Copyright Jack Mixner. 714 449 1040. www.mixnerstrategy.com
The Seven Steps
Success requires a game plan, practice in advance, the right people to support you, and implementation. The pay-off? A richer life in all ways for yourself, your family, your community - and your clients. The success game plan follows seven steps. They are simple, but not necessarily easy. Let's work together to create Your Own Strategic Plan.
The seven success steps are:
- Realize You Need a Plan
- Understand Your Personal Values
- Create a Company Mission Statement
- How Vision and Objectives Work Together
- Create Strategies and Tactics Based Upon Personal Strengths - And Opportunities
- Don't Bother If You're Not Going to Implement
- Revisit Your Plan More Frequently Than You Might Imagine.
All that is left is action.
You Need a Plan
In our seven-step process to create - and implement - a strategic plan, the first step is to realize you need a plan. Then, admit you need to learn how to put together a plan. Finally, involve a team in your effort. Consultants working alone might bring in their spouse and family. Sole proprietors might create an advisory board to support them during the process and to give - free - advice.
In the preface to his famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie suggests that the best way to learn and, finally, implement, anything is to use what you learn. My guess it that he thinks people ought to struggle a bit along the way until they are able to apply the principles (Carnegie, pages 27 through 29). Once you have the plan in action, he suggests that you let your team "fine" you for every time you go off plan and do something that does not make sense. Then he suggests reviewing your progress on at least a weekly basis. Repetition is part of the process. On a daily basis, keep notes on your progress for review at the end of the week.
Learning is the first step in the process. Use my format or another - it really does not matter. The goal is to implement what you learn.
The plan gives you a scorecard to measure your progress. It also makes sure you understand what you are doing, and why. We forget the why in the rush to make money. Clients know when you are just about the money. Many times, they are buying not your process, but the heart behind it, with all that implies. Having a plan helps make sure you are about more than just money.
The next step, figuring out your values, helps to get to the underlying heart in all this, the basis for your business success.
Your Personal Values
The place I go to look for a discussion of values is George Morrisey's books (Morrisey, page 27).From a private practice point of view, George suggests values of, for instance,
- Independence/freedom of choice
- Financial return
- Challenge
- Family
- Personal legacy
- Power and influence and
- Principles and ethics.
You might have different values. Another friend of mine focuses on a continuum between success and significance. He has all the success he needs (although he still is building) and is focusing on the significance of everything he does.
Other folks are trying to figure out how to give back to the community. One, for instance, is in the midst of joining the Peace Corps after a long career in strategic planning. You will have your own list of values.
Hawley makes the case that there is a difference between being a manager and a leader based upon their value systems. A manager might be concerned with goals and objectives, while a leader focuses more on vision (Hawley, page 167).
Change is an unpleasant fact. Values help you take into account change in your market niche. Continual learning. Taking risks. Investing in the future. All are values that may influence your future personal, and business, growth (Kang, page 199).
In business, Johnson & Johnson has one of the most comprehensive value systems of any company. During the Tylenol scare, they destroyed their whole inventory of Tylenol and started over again with tamper proof bottles. They did not need to destroy everything. It just felt right. Within a year, they had recaptured a large portion of their once-leading market share.
A simple bulleted list of values suits me just fine. You do not need a bunch of flowery text to make this impressive.
The short list of values you create is easy to apply. If your values are all about money, you will know that you charge for everything. Sometimes you will find a project that a client wants and will pay for that just does not fit your value system.
This is the time when you refer the off to someone else, or point out to your client that they might want to reconsider their strategy. It is still amazing to me how many times CEOs change their strategy when something just does not feel right - even if it is profitable.
Values underlie the entire strategic planning process. Start here in your process.
Company Mission Statement
Now it is time to focus on business. There are all sorts of different types of mission statements. They differ according to which book you consult. When I first started consulting, Birnbaum showed me his simple mission statement formula. He asks just two questions when creating a mission statement:
- What is your product or service? and
- Who buys it, and why (Birnbaum page 124)?
Values are not part of the mission statement, nor are objectives. Just product/service and marketplace. If your mission statement were longer than, say, thirty words, I would look very carefully to make sure it is useful to your company.
Locally, I see a demolition company's huge trucks that say on the side "no job too small". It looks to me like they actually focus on big jobs. I suspect the poor receptionist has a lot of screening to do. A discussion about the company mission statement, and a change in company truck graphics, would make things a lot easier - and profitable.
Just last week I went out on a "get to know a CEO" visit with a potential client. The son of an old friend, I wanted to make sure he got what he wanted and needed, and that everybody ended up looking good. His was a wonderfully successful company. Only one problem. It really did not fit the niche I target. I think we both came to realize that the fit was not perfect. We will see how it ends up.
Mission statements help you - and your potential clients - decide if business makes sense for your company. Sometimes it is better to refer work on to a perfect fit if there is one.
Mission statements help you decide what business to take, where and how to market. Answer two very interesting - and very useful - questions. Sometimes they are not so easy to answer, but they do make things easier.
