BUSINESS STRATEGY
Background
Prior to my moving into the MD role, the business was managed extremely well financially but not strategically. The strategy was, ‘keep doing what we are doing, and the money will keep rolling in’. Great as a short-term plan but flawed in the medium and long term.
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To move the business forward, broaden our client base and protect the future revenue, we needed to have a strategy that supported my vision (see the Culture case study) for the business and generated growth
Action
To distil down what we needed to do, I identified 5 key facets of the business that I felt drive business performance. I knew that if we could manage these 5 areas our growth would come. The facets were People, Product, Process, Prospects and Performance. I deliberately put performance last as I believe that the first 4 deliver the 5th. Subsequently I have added a 6th facet, Place.
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The previous management structure was very traditional and build around the old model of department heads. I felt that this reflected how we were structured internally but did not support my model for business growth. I restructured the management team and introduced a Leadership Team that consisted of one member for each of the of the 5 facets.
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As a Leadership team we developed business goals for each of the 5 facets. The relevant topic expert reviewed our performance against the facet, looked and best practice, market trends and as a team we wrote the top-level business goals.
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I introduced the goals to the staff in a Town Hall meeting, linked that to the development of the business and explained how we were going to build our Performance Review process around them.
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Detail was then added to the business goals to develop annual objectives that were SMART and could be related to by the staff. Department heads were then encouraged to create departmental and individual objectives that supported the overall business goals.
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We ensured that our internal communications were structured around the 5 facets so that everyone saw their relevance, saw how they could support the goals and generally became more familiar and comfortable with the language we used around business goals.
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Results
The goals were created from the top and cascaded down but the delivery against the goals was very much from the ground up. Everyone’s annual objectives were written and managed based on an understanding of the business goals and how an individual could contribute towards them.
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All our internal communications were structured around the facets and the goals. Our quarterly Town Hall meetings were based around the goals. The monthly newsletter had content written by the topic expert from the Leadership Team and was designed around the 5 sections.