How can you move your business upwards
when you’re stuck in repeating last year?
Growth brings rewards, but it also brings complexity. More analysis. More questions. More decisions. All of which puts pressure on you and your team, and makes decision-making and prioritising more difficult. It can put you and your team under strain.
So you need a strategy that’s strong enough to support your ambitions. The challenge is not just to build a bigger business and make more profits, but to build a better one at the same time, to surge upwards.
But as a MD, you may find it hard to discuss strategy. People get bogged down in arguments and positions. All in all, developing strategic and operational plans might be draining rather than stimulating.
Why it’s hard to be strategic in growing a business
There’s often a gulf between the ambitions of a strategic plan and the realities that you and your team members are facing day-to-day.
Do you feel…
1. The cost pressures are tougher than ever – The promised ‘breakthroughs’ never seem to materialize. Your cash-flow position is always perilously close to negative. Fixed costs rise month-on-month and your income levels do not match this trend. So you have to restrict costs including marketing spend which, of course, limits your growth.
2. Everyone is firefighting – Your company has become more complex as you grew your business. The daily urgent stuff has taken over. You and your people struggle to find the time to spend on important things.
3. Managers aren’t stepping up to the next level – You feel you are alone in carrying the burden of leadership and responsibility. Your managers are supervising and controlling rather than leading and managing. You are fixing and fighting; working ‘in’ the business rather than ‘on’ it. Everyone is too busy with urgent actions concerning clients to give attention to issues that really build your business. No one knows how to change this negative pattern. Other companies seem to cope better.
What you really want instead
You may or may not do proper planning – although you know you need it to help produce better results as time spent on planning is recouped many times over. In either case, what you really want is a blueprint for better growth so that you can:
1. Grow your high-end ideal client list, develop and offer true value-based products and services to them, and earn the right to charge higher fees in line with the value provided.
2. Build a business that will last and grow in value, with a clear and compelling direction, a robust business model and a sustainable, profitable track-record.
3. Create a best company to work for, with your top team leading, inspiring and engaging all your people.
These things won’t suddenly happen by themselves, but there is a way of making them happen.
The solution? “Built for Results”
(ABPLAN’s Plan and Accelerate Your Business Programme)
“Built for Results” is a year-long in-house programme offered exclusively to MDs and their leadership teams.
The programme gives you all the help you need to create and implement a robust process for long-term growth; a growth plan that you and your team 'own' and which motivates all. Built for Results gets your whole organisation focused on providing a better employee experience which leads to a better client experience than that which your competition provides. "Competition" would include much bigger and resource rich, but not necessarily more professional companies. Small can be beautiful, great and winning.
It’s fully tailored to your company's needs by means of workshops, coaching, training and events to help you get new insights into your industry and your business and new skills.
The foundations of the “Built for Results” Programme
There are many consultants out there who can help you put together a strategy aimed at taking you to a higher level. What makes me any different? Here are some of my strongest beliefs that are reflected in this programme:
Firstly, simplicity trumps complexity. The hourly or day-rate business model for most consultants motivates them to pad out their work by making things more complicated than they really are. By contrast, this programme focuses not on complexity but on making things crystal clear and simple – although you may in the beginning, until you find your stride, think it’s complicated.
Secondly, your own answers are better than anyone else’s. There are consultants who can offer you answers, but those answers may not be quite right for your situation. While taking you through a structured, modular approach I focus as a consultant, coach and facilitator, on mostly asking you the right questions so that you come up with your own examples, insights and answers. I provide systems and approaches and challenge you. And I refine or change my inputs, verbal and in writing (including the modules of the programme), to incorporate your insights.
Thirdly, any plan is only as good as your ability to implement it. It takes up to two months to formulate and own a strategy, but I’ve found that it typically takes a full year to gradually implement changes and to experience that the changes are working. So 12 months is how long the programme lasts.
Finally, being in charge can be a lonely business. The programme is more than just a set of workshops, sessions and action plans. It provides you personally the chance to have confidential conversations with me, and to get support, challenge and feedback.
The main benefits of the programme
Here’s what you’ll have when the programme is done:
1. A strategy built around team and client needs. The purpose of a business is to increase client profitably, and your role as leader and manager is to create with your team a strategy that ensures profitability and to execute it. For starters, I recommend placing an emphasis on your team. Not the traditional mantra of the client first? Admittedly, putting “team first” sounds wrong. But paradoxically, focusing on your team leads to a higher level of emotional commitment to you and your company which leads to a higher level of professional work. Your clients gain.
