| Fact: Every single company failure in history has one thing in common - failure by its directors and senior management team to respond quickly enough to changing threats and risks.
We passionately believe the way to manage your business and grow it in a consistent and sustainable way is to take a balanced and holistic view of your business.
|
This, in essence, is the "Six Pillars" philosophy.
This approach ensures that equal emphasis is placed on each of the six, inter-related areas and not focused on just one or two narrow, short-term priorities (e.g. sales) which would ultimately lead to an unbalanced company, and in turn, to an unsustainable business in the longer-term.
|
Leadership and Business Direction
This talks about where you want your enterprise to be at any given point in time. Whether a sole trader, partnership or part of a formal senior management structure within a larger organisation, it is important for your company to pull all the different strands together into a cohesive whole, allowing the entire enterprise to move forward.
Brand and Market Position
Too many enterprises focus on sales alone. But what use is increasing your sales by over 50% only to lose more than this if the supporting processes are unable to keep pace with the increased volume? Such weaknesses will lead to increased mistakes, unfulfilled orders, missed deadlines - culminating in loss of market share and negative reputation. Instead, ‘Brand’ concentrates on how your own company is viewed internally; how you think your stakeholders perceive it; how your stakeholders actually view your company; and how you reconcile and manage any differences. ‘Market Position’ is about your products and services and how these perform, are marketed and meet customers’ needs, for example.
Knowledge Management
Focuses on all the information your enterprise has access to and how it is stored, retrieved and cascaded throughout the organisation. It includes your IT structures, CRM systems, internal processes, guarantees and warranties. KM is a two-way street and embraces knowledge used internally as well as externally. It is probably one of the most overlooked but essential elements of growing a successful enterprise.
Financial Planning and Controls
There is little point in increasing revenue by 30% only to see costs rise by a similar amount. In this instance, the question should be, “what’s the point?” Instead, revenues should rise faster than costs in all instances. Financial delegation is the key to success, but this needs to be coupled to unambiguous accountability for those budgets. Everyone within the enterprise needs to understand the importance of cost control.
|
Stakeholder Engagement
Obviously includes employees and customers. But every enterprise, whatever its size, has a wider range of interest groups that can have equally as positive an effect if managed properly. For example, your bank manager(s), accountant and solicitor are essential for growing your business by acquisition. Your competitors can provide relevant market intelligence which can be used to your advantage.
Active management of suppliers from which you buy services or raw materials can lead to substantial savings or allow you room to negotiate better terms.
Partnerships or joint ventures should create maximum benefit to help grow your company. Press and trade journalists can be a good source of market intelligence or to promote your goods or services. Links to the local community not only lead to pride among your workforce, but also to positive publicity and market awareness. And don’t forget policy makers or local politicians.
Never underestimate the range of stakeholders your enterprise relies on – and manage them proactively.
Deployment of Right Skills in Right Place at Right Time
Starts with understanding what skills your enterprise needs and maps it against those it already has. Gaps can be addressed through either training or recruitment. It also means identifying reward packages that maintain motivation and understands what drives individual members of the team. It means overturning conventional thinking so that ‘flexible working’ means team members can be deployed to areas of the business where they are needed. This requires a lot of trust from both those managing and being managed.
It means creating a culture that focuses on the needs of the business, but is also fun and where entrepreneurialism is an innate part of the company.
|
- A decision would have been made by the directors and senior management team to give the go-ahead to develop and implement a new product or service (Leadership and Business Direction). They would have consulted with various other departmental heads in order to achieve this.
- Research would be undertaken to identify which market(s) needs would be met, how the product or service would be market and where in the company’s overall strategy the new product or service fitted (Brand and Market Position).
- New infrastructure and IT systems might need to be developed and installed. Communications bulletins, web site and other marketing materials would all need to be created. Pilot groups of potential clients might be interviewed or invited to participate in customer clinics. New support processes might need to be introduced to support various activities relating to the new product (Knowledge Management).
|
- At various times from inception to delivery, supply chain suppliers would be required to provide raw materials and know-how; additional funds raised from external sources to finance product development; liaison with Government officials to ensure the new offering complied with legislation in consultation with lawyers and accountants; and the trade press invited to the formal launch (Stakeholder Engagement).
- Staff might need to recruited and then trained after the right skills had been identified (Deployment of Right Skills in Right Place at Right Time).
- Finance Department would have considered the viability of the new product and would have forecast revenue, cost of production, profitability, margins, etc. They would have been instrumental in rising additional funding and would have allocated budgets (Financial Planning and Controls).
|
