Now let’s consider a question. If I were to tell you that there were two business owners in the same industry and they were equally smart and had exactly the same number of years of experience. Now given that scenario if I were to ask you which of the owners would be the most successful I would get answers ranging from the one that works the hardest to the one that has the best sales staff to the one that is the luckiest.

In my consulting practice I learned that companies that had operating plans consistently outperformed companies that did not have an operating plan. Think about it. The reason is simple; attempting to operate a business without a clear concise plan that leads you to your goals is just like trying to go on an automobile trip without a map. If you are going to maximize your results you must have a plan. And once you have a plan you must live the plan, not just once a month or once a week but every day.

And if you are going to have an effective plan you have to get your entire team involved in its creation. Sure, as a business owner you could go into your office and sit down and go through the process of creating a plan and present it to your employees and tell them this is your plan. Go out and be sure we achieve this. Your employees just have a plan that they think has been shoved down their throat. This is an ineffective way to manage. It’s kind of like a quote I saw from a former marketing executive at Citrix Corporation. He said “Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say.” If you don’t involve your employees in the creation of the plan, they certainly have no sense of ownership. Owners of winning companies involve their employees in the creation of a plan. Every employee should be responsible for developing their portion of the plan. We’ll talk in a future article about how you use your plan to drive profitability.

Another difference between winning companies and losing companies is that winning companies have effective financial reporting. That means that once a month no later than 10 working days after the close of the month the owners have an income statement, which compares their operating results against their plan, a balance sheet and a statement of source and application of cash. In today’s world it’s not hard to do. There is a lot of software like QuickBooks available, what it really takes is discipline to do it. But however you do it, this is vital. You have to know how you are doing early enough to change what you are doing if your operating results are not what they should be.

Next winning companies have an effective communication process, now listen, I implement a lot of different processes for clients and they don’t always agree with the new process but they trust me enough to allow the change to be made. I mean I could tell a client that to improve performance he needs to let me shave his head in front of all of his employees and I would generally get a little push back but in the end I would hear “well ok if you think it will help. But Of all of the processes that I implement for my clients this communication process is the one that the owners usually fight me over. They will say things like “we don’t need a formal communication process, I mean we see each other and we talk.” This is one of those non-negotiable things for me. When I begin working with a Company I do some anonymous employee questionnaires and invariably I learn that employees are hungry for more communication from top management and they rarely feel as though they know what is going on. This is a quote from a former manager at AT&T long lines “We know that communication is a problem but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees.” You obviously cannot manage like that.

In the next article we will continue our discussion of corporate communication and other processes that separate troubled companies from triumphant companies.

Sandy Steinman, the Author of The Small Business Turnaround Guide-Take Your Business from Troubled to Triumphant, is a consultant and a turnaround specialist for small businesses and the President of Profitability Partners, a consulting firm specializing in small businesses. The book can be purchased at: get the book here

Sandy Steinman, the Author of The Small Business Turnaround Guide-Take Your Business from Troubled to Triumphant, is a consultant and a turnaround specialist for small businesses. The book can be purchased at: http://www.businessturnaroundguide.com. Sandy is President of Profitability Partners, Inc

Author Bio: Sandy Steinman, the Author of The Small Business Turnaround Guide-Take Your Business from Troubled to Triumphant, is a consultant and a turnaround specialist for small businesses and the President of Profitability Partners, a consulting firm specializing in small businesses. The book can be purchased at: get the book here

Category: Business Management
Keywords: small business, books on business improvement, business planning, corporate communications