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.

Resources for Good Works

Share with the Lord’s people who are in need.

Be inventive in hospitality.

(Romans 12:13)

I had one of those weeks where I submitted a monthly report that was underwhelming for me to publish. We had a lot of meetings last month that produced a lot of narratives. When I read over the document, there were a lot of “fixin’ to’s,” but very few, if any, quantifiable metrics. To know me is to know that I am process and goal driven. I must be able to report measurable progress of my works and activities over time. My immediate prayer: while working in the workforce readiness environment, please help me to never lose focus on the necessity to deliver a corporate solution.

In full disclosure, I did not come to that prayer request on my own. Shortly after pressing the send button to forward the progress report, I participated in a conference call. The topic of discussion was learning more of the best practices of other career readiness and workforce development program successes through the deployment of employer resource networks (ERN).

The primary goal of an ERN is to provide a cost-effective solution to reduce turnover and to improve productivity for the employers. The program especially targets the workforce who are employed, or underemployed, where life situations happen that mean the difference between getting to or staying at work, versus having to miss a day of work to resolve potential crises. ERNs are not benevolent programs or gifts. The model is designed so that “success coaches” are available in the workplace to guide employees to resources so that they do not have to miss work. The employer benefits by proactively investing in an on-site person who knows the local community services, preventing the supervisor or human resources staff from dealing with these matters. My take-away from the meeting was that productivity programs like ERNs must be treated like corporate initiatives, where the potential benefactors, employers, must pay-to-play and expect a measurable return on investment. To learn more about successful regional employer resource networks, visit http://schenectadyworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/West-Michigan-Team-ERN-Overview.pdf or http://www.ern-ny.com/.

On my drive home, I thought about the activities that we are engaged in and asked myself to answer the questions I challenge our team to consider everyday: What product or service do we provide that our customers/clients/partners are willing to pay a subscription or service fee to receive? How do we quantify that value? If we cannot clearly articulate measurable solutions in a monthly progress report, what good are we…? Our September time resources will be allocated differently and more effectively.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked for examples of what other communities are doing to meet the needs of job seekers that address generational deficits in finding gainful employment. The ERN model is a purposed solution for removing barriers that impact an employers’ productivity and profitability. Could you get the corporations in your community to buy into and deploy a proven pay-to-play resource? Feel free to comment or send me an email to 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/.