Develop the strategies
The first thing you have to do is to figure out exactly what you
want to achieve for the year. Bryan and 11 members of his staff
spent several days off-site with the consultant to come up with the
company strategies for the year.
Using a consultant helps to get the process started. Bryan says
you should find someone who fits your culture and understands
your company and your industry. Seeking advice from your local
chamber of commerce, trade associations and professional advisers can help you in finding the right consultant to use.
With the help of the consultant, the company uses a technology-based compared analysis system, which puts all the choices up on
a screen for the staff to sift through.
Before the meeting, employees are given a particular topic to
research and then report back on how the company is achieving it,
why it is important and how it could be improved upon. They also
look at the challenges, risks and opportunities for that topic over
the next year. These are then used when coming up with strategies
for the coming year and also to get employees involved in the
process.
“You come up with 20 ideas that you think are going to take you
to the next level and then you do comparisons,” Bryan says. “This or this? This or this? Which is more important? Do you like this
one slightly, moderately or more than the one above? Or do you
like the one above slightly, moderately or more than the one below
it? You ask that against every bucket of opportunity, and it narrows
it down for you of what the whole group thinks is most important
and will achieve the objectives for the year on revenue and profit.”
The top choices are ranked in order, so then you have to narrow
down your ideas to the ones that are the most important. It needs
to be a manageable number of ideas that you can actually work on
implementing throughout the year. Bryan drives this process to get
the staff to agree on the best strategies for the company.
“You could come up with 10, but we are firm believers that you
can’t do more than five or six things,” Bryan says. “You can do the
other ones, but you need to pick five or six that people can remember. If you pick 10, nobody’s going to be remembering, you’ll just
never be able to remember it or act on it. It’s better to do five
things right than 10 things halfway right.”
Some of the strategies the company picked to focus on for 2009
include accessory sales, improving forecasting and selling into
different segments of the market more efficiently.
While this type of strategy development might seem fast, since
the company spends less than two days actually determining the
strategies, the method is more interactive because of the technology and easier to develop conclusions on the best strategies.
Getting employees involved in the process also helps them
understand the strategies better, and in turn, they help others
understand them, as well.
“As a group we’re always going to come up with better ideas
than a single person could,” Bryan says. “It tentacles out through
the entire organization. If we’re all involved with it and all can
verbalize it and repeat it and live it, sleep it, drink it, eat it,
breathe it, then the rest of the company does also.”
You also need to make sure you’re involved in the development
process, as it shows employees that you are a part of the team and
care about the strategies of the company. Bryan was right there with
his co-workers, presenting a topic and suggesting ideas regarding
strategies. He says if you’re not going to be part of the process, you
might as well not even be in the room helping with it.
It’s easy to come out of strategy development sessions, but you
also want everyone to understand the strategies before you start
the implementation phase, so you need buy-in.
“If you buy in to the fact that the five or six things you pick are
going to make a difference over the next 12 months to help you
achieve your revenue and profit goals, then you need to buy in to
it and your managers need to buy in to that so that it permeates
throughout the entire organization,” Bryan says.
Developing that buy-in goes back to making sure you pick the
strategies that are the most important for your company.
“If you just pick five things that you don’t think are going to help
you at all, then yeah, it’s going to sit on the shelf and nobody’s
going to buy in to it,” Bryan says. “It does start with that process
of, ‘These are five or six things that we’re either not currently doing
or not performing as well as we think we can, that we believe in
our hearts will make a difference in our next 12-month results.’ If
you honestly don’t believe that, then the process was a waste of
time and go back to work and do what you were doing before.”
