Entrepreneur | Teik Oh

How to Plan for Your Business

Sep 08 2015

There are three types of plans that you can develop in your business.

But before I go through them, let me ask if you do any planning in your business?

Many people in small business ask why they need to do any planning at all, other than the most basic – they plan what they want to sell, they plan where they open their shop, and they plan to open! They say “I just do it!” Well, just doing it is like saying “Fire, ready, aim!”

In other words if you don’t put one foot ahead of the other, in the right sequence, you are going to fall flat on your face. How can you “just do it” if you don’t know what “it” is, whether you are equipped to “do” it, and at the end of the day have you moved from where “just” is? How can you grow your business if you don’t know where it is you want to get to in order to be successful?

So, let’s get back to the different types of plans and how to plan. Read More

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What does “working on your business” actually mean?

Sep 01 2015

I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase “don’t work in your business, work on your business.”

But what does that actually mean? For most of us it probably conjures up the difference between working hard at making or selling your product, or keeping the books, or labouring over the store – physical or online, versus a picture of being a relaxed leader working out “strategies” and “innovation” to grow your business.

For those of us who have tried to apply it practically, that picture simply doesn’t work! While you try to take time out to work out strategies or develop new techniques in your business, things just don’t happen in it. While we try to work on our business by developing better marketing plans or improving customer service, all it means is that later we have to catch up on working in the business. Am I right? Running a small business is a busy task!

When I started my first business I was busier than busy. I left my big international financial services firm to start a medium sized consulting practice with a couple of partners. True, while I spent a lot of my working hours (or let’s be honest, most of my waking hours) working in the business by dealing with client affairs and consulting directly with clients, I was able to work “on my business” during Partner-meetings where we discussed marketing, new products and hires and fires. To me then, that was working on the business and it wasn’t too difficult because we had borrowed and used the excellent internal administration systems from our previous firm.

But that was it wasn’t it – I wasn’t really working on my business, I was working in the administration of my business.

I found the real truth of working on the business when I left that partnership to start my own boutique consultancy where I hired from scratch and had to set up from scratch. There was no way I could have continued to work in the client advisory side of the new business as well as in the administration of the business – I would have killed myself.

So what did I do? Read More

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Should I buy a business to give me a salary?

Aug 25 2015

I recently spent three months in constant contact with a client advising him on a management buy out.

Not so unusual….except this time I was trying to talk him out of it!

Here’s the situation, my client is an engineer, and has been an engineer all his adult life. He rose through the ranks of the company he has worked for since he left university until he became General Manager reporting to the CEO who was also the owner. During his career with this (small) company, he helped to draft procedures manuals and develop their internal systems; he got to know the clients and while not in sales, he helped develop relations through his work and his network with the customers was excellent.

Then, the family owners decided to sell out to a publicly listed company. My client stayed with the company and started reporting to a new CEO appointed by the public company. He can’t say that his relations with the CEO and the new owners, represented by the Chairman, were bad. Indeed they were courteous, but simply different.

Of course it would be. He had gone from direct relationships with people he had known since he was a young man 20 years ago to corporate relationships with people he hardly saw. As friendly as these new relationships were, they had to be different.

After a few years, the market turned. The specialist engineering services provided by his company started to lose demand, and the business results plummeted. The public company held on for as long as it could but then had to make the commercial decision – it had to sell the company and asked if my client wanted to enter into a management buy out.

I won’t detail the financial structure as that’s not the point of this article. Suffice to say that the company was not worth anything after the last couple of years’ bad results.

However my client believed he could revive its fortunes and turn it around – in the last couple of years, the CEO and the Chairman had not listened to his warnings about how to conduct operations and how to market their services and he felt they were starting to lose contact with his network. However he had kept contact and felt that he could bring their business back, as well as make the operations more efficient.

The point was, how much would this cost him? Since the business was worthless, and closing it would cost the public company hundreds of thousands in redundancies and other costs of closure, I felt he was in the best bargaining position. We worked out scrap value for the plant and equipment, agreed that we would not take over any liabilities, and decided that was our bottom line. I discussed with him in detail how it was simply not worth more since there was no “goodwill” in a loss-making company, and any up-side would have to be put in by himself after the takeover.