Vision and Objectives Work Together
At one point, one of the folks who was working on a project with me needed to understand what my vision was relating to the project. It was an economic development project focused on helping entrepreneurs acquire more venture capital. Why were we doing that in Orange County?
One way of looking at it is the purely personal point of view of helping a few people get rich. That is not really what we did. The goal was to help Orange County succeed on the world stage. By helping a local company find funding, we were successfully competing against the tech capitals of the world like Switzerland, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore - and Silicon Valley. A single success helps Orange County succeed on a global scale.
What about your vision? Covey talks about being proactive in everything you do (Covey, page 75). Proactivity fits with vision. Have a picture, even a very vague one, of where you want to end up. Then everything works better. One CEO I spoke with recently wanted to build a company like the ones Collins describes in Good to Great. He had three employees. Think his company is going to grow? I think so. A simple vision - we want to be great - helps define for him the next steps. New hires need to fit the mold. Can they grow with the firm? Will they know how to sell in a large company environment?
Objectives take the vision and make it more concrete for the next year or so. It is OK to be a small firm. If you are going grow, however, state annual objectives that reflect that growth. Make them doable. Make them somewhat hard to accomplish. A stretch is in order if you are going to grow.
In the economic development project above, we stated goals in economic impact terms. We continually measured our results, and set our goals, according to the specific economic impacts our projects had for Orange County.
Having a long-term vision makes sense. Having annual objectives supporting your vision also makes sense. Keep them in front of you at all times. Look at them at least weekly to make sure you are on track.
Strategies and Tactics Based Upon Personal Strengths - And Opportunities
When you attend a National Speakers Association meeting, you learn very quickly that they see one very crucial strategy to succeed at speaking, writing a book. The first national conference I attended actually had a skit with fifteen dancing people all dressed up as books. They are serious about books. Dottie Walters has created a whole industry around speaking and writing (Walters, pages 132 and 180).
I had a client in the pest control business. Every time one of his competitors went out of business, he bought their phone number and their yellow page ad space. In some phone books, his ads were the only ones available. Call any company and you called him. While I will not say if I agreed with the ethics of his strategy, I will say it was very effective.
For folks who like to write, speaking about their books is a very good strategy. Owning ad space in the yellow pages makes sense for a termite company. Locating next to a research university with a teaching hospital makes sense for a pharmaceutical company or a medical device company. If you have the strength, create a strategy that takes advantage of opportunities.
Weiss continually expands upward the envelope of clients he attracts, while handing off smaller clients to other practitioners who provide great service in the smaller company niche (Weiss, page 50). Shenson says never make cold call for business. His focus is on obtaining referrals from existing clients and lecturing to civic, trade and professional audiences in his target market (Shenson, page 18).
How many strategies do you have for your company? Probably not that many. They may change over time, especially if you have a look at, and modify, your strategic planning at least quarterly. New data says that revisiting your plan frequently and modifying it as necessary is a very profitable use of time (Hymowitz, page B1).
Don't Bother If You're Not Going to Implement
I heard Colin Powell speak on leadership recently. His key points:
- Set goals with the your team
- Train your team continuousl
- Provide your team with the resources they need
- Reward your team based upon their performance and
- Provide ethical leadership.
Planning only takes you so far. Build a plan that you and your team will implement.
Make your plan implementable, or do not bother planning.
Revisit Your Plan
Hymowitz describes an antiquated strategic planning process, namely creating - and filing and never using - an annual strategic plan. She says that CEOs practice this process at their own peril. She cites evidence that annual planning cycles generate less that three major strategic decisions, while companies that hold regular (read that monthly, or even bi-monthly) meetings make more than six major decisions (Hymowitz, page B1 citing research by Marakon Associates).
Annual is not enough. Monthly is better. Bi-monthly might be better yet. Include senior management staff who will affect decision-making, and who have information about competitors and implementation strengths and weaknesses.
REFERENCES
Birnbaum, William S. If Your Strategy Is So Terrific, How Come It Doesn't Work? AMACOM. 1990.
Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends & Influence People. Simon & Schuster. 1936.
Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Simon & Schuster. 1989.
Hawley, Jack. Reawakening the Spirit in Work. Berret-Kohler Publishers. 1993.
Hymowitz, Carol. In the Lead: Two More CEO Ousters Underscore the Need For Better Strategizing. Wall Street Journal. 11 September 2006. Page B1.
Kang, Lawler. Passion at Work How to Find Work You Love and Live the Time of Your Life. Pearson. 2006.
Morrisey, George L. Creating Your Future Personal Strategic Planning For Professionals. Berret Kohler. 1992.
Shenson, Howard. Shenson on Consulting Success Strategies From the Consultant's Consultant. Wiley. 1994.
Walters, Dottie and Lilly Walters. Speak and Grow Rich. Prentice Hall. 1997.
Weiss, Alan. Million Dollar Consulting The Professional's Guide to Growing a Practice. McGraw-Hill. 1992.