Posts Tagged ‘ Strategy ’

How do you develop a winning mission statement?

One that fits on the back of your business card but doesn’t clutter the whole thing up?

The more important question is: When do you write your mission statement?

Many want to write a mission statement too soon.

I happened across one of the most brilliant advertisements today.

A friend passed it along to me on Facebook.  All you have to do is “Like” the Redbox page and you get a password for a free one night movie rental on June 21st.  Redbox wants people on their “Like” page (at 622,000+ as I type this).  People want free movie rentals. Of course I will share the location for your free movie (below the fold).

Where will your future competition come from?

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen talks about the threats that come to existing businesses from innovation.

Innovations could be anything from the telephone (which displaced telegraphs), to mini-steel mills (which displaced larger steel mills), to word processors (which displaced type writers), to digital photography (which displaced chemical film), to computer aided drafting (which displaced hand drawn designing), to blogging (which displaced print newspapers), to anything else.

The graph below summarizes the findings of The Innovator’s Dilemma.

You need a business plan.

It needs to drive daily decisions.

There are tons of free resources out there to help you get started.

One website has over 400 free sample business plans.  This can be a great place to start.  But all it is is a start.

Money motivates.

But once you pay enough to get money off the table, money doesn’t matter that much.

Once you do that, what really motivates is being autonomous, the satisfaction of skill and mastery, and making a contribution to the world around them.

Check out Daniel Pink’s book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Have a watch. This is well worth 11 minutes of your life:

You need extra eyes looking at your business plan.

Find people with expertise in a variety of areas and meet with them twice a year. The big secret on how to recruit them: free food. Never underestimate the power of free food.

Here is an example from working with one of my clients.  He started his firm at the beginning of this year and discussed his business plan and strategy with me. At a previous employer, collections lagged services rendered by 6 months or more.  Being a new firm, he knew that his cash flow would become unmanageable if his collections were so slow.

Who are you?

What is your business?

If you can’t answer those questions, you’re in trouble.

The answers to those questions dictate how you interact with your customers and employees.

Your business mission statement is the most important part of your business plan because it tells you what else is important.

Adam Stephenson is a patent attorney at Adam R. Stephenson, LTD.  Check out his business here.

Adam started out with a business plan created from a template, so we took it and made it better.  The template told him format, but we spent the time to create a plan that will give him specific milestones to measure his success as the business grows.  I helped him with the financial projections, cash flow planning, and other business management strategies.

I wanted to include his recommendation from my LinkedIn profile here:

“Tony reviewed my business plan in detail, examined my financial projections, and sat down with me face to face to analyze my market’s opportunities and challenges aspect by aspect. His advice about how to successfully navigate the startup period and manage cash flow by using ways to encourage early payments has been extremely valuable.

A reader asked how to do a break-even analysis.

Here it goes.

Whether it is salaries for new employees, equipment, or both, starting a business or expanding production costs money.  Doing a break-even analysis will tell you how productive the expansion needs to be to pay for itself.

You need to know a few things to get your break even analysis to tell you the truth.