Any business needs sound systems to work effectively, but great systems can also define your business. Your business systems allow you to create immense value for your business. The marketing section discusses finding your market-dominating position, achievable by having a unique product or a unique service delivery offering. With great systems, you can turn a commodity business into a market-dominating position as powerful as if you had a fantastic product. In this case, your systems would be your unique product.
Systems give your business a mechanism to increase efficiency for scaling up to achieve massive increases in efficiency, profitability and value. They're critical for the consistency and valuation of your business; they ensure consistent efficiency and quality of service delivery. To build a valuable business, these are the things you need to put in place.
Choosing suitable systems from many different systems, from software systems or mechanical systems or designing the right systems for your business, is critical if you want to scale up and create any business of any serious value.
Take an acquisition, for example; if you don't have the suitable systems in place, prepared for the integration of the new business, you're not going to get the full benefit from the acquisition. So many times, I've seen either large corporates acquiring small entrepreneurial companies for many millions. Because they don't have suitable systems in place, they fail on the systems integration and lose the ability to harness the full potential to leverage the benefits the entrepreneurs created.
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Many years ago in a small office in Fleet Street London, a senior IT manager worked for a large media business. He was developing his vision for the future of his company using his knowledge of IT and communications systems. Unfortunately, his significant budget spend came to the attention of the board. He had been spending what looked like vast amounts of money on IT, and because they did not understand his vision, they became suspicious. The result was they retired him off early. Only later did they discover he had created a global corms network. As a result, one of the largest news agencies emerged with a worldwide dominating position, sending their stock into the billions. So the guy who set up their infrastructure did not get recognised; the board did not understand the strategy or the systems he had put in place.
Some years later, a friend bought one share in each of the top 100 UK stock market listed companies. Being a shareholder, he was entitled to receive the annual shareholder's reports, quarterly updates and prospectus of each company. With this, he set up a unique business intelligence data service. He sold his corporate information business two years later, in 2000, to a global media giant for c. $8m. To my friend's frustration, the acquiring companies management team did not understand the newly presented opportunity and combined value proposition; his business represented this corporation. Instead of running with it, they focused on everything wrong with his old business. My friend watched, amazed that this corporate giant did not grasp and run with his concept as they had the perfect global distribution network to make everyone's dreams come true.
My friend used what he learned from this and now owns a significant global corporate investment data information service, while his old company acquired by seemingly the perfect acquiring investment partner no longer exists.
These two examples demonstrate the importance of clearly understanding your strategy and your business thinking and business systems match. Everyone in your team needs to understand the relevance to get the total value; otherwise, you could be throwing away $Millions or even $Billions.
So the finances may often be a good starting point because you sometimes got to identify which areas are actually working and which are not;
if we start marketing something that isn't working, then you end up with drowning the business instead of improving it.
So we identify the targets, and then we develop a strategy to improve that, then that goes into the sales and marketing.
Seven keys for success is
Finance Systems,
Business Strategy
Sales & Marketing Strategy,
Business Systems,
Business Operations
HR Staff, People and
driver or Management team
Once we got a sort of overall business strategy going, we then design a sales and marketing one that's going to deliver that, and then we got to make sure that the systems are working. So you know, sometimes that means some things have to change, or the reporting needs to be different, you need maybe different reporting back from customers to get that feedback into your sales and marketing and so forth, which then leads into your operations and your people. So if you've got a team of people that aren't used to doing things the way you need it to be done.
Now, to adapt to the new strategy, you need to look at how you're going to address that and get them on board and maybe develop some policies and procedures that help you to achieve that and help people genuinely want to help. They want to do a good job, and they want to be satisfied. But you've got to address the people in the right way that they feel that they're included and part of the team and that leads back into your finances. So you're the driver and your management team, yourself or a single operator, you need to be addressing all six areas and keep
on top of it. This can be really overwhelming, and it is for a lot of businesses because they don't have the right structure in place. And that's the point we leave you with a structure in place that makes it very easy for you to see instantly when it's going right and when it's going wrong and be able to correct it more easily. And as time goes by. This will get easier if we set up in the right systems and processes in the first place.
Watch our 7 part series on business growth strategies See Video No 5 called
'Business Operations Business Consulting Wellington'
Publishers and advertisers can decide how to present their content and what technology vendors to use, all while maintaining and improving key performance indicators.
Publishers and advertisers can decide how to present their content and what technology vendors to use, all while maintaining and improving key performance indicators.
Publishers and advertisers can decide how to present their content and what technology vendors to use, all while maintaining and improving key performance indicators.
Publishers and advertisers can decide how to present their content and what technology vendors to use, all while maintaining and improving key performance indicators.