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steps towards

BUSINESS GROWTH - By Mr Rakesh Sharma

Chief Solutions Officer, Prime Performance Solutions

Contents Introduction

02

Create a big ambition

05

Develop strong performance leadership

10

Creating a robust structure

12

Create an empowered team

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INTRODUCTION

Did you ever wonder why are you in business?

O

bviously for making moneyyy‌.! Not really. Your purpose of being in business is not merely making money, money is only a byproduct. Your purpose is much bigger than that. The purpose of the business is to make the human life easier. Right from the beginning of the civilization the human beings have been wanting to make the life easier and better.

Your business is an opportunity to explore yourself and expand yourself. Your business is a playground where you can play your game to the fullest of your potential. Through your business you can contribute immensely to the society and fulfill the purpose of your life.

Through your business you bring in new product and services which make the life of human being easier in some way or the other. Through your business you impact several lives, who may be your employees, your customers or your vendors. These

Your business is an opportunity to explore yourself and expand yourself. Your business is a playground where you can play your game to the fullest of your potential.

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INTRODUCTION lives are getting impacted positively as well negatively.

Your customers who buy your products and services are willing to pay the price for making his life easy and simple. When the business is expanding it is a Win-Win situation for the customer as well as for the business owners.

Therefore, every business owner has an obligation to grow his business, therefore they have been striving to make the business grow‌consistently. But not all the businesses grow to the level of their full potential. If you ask them the reasons of lack of their growth, then you listen various reasons, like economic recession, no market, govt policies, employees and so many others. This is highly intriguing to look at what are the different ingredients of business which can make a business grow perpetually.

Let us look at what are the key contributors of any business which will make it perpetual growing. There four key steps to business growth;

1. CREATE A BIG AMBITION 2. DEVELOP STRONG PERFORMANCE LEADERSHIP 3. CREATING A ROBUST STRUCTURE 4. CREATE AN EMPOWERED TEAM

Let us now explore these steps of business growth.

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1 Create a big ambition

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he first step of the business growth is “having a big and very clear ambition” about our business. Every business owner has an innate ambition to grow. Somewhere they think that they have got a unique product or a unique service through which they can help the humanity. They also think that this product or service must be used by more and more people so that more and more human beings can get benefited from these product and service.

When the business owners become very clear in their mind that what is their purpose of doing the business and what is their ambition in relation to fulfilling this purpose, it is important that they have to articulate this in very clear words.

Our experience has been that most of the business owners in this small and medium enterprises (SME) segment have a very vague idea of their ambition. Most of time of time they are not very clear / sure as to, what do they want to achieve through their business. And it is evident that if they are not clear where do they want to go and what do they want to achieve - how will they achieve that?

The research says that only 3% people in the world have meaningful goal and pursue their goals. These 3% people are far more successful in their life in comparison to remaining 97%.

So the first step towards the business growth is - Defining the ambition. The business

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CREATE A BIG AMBITION owners need to be very clear that what is the kind of potential available in the market.

If they are very clear about the opportunity available at the market place, they can accordingly decide on his ambition. But most of the time we have seen that the business owners do not work on defining their ambition. They do not have clarity – ‘where do they want to go’.

We have seen frequently that very few business owners in the SME segment have documented their business goals. There may be several reasons to it and those reasons may be right or wrong, these reasons may be valid or invalid, but no reasons will justify for not having the written business goals. So, we always ensure that the business owners look at the opportunities around them, look at their strength and then write their goals. Most of the people don't have a very clear idea as to how to write their goals.

Many business owners use a simple and easy approach. They just add some growth percentage to the previous year achievement and take that as the next year's goal. But this is not how we recommend looking at the business gold formulation. This is a very limited to view for deciding on the business goal. This is how you set limiting goals.

This is simply saying, that you are trying to repeat the history and you are not looking at the strengths you possess and the opportunities available at the Marketplace so therefore we recommend that;

ANALYZE THE STRENGTH YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS POSSESS

LOOK AT THE OPPORTUNITY AVAILABLE AT THE MARKET PLACE

ANALYZE THE SHARE OF PIE (SHARE OF AVAILABLE OPPORTUNITY) YOU ARE READY TO GRAB

This is how you can decide your expansion goals. As a business owner if you look at the kind of opportunity available then you will find that there is a huge opportunity and you have not achieved even 1% of it. Therefore, look at your strengths, look at the opportunity available, look at the resources you can organize and mobilize accordingly develop your goals.

