Know your purpose
It sounds simple enough, but do you know why you’re in business? Have you ever thought about it? If you haven’t, you need to start.
“You’ve got to have identification of a mission statement of what you’re about,” Martin says. “What’s the purpose of your enterprise? What are your goals and objectives for that? Once you identify that, you can decide the approach and strategy of how you want to operate the business, conduct the business and fill in the other parts that help you along the journey.”
You also need to secure resources to invest in your business and start breaking down your financial metrics.
“But all that is much more difficult if you don’t start with being grounded as to what your mission statement is and what you’re about and the broad-based goals and objectives,” Martin says. “If you properly address having a mission statement and having goals and objectives, you’re able to develop a comprehensive longer-term business plan. It’s very much part and parcel to the whole consultative approach we have for wealth management.”
The goal when helping clients with wealth management is determining what the clients want and mapping out a plan for how they can achieve that goal. It works the same way with a business in that you shouldn’t expect that you can do it all yourself.
“You have to have the right kind of mentors and advisers around you,” Martin says. “Advisers can be a board of advisers, they can be key client relationships, they can be key employees in the mix. It can be external partners that fulfill advice competency to your enterprise that you don’t necessarily warehouse within the business enterprise. … The advantage of working with mentors and boards of advisers is to draw upon their experiences in having similar paths of professional experience.”
The effort to be able to clearly state what you do and show what your business is all about and demonstrate planning will pay off in your ability to retain employees.
“The fact that you have it and the fact that you can stand up and communicate it to your employees as it relates to an overall plan for the business and the vision for the business puts you in a much better position to have employees who view your company as being something on an enduring and sustaining basis,” Martin says. “It all ties back. The existence of the plan puts you in a better position to articulate and communicate to your employees and to your clients what your company is about.
“Take a business where there’s X employees and it’s just a job and they show up and they punch in and punch out and it’s a place to collect a check,” Martin says. “They don’t feel like they are part of a bigger thing. They’re not locked into the mission of what they are fulfilling to the client and other possible goods that a company exists for.”
By attaching a purpose to your company and a clear reason for being in existence, you give your employees a foundation to stand upon.
“When companies define themselves much more broadly about an enduring purpose, the clients understand that and the employees are there as more of an avocation as opposed to a job,” Martin says.
