Hope Is Not A Business Strategy: How To Take Control Of Your Business So It Won't Take Control Of You

By C.T. Knabusch

Are you relying on hope to expand your revenues and reduce your hours? 

Are you feeling overwhelmed by your small business? Working too many hours for too little pay? So focused

• Language: English
• Publisher: 13Ten Business Solutions, LLC
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986839615

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

HOPE WILL NEVER result in greater business revenues, nor more free time. Hope is not a course of action.

Meaning . . . "

Hope

is not a business strategy," a phrase I frequently repeated throughout my 30+ year career in operations. Especially when we were looking forward, making projections for the next quarter, fiscal year, or five-year plan. It was also commonly heard when deciding what to do when we missed performance numbers. Hope is not a business plan, meant we needed to focus on the issue at hand and do some planning so that we’d know what action to take. Waiting for circumstances to come about and responding to them was not going to be a sufficient course of action and something would invariably be missed, most probably, performance metrics.

Yet, even then, I received pushback because planning was unpopular or was difficult or time-consuming. While those perceptions might have been correct, having a plan was always better than not having one, even when the conditions/circumstances didn’t follow our plan and we had to adjust. The purpose of planning wasn’t to cover every eventuality, but rather to think through possibilities, both good and bad, and consider various alternatives while the time for thoughtfulness was available.

In discussions with small business owners, I found that some of their issues were the same ones I encountered while in corporate America. The difference is that corporate America has departments, divisions, and teams to address those issues one way or another. Granted, that doesn’t guarantee success either, but the small- or mid-sized business owner operates much leaner and is frequently wearing multiple hats at any given moment, and thus has not always had the time to build the processes, procedures, and systems that make up the operations of the business.

This is not because they are lazy, but because they are

busy—running

their business, generating revenue, working to satisfy customers, providing jobs and opportunities for their employees, and making a living for

themselves—they

just haven’t had the time to step back and think about the various aspects of their business and document them. This generally leads to an application of strategy other than the one they might have desired: it now means that they are relying upon hope as a part of their business strategy. In all my years in operations, hope was never a strategy that achieved what was desired; instead, it led to safety issues, failures to fulfill customer requirements, performance failures, etc. At times it may well have been the only strategy available, but we worked quickly to address that and thoughtfully create appropriate strategies to fulfill the needs of our customers, stakeholders, leaders, and communities in which we lived and worked.

Business strategies are plans used to fulfill the needs of our customers, stakeholders, leaders and communities in which we live and work.

Throughout this book, we’ll examine a number of issues that my wife and I have encountered in dealing with local businesses and outline how planning could have either prevented the issue or laid out a better way through the issue, for both the customer as well as the business. In hindsight, some of these issues we encountered are humorous, but at the time, they were aggravating to all parties. In some cases, they cost either the business or us additional money. I mention my wife, because she’s my partner, confidant, sounding board, and a woman with an exceptional amount of common sense. For the last ten years or more, I have regularly bounced ideas or situations off her in order to get another perspective. In many cases, I received significant insight that I wouldn’t have considered. Many of my examples included in this book were from work we had done on or around our house and as such, she played an instrumental role throughout each of those experiences.

My wife and I were sick of getting poor service from smaller businesses. It’s not that big businesses are immune to poor service; it’s just that we’d been working on a number of projects and using small, local businesses. Whether it was the architect who designed a house plan for us, the general contractor who built our house, the pool contractor who installed a pool, or the other interactions with small businesses over the course of the last five years, we wondered what had happened to taking care of the customer. The only part of the process that they had no issue with was when they required the customer to pay. Now this doesn’t mean we’re down on small businesses or that all small businesses are bad in some way, as that simply isn’t the case. My preference is to use local businesses. I have many friends and relatives who are business owners and I am a small business owner. And, while my wife and I have had some bad experiences, we have had some great experiences, as well! However, the point is that it was the disappointing ones that led me to ask, Why aren’t these businesses living up to their full potential? I wrote this book in order to assist businesses with operations and possibly to improve

both—results

and customer experiences based on the issues I’ve witnessed.

My wife and I have bought and sold a number of houses, built a house, looked into building another house, added a pool, finished a basement, added landscaping and in-home audio/video (AV) and security systems, and have done a number of other projects in the last five to ten years, all working with what might be considered small businesses. We generally research the companies and people we do business with by checking out websites, the Better Business Bureau, examining both positive as well as negative comments, etc., in order to ensure we’re dealing with reputable organizations and firms, as we haven’t always lived in the same area and don’t necessarily have a network of trusted businesses and contractors we’ve dealt with over the years.

We’ve run across some phenomenal small business owners and entrepreneurs in our interactions, but we’ve also experienced some that, with a little thought and work, could have done much better. As so much of my career in manufacturing and operations dealt with increasing efficiency, lowering cost, improving performance, and the like, it’s pretty easy to get a read on a small business and determine how, with a few changes in process or the application of project management or Lean principles, a business could improve their revenue by twenty to thirty percent, at a very low cost, while improving the customer experience and freeing up time (e.g. work-life balance). I believe many of the local businesses my wife and I encountered could have improved both their top-line revenue as well as their bottom-line profitability by ten to thirty percent had they performed some planning throughout their

operations—at

no or very little additional cost to the business. It is my desire that you might improve your organization’s performance by learning from these businesses as well as my own experiences. We will walk through some common small business issues followed by the solutions and potential outcomes.

