Your Year-End Goal: Fixing a Business that is 'Stuck'

Maybe your business has been coasting along nicely. You’re making money and not having financial troubles, thank goodness, but your company isn’t hitting its growth projections, or isn’t attracting new customers. Or maybe you’ve had new ideas that have come up in company meetings, but they haven’t been implemented. Whatever the symptoms, the diagnosis is the same: Your business is “stuck.”

There are many reasons this happens to companies. Some don’t have a clear strategy; others have a perfectly good plan but the employees and managers don’t “own” it. Or perhaps you have a beautiful strategic plan, and people are enthusiastic about it. But actually implementing the plan means changing what people do every day, and that’s where inertia sets in. There is often a dynamic at work in companies where there is a business plan but no clear path to implementing it. The average employee’s reaction is: “Great strategy, but what do I do different on Monday?”

These are problems many small business owners face. The good news is there are techniques to use to unstick your business.

A caveat: These are not quick fixes. A business that is stuck probably needs to be reoriented and transformed, and that can’t be done over a weekend. But when done properly, the reward can mean millions of dollars in increased revenue and profit.

The first thing I suggest doing is identifying a small group of managers in the company who will act as a “Strategy Steering Group.” These are the core leaders who are responsible for implementing plans in the company. Keep that group size to no more than eight to 10; a group larger than that becomes unwieldy.

This group will be charged with trying to figure out what the future holds for your business and how your company should respond to these future challenges. Basically, the exercise entails answering the following three questions:

1. What will our external environment look like two to three years from now?

2. Given this future external environment, what should the company look like in two to three years?
3. What changes does the company need to make to look like this in two to three years?

The first thing the steering group needs to do is predict the external forces that will affect the company. All companies are at the mercy of forces like economic conditions, new competitive challenges in their industry or changing client needs. I use a graphic illustration to help the group come up with answers to the first question and to vividly demonstrate how the company is impacted by external factors. The illustration is an example of what external factors will be affecting a hypothetical construction company in the future. As you can see, this construction company will have to deal with developments in such areas as the labor marketplace, the real estate market sector, competition, new technology and more. It is the group’s task to use its expertise to come up with reasonable forecasts of what will happen in the future in each of these areas.

About a month before the Strategy Steering Group meets for the first time, I recommend that the small business owner or a moderator meet with each member of the group on a one-to-one basis to talk about what the company’s external environment will look like in two (or three or five) years — whatever time period is desired. Ideas will surface, but more importantly, the ideas will percolate during the weeks before the group meeting. This is done with each member of the team, and when that process is finished, the business owner or moderator comes up with a diagram much like the one the next page, listing some of the ideas of external forces, along with a summary of some of the ideas that have surfaced so far. When the group finally comes together in a strategy session, it will have a place to start discussions.

One reason not to do this all in one day is that people need time to let ideas bubble to the surface and research things a bit. If you try to undertake the strategy sessions and answer all three key questions in one day, you’ll end up missing some great ideas and major opportunities in the marketplace.

In the big group meeting, which should take a day or two, you’ll usually get through the first two of the three key questions. You’ll get some half-baked thoughts and ideas, and that’s fine. You’re not going to definitively nail down the ideas of what the company will look like in the future, and there will be disagreement in the group in its predictions. This isn’t a science, and no one has to be “right.” The idea is to get everyone to stand outside of themselves, their operating divisions and their day-to-day jobs and get them thinking about the future. At this point, you’ve gotten through question 1 and perhaps through question 2, which asks what the company should look like in two to three years. You’ll probably have a room that is full of flip charts plastered with ideas. That can be overwhelming.