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.

Influencing Good Works

Iron sharpens iron,

and one man sharpens another.

(Proverbs 27:17)

 

Have you ever taken a look at the people in your LinkedIn, civic, or other professional networks to evaluate whether or not you have mutually beneficial business synergies? We were developing a marketing campaign for our workforce training solutions  and this question began our brainstorming exercise.  Why would key decision makers give us an audience to discuss our vision for educating and training through workforce readiness initiatives?


In this development process, one roadblock was evident: wanting to be an advocate for young people about careers in manufacturing and influencing the parents and community leaders of the value of our program required more than wishful thinking. To achieve success, our approach had to include a clearly defined direction, a disciplined doctrine/process, and above all else, a divine determination. Still, we needed someone to lay hands on us, or as I learned in SETX, someone whose endorsement could open doors one could not open alone…an influencer.


In today’s social culture, “friending” is an action verb, not to be confused with the more traditionally understood term of friendship. Friending has reciprocity, the practice of exchanging ideas and information with others for mutual benefit, allowing access, and sometimes, special privilege. Realizing that some efforts require access to people outside of a typical network, it is wise to “friend up” with leaders, or people with great influence.


When we finalized our proposal, we identified an influential community leader with whom we had an established relationship and pitched it to him. His immediate response was simply, iron sharpens iron. After a moment of reflection, he explained the mutual benefits, or synergies, that emerge when two blades rub together. The edges of the blades become sharper and more effective for the good works to be performed. Our children need more real world exposure to jobs and career opportunities available and our approach provided a hands-on, vocational, and valuable solution.

http://www.latrobellc.com/industrial-people.php

I still prefer face-to-face fellowship and meetings. In today’s social climate, I still value relationships and friendships, and feel that regardless of the size of the professional or civic network, people do business with those that they know and trust. I am guilty of “friending” to gain access to ideas and information, but my journey has revealed that no one achieves such alone. Iron sharpens iron, which sharpens our ability to deliver real value and mutual benefits in our purposed work. Who are you influencing by your good works? Feel free to comment, or, send me an email at latanyua.robinson@gmail.com. If you like this post and want to catch up on some of my previous discussions, please visit the full Purposed Work blog at http://ltr-latrobe-mfg.blogspot.com/.