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Category - Business Planning

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1
Recession proof your business
2
Happy New Year! Now make a plan!
3
How to Implement Strategy
4
WE are always right? Or keep questioning our old ways of thinking?
5
Work out your divorce before you get married!

Recession proof your business

Is it possible to recession-proof your business? Probably not, despite the wealth of internet articles on how to do so (about 3.3 million hits on Google and counting).

However, what is possible is to arm your business with a series of simple and common sense business strategies to protect it against tough times.

There are defensive and offensive strategies. As profit performance heads south, it is difficult not to panic and begin to tighten all the hatches. However you can tighten too much. Hence, while it is natural to concentrate on the defensive strategies, it is important to keep in mind offensive strategies – those that your business should implement to ensure that you are the one in your industry that keeps selling when others are closing down.

Let us deal with the defensive strategies first. There are six strategies that you need to implement. These are:
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Happy New Year! Now make a plan!

It’s the start of a new year soon, so to all my readers old and new – Happy New Year!

And in the new year, after we have all recovered from those annual excesses that we always say we will avoid, we will come to the realisation that we really ought to do some planning and goal-setting for the year ahead.

Ultimately the secret of your success is to make your business grow year by year.

It is an old adage: “businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan”. Time and time again surveys show that fewer than 3% to 7% of small and medium businesses that fail have ever done any business planning.

The start of a new year is the best time to start a business plan. You can “close the books” and think about new initiatives and ideas about your business. It is the business equivalent of making your New Year resolutions, but with a better process that can lead to follow-through and organized action.
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How to Implement Strategy

Most organisations will have a strategic plan. Even if it is not a formal document, the organisation will have created a set of strategies over time, perhaps in the development of business plans, or to develop a new initiative, open a new branch or market, or even to develop internal skills and capacities.

However many of these strategies are simply not carried out to fruition. Strategic Plans, business plans or sets of well thought out strategies sit on the shelf with limited or minimal implementation. Often, this is because organisations don’t work on implementing strategies day to day. Organisations may be good at what they do on a day to day basis, such as buying, producing and selling, but these processes are conducted by functional areas who have functional responsibility for those areas. Implementation of strategies on the other hand are often cross-functional, interrupt existing responsibilities and processes, and inadequately resourced.

So, having spent scarce time and energy creating well thought out and well crafted strategies, what can you do to ensure that you are able to execute strategy effectively?
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WE are always right? Or keep questioning our old ways of thinking?

For a brief moment women wearing burqas and niqabs were banned from sitting in the Australian Parliament’s public galleries. This was later changed as long as they revealed their faces for identification at security checkpoints.

In a show of protest three men wearing a Ku Klux Klan uniform, a motorcycle crash helmet and a niqab tried to enter the Parliament building. They were met by security outside who told them that the helmet and the KKK hat were not allowed inside whereas the person wearing the niqab would have to reveal their face but could then put the veil back on.

There followed a (mild) furore on social media about inequality and the overblown political correctness. People rallied around the cry that “we” shouldn’t bow to the powerful minority as “we” had our own standards.

However the social media commentators seem to have missed various points:-

1. They themselves had probably lived or visited overseas where local law meant that drug possession was punishable by death, that you couldn’t chew gum on the streets, that many other things we did not agree with was law, and we protested that “they” the majority should listen to “us”;

2. They recognised “our” team’s views and believed they were right but they did not recognise the “other” team’s views could possibly be right;

3. The burqa, hijab and niqab, along with saffron robes, and nuns’ habits are part of a particular religion’s accepted dress;

4. The KKK uniform is a recognisable uniform of hate and racism; and

5. A motorcycle crash helmet is a – hello – HELMET!

But what does this have to do with business?
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Work out your divorce before you get married!

As a business advisor, I have advised my fair share of start up businesses where the owners have been friends or colleagues starting as co-owners. I have also sat through many a business dispute between these people who started off as friends, colleagues, and co-owners!

You will be well familiar with the much touted statistics of the large proportion of start up businesses that fail. Yet even businesses that succeed may eventually (and more often than you think) have a falling out between co-owners.

It is predictable that when you are at the beginning of an exciting idea you think it will last forever. Yet, it is also predictable that circumstances will change and the business is unlikely to stay the same. The business may ebb and flow and different people may have different risk tolerances for that ebb and flow. Opportunities may arise and different people may view those opportunities very differently depending on their own priorities.

If nothing else, relationships change with time, emotions change with time, energy levels change with time. Profits and growing wealth (or the opposite!) raise questions never asked at the start of the relationship.

So, when asked what is the single most important structural thing to consider when two or more people start a business together, I don’t say type of entity or share values, I say “write up your divorce papers before you get married!”
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