How Strong Does Your Business Need To Be?

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If you’ve been following my work you’ll know that I’m all about how, to be successful, you need to build a strong business and that you do this by establishing a strong foundation.

But just like for a building, the size and type of foundation that you need to establish will vary – you don’t need to build a foundation that would hold up a skyscraper if you’re just putting up a new shed in your back garden.

A solid business foundation comprises 3, what I call Fundamental Building Blocks Strategy Building Block, Systems Building Block and Leadership Building Block.

The foundation you build, and hence the strength of your business, needs to be enough for the size of business you are now and to be able to successfully grow, over the next 2 or 3 years, to the next level.

That means these 3 building blocks need to be right for your business and not necessarily anyone else’s. Let’s look at each building block for different sizes of business…

Strategy Building Block

What do you aim to achieve and how will you achieve it?

The Micro Business

If your business is a micro business or start-up your strategy should be focused on you establishing a position – some ground – in your chosen market.

Its priorities would be based around customer attraction and conversion and on overcoming specific key challenges that obstruct that aim.

The SME

For a small to medium sized business you’ve established your position and now you want to expand and your strategy is all about growth, whether that’s targeting volume customers, higher-value customers, new market sectors, introducing new products and services, new business models and so on.

The Large Business

For a large, global corporation, as well as staying ahead of competition through innovation, the strategy will need to focus more on consolidation costs and on making the organisation run more efficiently and effectively.

Systems Building Block

How well will your business run?

The Micro Business

With only you (or maybe one or two others) in the business it clearly won’t run without you but that doesn’t mean you have to run around doing everything.

Identify your key processes and make sure they run smoothly. Automate as much as you can, such as can be done with email marketing and online sales, and outsource as much non-essential work as possible.

The SME

As your customer base and workforce grows you need more efficient systems and processes to manage the workload and deliver the products and services as well as you did when you started out.

You also need better tools and metrics for monitoring progress and keeping on course.

The Large Business

The Systems block becomes more important the larger a business gets. At this size, your bottom line profit can be impacted as much by how well your company runs as how much revenue you make.

Leadership Building Block

How do you stay in control and keep your business on course?

The Micro Business

Your leadership skills and attributes boil down to managing yourself, your customers and your suppliers.

Your self-discipline and self-reliance, your confidence, your productivity and your ability to communicate and build relationships with customers and prospects are most important.

The SME

As you grow and bring in people your leadership skills turn to leading others as well as yourself, to building stronger, more important relationships and to spending more time looking at where your business is heading and avoiding or eliminating that which can harm it.

The Large Business

As a CEO of a large company your leadership needs to be supported by a team of other leaders and managers who essentially keep the business running whilst you focus on steering the ship, producing a healthy return for your stakeholders, adapting to changes in your industry such as technology and legislation and on being creative and finding ways to differentiate versus your competitors – basically all the big picture stuff.

Last Word

Create the building blocks and foundation that are right for your business. When starting out don’t overcomplicate it – keep it simple and stay focused. But do build a foundation.

No matter how small a business is, it needs a strategy to show the way, it needs some basic processes in place to free up the leader so that he or she can focus on establishing and growing.

Does your business foundation make your business strong enough to achieve your aims? Find out more and test the strength of your business – download the eBook (and Audio book) “How Strong Is Your Business” and make sure your business is strong enough.

 

Related posts you may have missed:

Struggling to Grow Your Business? – Become a Big Fish

One of the most common reasons for a small business struggling to grow, or even to keep on top of current business, is that they spread themselves too thin. They have too many customers spread across too many sectors.

When you start out you just want people to buy your products and services and you don’t care who they are and what type of business they have – you just want their business.

Strategy Equals Hard Choices

The purpose of a developing a good strategy is that it clearly shows where you are aiming to be and sets out the steps you need to take to get there.

By setting out this destination and the path to it, it’s then down to you to stay on that path. To do that, you have to make (often hard) choices.

You have to choose your ideal market niche(s), who to target in that niche and what you can deliver in order to give you the return you need to hit milestones along the path to this destination.