Strategic Discipline Blog

Fred Smith’s vision and focus helped drive FedEx to become one of the most successful companies in the world.

His quote, “Two Words Drive the Business, the Promise and the Process,” provided clarity to drive the business’s success.

Do You Know What Drives Your Business?

Clarity is critical in driving business success. Do you know what drives your business? Fred Smith did, and I’ll bet anyone who was 10 years of age or older in 1979 knows what FedEx promise was. Here’s a quick refresher.

“When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight.”

This promise and FedEx hub and spokes process drove their success.

How do you discover what drives your business? How do you know you’re focused on the “right stuff.”

As we’ve shared several times in these blog posts, Discovering Your Hedgehog Concept – Your Move To Greatness?, HEDGEHOG CONCEPT Three Circles Signal Greatness, Double Bonus – Customer Discovers X Factor and Profit Per X, and Discover Your X Factor (#9-24-13) Newsletter #145, Jim Collins in Good to Great, discovered all the Good to Great companies accelerated their growth once they had discovered their Hedgehog Concept.

This graphic isn’t just symbolic it’s literal in its meaning.

Breakthrough is achieved when a company identifies its Hedgehog Concept!

Your hedgehog concept is comprised of three elements:

• What you can be best in the world at?
• What are you deeply passionate about? and
• What drives your economic engine?

As shared in HEDGEHOG CONCEPT Three Circles Signal Greatness, these three elements correspond to your brand promise, your core purpose, and profit per X.

All three are an iterative process to discover.

None is more relevant to driving your business than Profit per X.

How to Discover Your Profit Per X

I won’t diminish the value of discovering your Purpose and Brand Promise, however, Shannon Susko’s tool for discovering your KFFM, (Key Function Flow Map), is extremely helpful to identify your Profit per X.

Your KFFM visually shows how money flows through your organization. It also is how a customer moves through your business.

Most companies have not mapped out how cash or their customer flows through their business. How many steps does it require to get cash flowing into your business? When you understand this, when you can discover shortcuts, or possibly determine who your best customer is, who will buy from you for a profit, you’re on your way to recognizing what drives your business.

Constructing your KFFM (Key Function Flow Map), begins with identifying the Key Function Chart of your organization. Then you begin creating these high-level functions into a flow chart that maps money flowing through your organization. The KFFM can have several different levels which help each function explore, and identify how their individual function works, to refine and monitor its efficiency, revealing key metrics to provide feedback.

We’ll explore more on the KFFM in our next blog to understand the vital role this plays in your business. Until then, learn more about Profit Per X and the KFFM by watching this 14-minute video from peter Boolkah and Shannon Susko.

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems today to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact in the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M) business Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – KFFM (Key Function Flow Map)

The KFFM is the foundation for everything in your business. What flows through the KFFM is widgets, which are the non-fiscal things your people control in your business. With this view, you can recognize the key elements your business needs to make better, faster decisions. The Key Function Flow Map is the foundation for how your company makes money. We’ll discover how to identify it next blog.