The Five Key Areas to Increasing Value – Part 1
April 7th, 2021 // 3:46 pm @ Scott Manning
You now should have a very well-defined Quarterly Battle Plan for the next 90-days of your life and your business.
For your business to be clear on its goal and objectives, for any period of time, you have to be clear first. But that isn’t good enough, you then need to also understand what aspects of the business are actually going to move the needle and make a difference towards achieving those goals and objectives.
This is where I see most business owners go wrong. They work on making the wrong things better. And you might say how can anything being made better be ‘wrong’ – well, it doesn’t mean it’s bad it just means that if we have limited resources, time, people, and even dollars to allocate for improving something we want to do it with the things that will make the greatest impact and give us the best chance to achieve the goals.
Of course, the ‘ideal’ would be to get to a place where you can you have a business that just runs effectively and efficiently. The foundation is solid and it is achieving your goals. Now all you have to do is work on refinements and incremental improvements to make it better.
If you want to make your business actually more valuable, grow your profits, and continue to find ways to build a better business overall then you have to put your focus into certain areas that will drive results financially.
Remember there are a lot of ways to ‘grow’ a business… you can expand its capacity or size or reach or scope or niche or vertical.
The easiest example that every entrepreneur can understand would be Disney.
They could have stayed in only the movies business or just added theme park. They could have just made those more valuable versus expanding the ways in which they generate a profit.
The same theory applies to Amazon, Apple, Google, and on and on.
Each company keeps expanding in other ways to create greater leverage and ultimately the making each component more valuable as a result of expansion.
While you can and should use these companies for inspiration, it’s much better to know your own business and I hope that you always look for ways to fuel your creative juices and stay excited about what you are doing, who you are doing it for, and your ‘why.’
Let these principles guide your path to success. It will make it easier to find leverage points when you embrace the underlining mission. So, let’s tackle where you look when you want to grow – because there are several targets and your plan of attack will depend on your core objectives.
Let’s get started…
First of all, the math doesn’t lie and, second of all, you are very smart so it’s not that hard to see where or why you are stuck (if you are). You just have to be willing to look without judgment or justifications to see the truth of what’s going on in the business.
The money moves from start to finish and that means looking at where and how your customer moves from start to finish (both of which we have talked about in great detail right here in the past).
But today we aren’t talking about triage – we are talking about growing profits and increasing value.
There are five areas I would like to talk about and we’re going to break them down one by one over the next several weeks.
Increasing the value of your customers
Increasing the value of your systems
Increasing the value of your team
Increasing the value of your actual products or services
Increasing the value of your opportunities
The power in these is that they all link directly together and one impacts the rest. They could very well stand alone by themselves in terms of an initiative but become even more significant when combined.
We can talk about speed or cost or quality or any other number of variables. There are also marketing and production and accounting considerations. However, the main point of a business is not found in a department or spreadsheet, instead in the execution of strategy.
The more separation there is between the innerworkings of a business, the more disconnected it becomes and makes everything harder for broader goals to be reached.
This is why I challenged you to do your Quarterly Battle Plan in the first place. We don’t need to go tinkering around. We need to be driving in a direction with a purpose based on the destination we desire to arrive at related directly and specifically to the goals of the business. That guides the focus and the priorities of everything and everyone else.
There is a lot to assess, think deeply about, reflect upon, and explore with the application of this week’s message to your vision and into the trenches of your business from leadership to communication to focus and everything in between.
We’ll get to the actual specifics with each of these areas of improvement and value creation next week. Stay tuned.
Category : Blog
