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#25: Strategic Plan – Part 2

Following on from last week, I have decided to take as an example someone whose core business is going to be providing virtual operational support to the small and medium sized business (SME) market.

Imagine for the moment that this could be you, and it might help you appreciate how a plan could be put together to start such a business. Below I have set out the
“Strategy” part of a “one-page plan”:

Imagine you are going to set-up a business providing operational support to small businesses. Let’s call it Virtual Business Support (VBS) Ltd. The vision is that you are going to grow your business through trust. It is all about buying trust, which is in short stock at the moment! We are going to make you trusted.

You are going to get your clients to trust you, and that is the value and principle which you are going to live out in your business and which is going to be the bedrock of your strategy. Your core business is going to be simple. You are not going to get distracted by anything else.

Your business objective is to be the trusted supplier of choice; if people have an operational problem, they think of you first. Your business strategy is that you are going to build trusted relationships and exceed clients’ expectations not just meet them.

Finally, the key success factor is to maximise your network, both existing and planned (we will cover this in another article). Not more complicated than that.

VBS Business Plan – Strategy

• Vision – “Achieving Growth through Trust”
• Core Business – providing virtual support to the SME market
• Business Objective – to be the trusted provider of choice…
• Business Strategy – by building trusted relationships and exceeding client expectations
• Key Success Factor – maximising networks

With this in mind, have a go at putting together a one-stage business plan you can envision for you own business. You might find it easier than you think! Feel free to contact me anytime if you feel you need more guidance on this.

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#24: Strategic Plan – Part 1

 Now you have got your business image sorted out, we can move on to your strategic planning process.

I always describe the planning process as a journey. Imagine you were going to the South of France on holiday; once you have identified the resort the next thing you would do, assuming you were going to be driving, is to plan your route.

Why treat your business any differently? A strategic plan is your destination, what you want the company to look like and stand for. Think back to the Nelson Mandela story. Can you imagine what your business is going to look like in three years’ time?

The business plan is your operational map and route to get you there. It has often been said that “Nobody plans to fail but many people fail to plan” or “failure to plan is planning to fail”.

“Storming Norman” of Desert Storm fame reportedly said that a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow, so just get on and do it! The following quote is one I saw framed in the office of one of my clients:

“The nice thing about not planning is that failure
comes as a complete and utter surprise
and is not proceeded by long periods
of worry, anguish and self-doubt”.

My favourite quote is an old Chinese saying:

“A sailor who embarks without a destination cannot possibly hope for a favourable wind”.

If you do not have a plan, how do you know what you are aiming for? Planning is important!

Next time we will continue to look at the strategic planning process, focussing on a one-stage plan you can follow easily.

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#23: What will a successful practice look like?

Here we are at the start of another year, always a good time to reflect on lessons learnt and a time to decide how to move forward. This month, I want to follow on from where we left of last year, looking at your strengths and weaknesses and why these are important aspects to consider when developing a business.

This really builds on the “wish list” we looked at in my previous article. Another way you could reflect on this list is to cluster them. I am suggesting four main clusters, for reasons which will become clear when we consider how we can measure the progress we are making.

Cluster 1 – Financial
Would any financial due diligence exercise reveal that the company was in robust health with good trajectory and momentum? Things that would be reviewed here could include:

• revenue growth
• profit growth
• quality of fee income
• revenue mix/concentration

Cluster 2 – The Clients
Does the client base make sense and look to be sustainable? Aspects to be considered might include:

• client desirability and quality
• level of repeat business
• number of clients considered to be trusted partners
• identified market for which firm has a distinctive offering

Cluster 3 – The Team
What level of “people risk” is the firm assuming? You might wish to review and evaluate:

• manifest understanding of client requirements
• culture of personal development and continuous improvement
• loyalty of the core team
• technical excellence
• communication/listening skills
• evident business acumen
• responsiveness
• contribution level across the form (dependency on one or two “stars” re. sales and/or delivery)

Cluster 4 – The Process
Which aspects of the business have been subjected to a process approach, to assure the likelihood or achieving and maintaining desired standards of performance? Areas deserving attention would comprise:

• quality of marketing machine
• quality of sales machine
• quality of delivery process
• culture of action-oriented relationship reviews
• number of effective partnerships and alliances in place
• IP creation and protection

Approaching the questions in this manner might help you to envisage what success is going to look like. If you need any more help on this, do get in touch and make sure you refer back to my previous articles covering this process too.