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CREATE A BIG AMBITION

Your goals must be the right representation and in alignment of your bigger purpose and vision of your life.

Once we have done this it is important to break your goals into; long term goals Medium term Short term goals

We have seen time and over again that most of the business owners do not have a long-term view of their business. They find it difficult to appreciate and to see what shape their business will take in coming 10 years or 5 years. And the reasons behind this is that they have not trained their mind and made it habitual of seeing the future and planning for future.

But once you start planning for future you will find that you have all the resources to predict the trends of the future quite accurately and you will start succeeding at this. So, make sure that you develop at least five year plan for your business and divide that plan in 3 years, 2 year and 1 year. The 1 year goals are also known as the short term goals.

Again many times we have seen that most business owners only decide their revenue and profit goals. If you are also doing this then I must emphasize that it is very limited view of the business. In the business it is important to have the goals related to customer growth, Employees’ Development and Organizational Process development. So, every business must have four type of goals

1.

2.

3.

4.

Financial goals Customer Growth Employee development goals Organizational Process

development

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CREATE A BIG AMBITION

This is a based on very famous “balance score card approach” for deciding the business goals for your organization.

Also it is important that the goals are written in the smart format- SMART. SMART is an acronym which stands for;

SMART Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Tangible

Goals must be written in SMART format as

It is easier to achieve them and to measure them.

Also, if the goals are written in the smart format it will become easier to ensure

that everybody understands the goals the same way, as the top leadership

understands them.

All the people in the organization will be able to synergize only if they are

understanding of the goal is same among each other.

The goal achievement does not happen on its own unless you have a very strong and robust strategy for goal achievement. This describe the “how” of goal achievement.

The right strategy supports in making the written goals possible and achievable. When it comes to setting up the strategy for achieving the business goal it is important to understand the following:

1. Who is your customer?

2. Who is not your customer?

3. Where will this customer be available?

4. How will you find your potential customer?

5. What are the specific expectations of your customers you

promise to fulfill through your product/ service?

6. How are your offerings unique and what gives you the competitive advantage?

7. What are your strengths which are supporting us in meeting the

customers’ requirements?

8. Do you have sufficient resources in terms of the manpower,

machinery, money and the methods to fulfill the needs of your customers?

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CREATE A BIG AMBITION If you are clear about the above questions you shall be able to ensure that the customer is delivered the product and the services as per his requirements and he is associated with your business not only for his own requirements but also, he is going to recommend to his family and friends. And this is how the customer keeps working for us as a part of our sales team. And he becomes the most effective salesperson and our advocate at the Marketplace.

Now it is important to put down the answers to all the questions so that you can develop an effective Action Plan for meeting your objectives. It is important that we write down a micro level Action Plan for giving in the shape of reality to our ambition.

We have seen most of the business owners do not have a clue as to how to write an effective Action Plan to achieve their business goals.

It is important to use the right brain effectively for developing the right strategy for the achievement of the business goals. Â Business owners need not develop the action plan themselves.

The advantage with business owners is that they have more people in the business as part of their team and this team will help them develop an effective Action Plan. Â If you involve your team members in the development of action plan, then you are actually aligning them with your business goals and action plan at a very early stage and the result of this happens that the implementation becomes very easy. Therefore, take inputs from your team members to;

Align them in your goals Motivate them to implement the strategic implementation Be creative in developing the action plan Gather distributed resources and create synergies

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2 Develop strong performance leadership

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ow we move to the next aspect of the business growth. Next very important contributor to the business growth is the Performance leadership. This aspect about personal leadership of the business owners. It is important to understand: what are the values working principles for the business owner.

On what principle he is wanting to base his business. Is his style is participative or autocratic? All this will decide How effectively he will be able to lead his team to achieve the business goals.

Is the business owners himself performance oriented?

Can he drive his own performance and his team performance?

Is he disciplined enough to execute the developed strategy and action plan to ensure that the goals are achieved?

Does he understand the performance management very well?

Does he do the number crunching and take the informed decisions about his business.

Does he ensure that his team members understand the numbers and the data in the same way as he understands?

