliter.biz or  https://www.latrobellc.com/services.html.