So this programme gives you a practical, structured way of defining a team-led strategy that will improve and gain depth over time. The programme provides a blueprint and a series of easy-to-work-with documents. The blueprint is alive and its purpose is to shape and inform your and your managers’ decisions (and of their teams) for years to come.
2. An operational approach which is simple and easy to use. Any change encounters resistance. The human brain rejects change. It takes time to create new footpaths, new roads and to turn them into familiar highways. It takes a tested programme and a facilitative coaching approach to lead people to their own insights. The excitement of arriving at own insights is electrifying. Have you not experienced this? Is facilitation something that you normally do even if it is slow when you are anxious to get results? More haste, less speed.
3. A motivated leadership team. To help your management team step up to the next level, I use coaching models and clear diagrammes backed by easy-to-read explanations. The texts of 34 modules are placed at your disposal on this website (member login). Group workshops and sessions are supplemented by one-on-one coaching sessions which are repeated as often as needed until you feel comfortable and in command of the situation covered by each module.
4. An aligned and inspired staff. If you can tap into people’s deeper motivations, and facilitate their getting new insights, you can release an enormous amount of self-led proactive effort. But usually, everyone only takes a slice of themselves to work. Most people only do what they need to do to get by. We will involve everyone and cascade your growth blueprint to each individual, which puts all on the same page and encourages everyone to become accountable and more engaged.
5. A change in mindsets and of getting unstuck. Often the reason for not using one’s potential and for not forging ahead, lies in limiting beliefs. We all have such beliefs. I use an effective approach in assisting people to address beliefs which constrict them. We focus on overcoming a few practical blockages at work and soon individuals start to question their own “stuckness”. The light goes on. It’s liberating.
Further benefits
The programme will ensure that you will dedicate time to concentrate on what really matters. Workshops and sessions are properly planned, presented and documented so everyone knows what’s being discussed and agreed. Your ideas and those of your team will be in front of you. The programme materials are in everyday English and jargon is kept to a minimum. (However take note, the discipline of leading and managing has developed its own vocabulary and if you wish to delve into its publications or articles, you need to learn some of this vocabulary.)
You know where you are and how you’re doing. We create a clear map of your strategy, decide on a structure of collaboration and I help you track your progress in forging ahead.
Everyone’s clear about who’s accountable for what and when. We continually update your monthly plan and action tasks online, and while I'll hold your hand and facilitate, I will also hold you and your team’s feet to the fire so that stuff gets done.
My clients report a growing feeling of mastery. There’s satisfaction in doing something valuable, doing it well, and doing it better than anyone else.
What's in the programme?
There are five stages, lasting a year in total:
Stage 1: Clear Direction. Firstly, you and your top team establish direction in a structured facilitated conversation. This workshop only requires that you are rested and that you bring your knowledge and common sense to the table. At the end of the day your team will have a highly motivating strategic plan and mission statement. The latter describes what you want your company to be in five years, which markets and clients you will address, what kind of quality your clients can expect to get from you, what you ethos or moral compass is and what your team can expect will be in it for them (tangible and intangible benefits such as camaraderie, personal growth and, of course, rewarding careers).
Your mission statement, which explains the why, the purpose of your existence, will be the heart of your strategic plan. We will make this purpose more tangible by developing an exiting vision of what you wish to achieve within six months. This vision is then pursued with three wildly important goals – and reviewed ever so often.
Stage 2: A Practical Operational Plan. The details of your vision are described visually in a special operational plan which is sliced into achievable monthly segments, tackled and reviewed before the next month's segments are created.
Stage 3: Marketing: I will also teach you the cycle of marketing, using a game metaphor, whereupon we will develop a straightforward marketing plan. (There is a huge difference between marketing and selling.)
Stages 1, 2 and 3 at this point cover two months. All of this will involve three workshops and a few 90-minute specific one-on-one coaching sessions. You will have powerful and persuasive plans that everyone supports and commits to.
Stage 4: Implementation and Tracking. Success lies in execution. The implementation and tracking stage lasts 10 months. This stage is all about commitment to see the programme through, accountability, and getting the job done with new skills, growing ease and with high motivation. This is achieved through group sessions, one-on-one coaching, update meetings supplemented with meetings on Skype or with regular phone calls. I provide individual coaching. There is no running meter (as I work on a project basis and not on an hourly rate) and ample coaching is included in the package. Any individual can request executive coaching - it costs nothing extra.
Stage 5: Relations: A business exists because of relations and needs. We firstly focus on you and your team and get everyone going. They need to deliver professional work to benefit your clients. Then we focus on your clients. Team First, Clients Second.