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DEVELOP STRONG PERFORMANCE LEADERSHIP

In the nutshell the execution of any strategy is the act of leadership and the business owners has to be a decisive executional leader to make sure that whatever he is thinking and planning or whatever goals he has set, all that is implemented on ground so that the results can be achieved. We recommend the following leadership attributes for business growth:

Right mix of task and relationship orientation Participative decision making Discipline of time line and commitment High level of personal integrity Role model for performance High focus on execution and result orientation Harness creative juices of self and team Team leadership Continuous performance reviews and coaching

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3 Creating a robust structure

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he next important aspect of any business growth is the robust structure. Business is called organization and Organization itself means to work as per and structure. In every business there are certain systems and processes and Standard Operating Procedures through which work is performed.

Are these processes documented and standardized?

Are the team members aligned with organizational processes and trained on processes?

Are these processes being measured through relevant Process Performance Indices?

Are these processes effective and delivering the results as expected?

We have seen very frequently that the SME business owners do not have any documentation around business processes. As a result, everyone in the business will do the work as per their best understanding. But in the absence of working as per the standard process the business results will vary time to time. The quality being delivered to the customer will also very time to time. On sales front sometimes, you will have lots of Orders, on other times you may be sitting idle.

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CREATING A ROBUST STRUCTURE

To have the predictable and sustained results one must have the documented Processes and these processes must be standardized and measured for effective delivery of results.

All-important processes must be documented There must a work flow chart for all important processes from start to finish Internal SLAs must be defined and agreed Effectiveness of processes must be measured through PPIs – process performance indices Process must be re-engineered time to time

We have seen very frequently that the SME business owners do not have any documentation around business processes. As a result, everyone in the business will do the work as per their best understanding.

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4 Create an empowered team

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hen comes the fourth important ingredient of the business growth, which is Creating an empowered team. We have come across to a situation and its treatment very frequently where the business owners are complaining that their employees are not taking responsibility. Â Very frequently they will complain that when they go for a business call they would be able to satisfy the customer and they would get the order, However whenever a salesperson visits he generally is not able to get the order from the customer. This results in lack of trust on sales person and other employees. It has been observed that business owners shall not effectively delegate to their team members.

This leads to another fact that most of the business owners are busy in day to day operations and they are not able to lead happy life.

Each one of them is very busy and they are busy only in the operational activities.

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CREATE AN EMPOWERED TEAM

Following are the common reasons for SME business owners not able to create a strong team.

The small businesses do not have any define process for recruiting the people.

They do not have the efficient interview process and as a result they will pick

up anybody who comes to them first.

They would not pay a good salary to attract the right talent in their organization.

The worst what happens in the organization is that when an employee joins he is not taken through a proper induction and job training and this results that this employee will be put on to the job latest by the second or third day in office working.

This is not an easy situation for any new employee because he doesn't even know that what is expected from him on the job. In the absence of training he will commit lots of mistakes and will become the victim of scolding and frequent rebuking from the business owners and seniors. Very soon the business owners who generally believes in micromanaging the employees will develop certain apprehensions about his performance and he is labeled as poor worker.

But since getting a new employee is equally difficult, they keep on continuing with this poor performing employee who is also demotivated. He is also at risk of losing the job at any point of time so this starts a negative cycle and performance keeps going down.

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CREATE AN EMPOWERED TEAM

So as a part of the growth journey it is recommended that the employees have to be recruited with great caution with a proper interview structure. They are supposed to be interviewed with the highest level of quality and efficiency but subsequently it is important that they are supposed to properly trained for the job which they are expected to do. But the journey doesn't stop here another this is the beginning and therefore his job description and key result areas which should be communicated to him at very early stage of his joining.

Important steps for creating a robust team:

Hire the best fit for position

Follow a very structured interview and selection process

Take the employee through structured and elaborate induction and job

related training

Continuously monitor his progress

Give him feedback time to time

Acknowledge his good work and help him improve where ever he is lacking

Create employee engagement events and recognize and reward employees

for their good performance

Create opportunity for their career growth

Train rigorously for existing job and next job

Recognize the employees for team work

Create team contest and reward the entire team.

For more information on business growth you can be part of our business result management system.

Visit us on www.primeps.in Be part of our free webinar on‌ Register now‌.

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