Before we walk through some of my interactions with various businesses, let’s continue with some background that might be helpful.

—

I’ve worked most of my adult life in what I would term operations,—basically, the area that gets things done. That is not to belittle other areas of organizations as I know they are all necessary. I didn’t have the inclination for accounting/finance, sales, marketing, etc., even though each of those has an operational component. With my career, operations included nine years in the US Army delivering network communications throughout a division; and then, in the private sector, computer programming (for manufacturing primarily), materials management, quality, project management, logistics, supply chain management, production floor management, process improvement, and system integration.

Every functional aspect of business has an operational component. Whether it be accounts payable generating invoices and sending them out to customers, credit and collections determining the creditworthiness of a customer, or later having to collect payment from a customer, or any number of other functions, each has their own back-office operations, and that’s what this book is about. I do not have the technical background to offer suggestions or ideas about the technical aspects of accounting, or law, or advertising, or the techniques and aspects of any number of other business functions, but I have an extensive background in operations and the technology application thereto.

This book isn’t primarily about examples and issues from my life in corporate America, but rather from my and my wife’s interactions as customers with American small- to mid-sized businesses over the past few years and how those small businesses and their counterparts out there could improve their operations and thus their bottom line through lessons I’ve learned throughout my career. Yes, I do apply what I have learned from corporate America, but in doing so, I attempt to keep in mind the more limited resources of small- to mid-sized businesses.

While this book is intended to be read from beginning to end, it does not have to be. The sections and chapters have been set up to be self-contained, for the most part. The table of contents and index are created in such a way to allow you to quickly find the part you seek assistance with, more like a reference book. Feel free to approach this book in whatever way provides the greatest value to you.

Hope is never much of a strategy as it suggests that nothing can be or has been done to prevent or react to a given situation. As such, I cringe when I hear managers, executives, leaders or business owners say things like they hope to hit a particular performance target or they hope to make it through a tough period. Rather than sitting back and just passively rolling with circumstances taking what comes and seeing what happens next, leaders take an active role in setting expectations and adjusting to developing circumstances. So what’s the difference? Activity versus passivity. Thoughtful introspection, insightful planning, and quick responsive actions to ever-changing business conditions is required to lead a successful business.

This book is about how planning can positively impact all aspects of business performance and allow managers, executives, and owners to better lead their operations. Having a plan is always better than not having one, even when the conditions and circumstances didn’t follow the plan and adjustments have to be made. The purpose of planning isn’t to cover every eventuality, but rather to think through the possibilities, both good and bad, and consider various alternatives while the time for thoughtfulness is available.

Thoughtful planning allows businesses to set expectations, perform analysis of existing or potential scenarios, and evaluate data as well as risks in order to anticipate and make appropriate decisions to optimize expected outcomes. This book examines some instances where the application of Lean or project management principles, whether through prior planning or in reaction to a gap between expectations and delivered performance, would have improved the customer experience, saved the business money and/or time, and allow efficient and effective operations.

PART I:

THE PROBLEM AND INTRO TO SOLUTION

CHAPTER 1:

THE BUSINESS FOUNDATION

— VALUES, PURPOSE, VISION, MISSION

IN THIS BOOK, we’ll talk about strategies, plans, problem-solving methodologies, and more, but before we do, let’s set some foundational aspects and definitions. If need be, feel free to skip ahead and come back only if this is helpful to you.

The reason we must talk about these foundational issues, in addition to ensuring common definitions, is this question: How do you create a

plan—whether

a contingency plan, an operational plan, or a project

plan—if

it doesn’t align with the organization’s mission, vision, values, purpose, etc.? This book isn’t meant to be a how-to on creating these aspects of a business as it’s assumed that you already have them. If not, there are numerous books (one of my favorites on the topic is Vision, Mission, Values, Aspirations, Do They Matter? by Sam Schreim) and articles out there to help you through that process. But yes, these are, in a sense, another type of planning and, as such, they require thoughtful introspection. Let’s start with the values, purpose, vision, and mission of a business.¹

Values

In my way of thinking, values are those everlasting principles or standards that guide our behavior and that of our organization. We need to think through and understand these such that they can be articulated to others (typically employees) because business organizations are generally greater than a single individual. Most of us don’t sit down and ponder our values; they are just there. We may have picked them up from our religion, our upbringing, or in other ways along our journey. Much like we’ll say later about planning, these need to be thought through and documented. Periodically, we should revisit them to ensure they are still relevant to us and our organization.

Ultimately, a business needs to act consistently, with regard to its employees, suppliers, and customers. But how does it do that without taking the time to think through and plan the business’s values and then communicate them to the entire organization?

We’ve all seen value statements at businesses; they range from the large, fancy ones from corporate America to the simple ones on a wall as you enter a small, local business. We’ve also seen the anti-values postings like, Sorry, yesterday was the deadline for all complaints. And while this may give us a chuckle, it also tells us something about the values of that organization, or at least one of its people. Be careful about posting anti-values signs