How to Improve Small Business Evaluations

How to Change the Valuation of Your Business

Developing an Outcome Driven Strategy

Driving the Strategy to Achieve the Desired Results (Part 4 of 4)

Let’s review.

1. If we want a satisfactory outcome to our business life, we need to define specifically the outcomes desired.  I call these your ‘Ends’.
2. ‘Ends’ are not always tangible outcomes like money in the bank.  They can be intangible such as wanting a legacy or taking care of those who have contributed to your success.
3. ‘Ends’ can conflict with one another.  To have attainable success, one must reconcile these potential conflicts and get clear on the ultimate ‘Ends’ to work towards
4. Having well defined ‘Ends’, a strategy can now be built to get to where we want to go.
5. To build an effective strategy we have to accurately assess where we are now and determine what will need to be done/changed to achieve the ‘Ends’.  I have called this a gap analysis.
6. The result of your assessment and gap analysis should be a list of projects.  Building out the detail of these projects gives you an action plan

In this post I am going to talk to you about how we go from the action plan to actually implementing the actions necessary to get the change desired.  This is far from an easy process.  In fact the business landscape is littered with plans whose owners had every intention of implementing but didn’t.   A plan that is not implemented is a total waste of the time and money spent creating it.

The primary reason why plans end up not being acted on is that the total of actions called for are overwhelming in the context of all the normal business and life activities an owner is dealing with.  The result is kicking the can down the road; putting off even starting on the necessary projects because it all seems so overwhelming and complex.

My answer to this problem is to thinks small…really small.  Break the actions necessary into steps that one can readily understand and actually execute in the context of one’s daily reality.  Here’s an example.

Let’s say that our plan calls for us to do some personal financial planning to figure out how much we are going to need from our business to fund our lifestyle.  But you never have done any personal planning before.  So you keep putting it off because you don’t know where to begin.  How could we break this down into small steps that we would actually do?

We might start by creating a sub-project – Selecting a personal financial planner.  We could then break that sub-project into even smaller actions.  The first might be to create a list of our current business advisers and contacts who might know about personal financial planners.  That wouldn’t be so hard to do would it?  Might take an hour or even less.  Then we could have another action for calling and making appointments with those people.  You could probably fit that into your schedule.  Once you had the appointments made.  You could have another action for making a list of questions for your meetings.  That list should probably include getting referrals to specific personal financial planners.  Once you’ve had your meetings with your advisers, you could have an action for consolidating the information and creating your list of questions for the financial planners themselves.  Then there would be an action to call and make appointments with the referred financial planners and one for consolidating the information you learned from them.  Another action might be getting references from those you really liked and yet another for checking those references.  Your final action would be making a decision.  If you could do one action a week, it wouldn’t be long before you had knocked off that sub-project.

And this is the key to driving your strategy.  Break your projects down into very doable actions, only assign yourself as much as you will really get done, and then DO IT.  A lot of very small, logically planned actions, DONE, will get you the results you want.