Stage 6: Mindsets and blockages: Although listed last, we actually start the programme with a discussion about mindsets. Some mindsets serve us well. But it will take a while before people are ready to see and admit some negative mindsets which hold them back. I can assist any individual in addressing a few blockages in a structured manner. For some people, this is the most important part of the entire programme.
There are also these bonuses
Study resources. The programme’s modules, applicable diagrammes and a brief text with each module, plus templates and examples are accessed online as the programme unfolds.
Articles. In addition, study material in the form of articles outlining best practices in virtually all of the topics and processes we cover, are offered and made available to those who like additional reading material.
My Growing Clients newsletter and blog. Every month I cover one topic, which arose out of a conversation with a client, in my newsletter and in my blog Growing Clients. This topic nearly always requires that I do proper research. It usually is of interest to a wide range of my clients, judging from their comments.
The newsletter is brief and only draws your attention to the topic and invites you to go to my blog for a full read of the post.
In the posts I address perennial problems which you probably also have struggled with or which may still bother you. Each post supplements one or more of the modules of the programme.
Is the “Built for Results” Programme right for you?
This programme is designed specifically for successful small and mid-sized businesses. Typically my clients are companies or organisations with between 1 to 50 people and with revenues of between a few hundred thousand and a few million Rand.
My clients are mostly independent professionals such as lawyers, designers, IT companies, engineers, tourism travel agents, consultants, retail shops, hotels, PR and media communication firms, and a host of others. They are nearly all based in the Cape Town Metropolitan Area, in the Helderberg Area (Somerset West, Strand, Gordon’s Bay), and Stellenbosch. I also have offered projects to clients in Gauteng/Johannesburg and Pretoria.
My clients included two universities, a few parastatals (funded government organisations) and a number of public-benefit organisations and trusts.
(For a listing of more than 50 clients please click on clients.)
The sector doesn’t matter. The Build for Results Programme and its components have been researched, designed and successfully run in a diverse range of small and mid-sized to large companies or organisations.
What about you personally? The success of the programme hinges on the personal relationship that we develop. The best results come if you share some or all of the following traits: You’re enthusiastic, open to change, focused, keen on quality, a believer in people and teams, keen on learning and development, a communicator and good on follow-through.
It is also necessary that you are able to commit to a demanding 12-month programme and see it through. Your progress and motivation, I can guarantee, will take a dip in the third month when all the newness will seem a bit much before you will find your stride and start moving ahead with less and less effort. By then you have made new processes and ways of doing your own. We will ensure that all members of your top management team run next to you. Carrying the pacesetting burden alone up front is not fun.
Just as you want your company to move up to the next level, you too want to move to a new level of leadership. You’d want to channel your ambitions into creating something really special - a winning company in which people love to work, a best company to be part of. Build a real asset.
Make an appointment for a complimentary Mini-Strategy Session
There may be many triggers for considering the programme apart from those mentioned up to this point. You started your company in an entrepreneurial leap of faith, you followed your dream and built your company with enthusiasm and passion. You focused on developing wonderful products and services and on acquiring clients. In the process you devote scant attention to really building your team members. Your team is not yet as professional as they should be and you are tired of urging them on. Your planning and execution systems are rather intuitive and you need something better.
The marketplace is evolving fast. Your marketing depends largely on word of mouth and you hope this will generate enough new clients with income to get you through the next crises. Your marketing requires serious attention.
You feel a need to get to grips with basics and do things right, to get your team behind you, to attract only Ideal Clients and to rid yourself of the drudgery side of business that clings to you like flotsam.
You might be stuck. How to get moving?
If you’ve read this far, and you think you might be interested in the programme. I invite you to contact me for a complimentary “Built for Results” Mini-Strategy Session. This is a no-obligation way to find out more about the programme and whether it's right for you.
In this session we’ll explore what challenges you and your top team are facing, what kind of results you’d like to see instead, and whether this programme could help or not. Whatever the outcome, you’ll leave the conversation clear about the issues you’re facing and excited about the future.
The session will take about one to two hours and can be done in person or by phone. Simply complete the request for a Mini-Strategy Session below and I will contact you about a suitable date and time.
On receipt of your email I will send you a questionnaire that will guide you in providing information which will ensure that our session takes place in a structured manner, and while this session is not a coaching session, it will already provide benefits to you, while leaving you with a sense of excitement about what's possible.
I look forward to our conversation.
With best wishes,
Albert van Niekerk
Request for a Mini-Strategy Session
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Last modified: 11-02-2012