That was the context – it should have been a short negotiation. Either the public company would negotiate a little then accept, realising that this was the best offer, as otherwise they would not receive any money but would have to pay out a lot of closing costs, or they would refuse and my client needed to walk away.

So why did it take three months? Read More

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A “proper” planning process

Aug 18 2015

In over 30 years’ experience in advising clients on planning I believe very strongly that there is a correct process to follow when you are preparing your strategic or business plan.

At the same time, I have also seen many attempts at different ways to prepare strategic or business plans by consultants who have never had to live through the implementation phase of planning, when client staff go “Huh? What exactly are we supposed to do here?”

I have just spent some time with a client who has prepared their plan exactly in that way. While I was advising them on the financial aspects of their business, their Chief Operating Officer was internally preparing their strategic plan, which I had a chance to look at since it would obviously have an impact on their financial strategy and budget. It was not my role since, as a gun-for-hire consultant I can only do what I am contracted to do. However, for the benefit of my client I felt I had to provide some warning about what I felt were the shortcomings of the planning process to the CEO.

As a consultant you have to approach these situations carefully. You do not want to seem critical so that you look like you are touting for more work; you do not want to insult internal staff and put them off side in case you have to work with them on other issues – yet, I always feel a responsibility to provide an independent view of what I see that may affect their business.

Here, for nothing, is a list of what I thought was wrong with the process and the resulting planning document.

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Customer Service in frontline staff

Aug 11 2015

As your business grows, you no longer have the only contact with your customers. More and more, that front-facing position is being filled by your frontline staff – your sales people, your front of house reception, your people who meet and greet and deal with customers day to day.

The customer service instincts that you displayed now have to be passed on to your frontline staff. So how do you breed that customer-service mentality into your team?

The principles are actually quite simple – ensure your team is vision-driven, build strong teamwork, create vision-centric KPI’s and provide rewards for doing the right things, as explained in this video.

Some key steps include:-

1. Ensure customer service starts with understanding your “brand”.

Your frontline staff need to understand what your “brand” is, as reinforced by your business vision statement. What does achieving your vision mean to your customer? What values will your staff need to uphold in front of the customer to ensure that the vision comes alive? What indications does your vision statement give them on how they should deal with a complaint? Are they empowered to make decisions about customer-service as long as their decisions align with the indicators in the vision?

2. Reinforce good teamwork

Remove any barriers to teamwork and create a structure that shares knowledge about clients and about service. Provide systems that give frontline staff all they know about customer preferences. Allow staff to hand over to someone else in the team more appropriate for the task or the customer.

3. Negotiate and implement KPI’s that measure attainment of the vision in customer-service

Remove Key Performance Indicators that measure output (how many customers served) and instead implement KPI’s that reinforce vision-centric outcomes (how many customers received what they asked for, how many customers received more than they asked for).

4. Reward vision-centric outcomes

Stop paying bonuses for income generated from customers. Instead create rewards that that actually reward behaviours that produce outcomes described by the vision and brand. Instead of awarding an award for the highest sales every month, how about awarding the person who satisfied customers? High sales may be one-off, satisfied customers come back again and again.

Get over to the Resources section of https://teikoh.com to see what other models, worksheets and templates can help you grow your business the right way.

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Increase your sales through a highly focused marketing plan!

SMART Marketing: In this book, the owners of a small business are led through the SMART Marketing 7 Step Process to produce a marketing plan targeted at their most desirable customers. Any business can use these principles and in 4 to 6 weeks implement a plan to get them through the door! Find out how...

The SMART Marketing Workbook: Companion to “SMART Marketing”, this workbook sets out the SMART Marketing process in 7 workshops for you and your staff to complete questionnaires and templates that at the end, form the marketing plan you need to sell your REAL product to your REAL customer! View now...

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How to Plan for Your Business

What does “working on your business” actually mean?

Should I buy a business to give me a salary?

A “proper” planning process

Customer Service in frontline staff