Strategic Discipline Blog

What’s the shape of your business?

Could it use a dose of adrenaline to get it moving in the right direction?

Do you know what your One Thing is for 2018?

Do you know what your One Thing is for first quarter 2018?

Is your company following Pearson’s Law: “When performance is measured, performance improves.  When performance is measured and reported back, performance improves exponentially?”

Does everyone in your business have an individual dashboard, know their expectations, and accountabilities to visibly see their progress?

What’s the percentage of “A” players on your team?

Does your business have a process to disrupt yourself, or are you in danger of your competition disrupting you?

SCALING UP YOUR BUSINESS

We’ll be sharing ideas and answers to all of these questions at our Scaling Up Business Growth Workshop, November 1^st at The Kirkwood Hotel in Cedar Rapids, IA.

Decisions equal success.  There are Four Decisions, in your business, you must get right, or risk leaving significant revenues, profits, and time on the table.

These Four Decisions: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash generate the following outcomes inside your business:

When you look at the outcome of these Four Decisions, what pops out to you?

What is the result you’re not achieving in your business? 

Even though most businesses face continual challenges in all four areas, challenges in one of these areas usually overshadows the rest.

Your first decision is to choose which one of the four to focus on next.

ONE THING

You simply can’t accomplish everything at once.  As much as you believe you need to work on everything that is confounding you and your business, this practice doesn’t work effectively.

Instead of helping you get more accomplished, working on everything makes matters worse.  It’s a simply understanding of what Verne Harnish (author of Scaling Up and the Rockefeller Habits) reminds us, “less is more!”

We’ve explored The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller, Jay Papasan in a number of blogs.

The foundational principal at our Scaling Up Business Growth Workshop, November 1^st at The Kirkwood Hotel in Cedar Rapids, IA is One Thing. 

To discover which of the Four Decisions outcome is most problematic in your business?  Ask this question:

What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Can One Thing make a significant difference?  Watch this video to get an idea of how this principle works. (Domino Chain Reaction:

A domino can knock over another domino 1.5x larger than itself. A chain of dominos of increasing size makes a chain reaction starting with a tiny push knocking down a subsequent array of much larger dominos.

PROVEN TOOLS AND STRATEGIES TO SCALE UP SMARTER

Attend our workshop and expect to learn:

ALIGN: Get faster results with less effort by developing organizational clarity and accountability.

ACCELERATE: Develop a strategic advantage over your competitors and position your brand as a market leader.

ADVANCE: See your company’s reputation and revenues soar as employees fulfill 100% of all promises.

INVITATION

In order to achieve your One Thing, you need an action plan to achieve it. You need to repeat this approach continuously. To identify and focus on your next One Thing.

When you attend Scaling Up Business Growth Workshop, November 1^st at The Kirkwood Hotel in Cedar Rapids, IA you’ll have a front row seat to learn how your organization can put the habit of Strategic Discipline in place to repeatedly achieve your One Thing.

We’ll provide you with tools and resources to help you:

• Identify Your Core Values
• IF you have Core Values – make them come alive in your business
• Identify your “A” players, and create a plan to develop and discover more.
• Improve your Cash Flow by discovering the 4 elements to the Cash Conversion Cycle: Sales, Make/Production & Inventory, Delivery, and Billing & Payment. Then walk through an exercise with the three ways you can improve each element.
• Complete a SWT of your business: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Trends. Discover why Trends are an important aspect for forecasting your business’ future.
• Discover how to Execute consistently using Strategic Discipline, the 3 key elements for identifying Priority, Metrics and the proper Meeting Rhythms to seamlessly achieve your objectives.
• Develop an Annual Plan for 2017
• Develop a Quarterly Plan for your first quarter.
• Develop a Process to OUTthink, disrupt yourself, and your Competition.

Bringing your leadership team to this workshop allows you to work through these exercises together.  You may not complete everything to perfection: as a rule, for our Positioning Systems customers plan two days to complete an Annual and Quarterly Plan. We dedicate time to identify key strategic elements to implement.

A element you won’t find at any of the other Gazelles’ Scale Up Business Workshops is a 30 minute segment dedicated to Outthink the Competition, and getting you started on Disrupting Your Business.

Having a coach to help facilitate this process dramatically improves your ROI.  P&L Technology practiced the Rockefeller Habits principles for years.  Yet gaining agreement on their One Thing, organizing and aligning their team at their annual planning sessions was at best chaotic.  The result: uneven performance and failure to achieve objectives.  Read about the results P&L attained in just six months with the help of Positioning Systems Strategic Discipline at What Value Do You Offer to Support Your Pricing – Scaling Up Example.

Explore the Four Decisions that drive growth in your business: Strategy, Execution, People and Cash at our Scaling Up Business Growth Workshop, November 1^st at The Kirkwood Hotel in Cedar Rapids, IA.  Make 2018 your best year ever. Register by following the link above or click on the links in the upper right hand column of this blog.

FIVE HABITS OF OUTTHINKERS – NEXT BLOG

Can you think like an Outthinker?  Next blog we’ll look at the five habits of Outthinkers, and whether can develop the practices of being an Outthinker.