Posted in: Growing Businesses

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#23: Retaining High Value Clients

Welcome to my first consultancy article of 2015! Last time, or last year I should say, we looked at my top ten tips for bid writing and how to structure your presentation. Now we are moving on to how you can keep the clients you will now have gained.

We are going to look at this as one of the key aspects of the Delivery Process. We need to bear in mind that a sound delivery process has twin purposes – to create happy clients who a) come back for more and b) refer other people to you. The accepted wisdom is that a happy client is worth two quality referrals, so it makes perfect sense to exploit this.

So, two of the most important goals arising out of your process are:

  • Seeking repeat business at the right moment (ideally when the client is at their happiest)
  • Seeking referrals at the same time

To these you could add a third goal, namely:

  • Working to a process to ensure there is no deviation from the core assignment, managing client expectations all the way, with checkpoint reviews

Why is this third goal important? Well, it is dangerous to assume that the client is happy, and that he or she understands and appreciates the difference you are making. In addition, you do not want to fall foul of an industry disease known as “scope creep”, where all sorts of little bits and pieces get tacked on to the work, not necessarily with an increase in fees, which risk the delivery deadline being compromised.

A couple of other factors to bear in mind:

  1. If you are going to require support in order to deliver the work, make sure you only use top quality associates; to do otherwise is courting disaster.
  2. Keep a close eye on outputs and time, so that you don not give yourself too much to do against the clock.
  3. If the project is pretty much “full on”, try to carve out some time to keep up your networking and prospecting, so that you do everything possible to reduce the chance of moving from feast to famine.

 
Next time we will look at the importance of Trust and Relationships in establishing rapport with clients. Remember, if you think you are struggling with anything or would like to find out more, you can always contact me.

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#23: Image

Welcome to my first expert article of 2015! Ready to get started? Over the past few articles, we have been looking at market research and why finding out who your competitors are is key to your own success.

One of the issues we need to think about at this stage is what you are going to call your business; what image do you want to portray, a great deal of which can be derived from the name. I am not a marketer, but as I see it you have three options:

  • First is that you go for a derivative of your own name, which is fine.
  • Second is that you go for something that gives a very clear indication of what you do, which is also fine.
  • The third one, which is particularly relevant if you anticipate doing more than one activity, is to go for a neutral name, so you can do multiple activities under one identity without unduly confusing anyone.

Students of political history will not be surprised that I did not call my company David Mellor and Co., or David Mellor and Partners. I was also unsure even then whether I would be undertaking a single or multiple activities.

So, I went for a neutral name, Primovant. It was medieval English for what astronomers considered to be the centre of the universe, so there were no ego issues involved at all! It no longer exists as when Stephen Furner and I agreed to set up what is now Viridian it was no longer required – more on that later.

If you are going to go down the incorporation route (we will come back to that shortly), just check that the name is available so that you don’t waste time or money on a name you can’t use, and also check that the URL is available because you will get very frustrated if you get caught up in design work only to find that you can’t register either the company or the URL. Both are easy to do.

If you are going to be a sole trader, just check your local Yellow Pages and make sure there is no one else trading under the same name. Obviously don’t “take the Mickey” and call yourself a well know brand!

If you are going to have a logo, please check what it looks like when it is photocopied or faxed. Some things look great in colour but rubbish in “black and white” and you can’t read them, so do the black and white test.

Finally before we move on, please make sure that you don’t fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act; there are certain colours which are not friendly to those with visual impairment, so you have to make sure that whatever you have on your website is in colours that people who are partially sighted can read. Whoever you use to create your website should be aware of this.

Next time we will look at your strategic plan and why planning is important to your businesses success.

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#22: Value drivers in a consultancy

Well, here we are at the end of another year. For my final expert article of 2014, I want to move on from last month where we looked at exit strategies and concentrate on your strengths and weaknesses, important factors to consider when developing a business.

Building a “best practice” sole practitioner consultancy is challenging but ultimately rewarding. Building a multi-consultancy practice is even more challenging.

I’ve created the following “wish list” of questions to help you consider your areas of strength and weakness. All of these factors contribute to a thriving multi-consultant practice, but many of them are applicable to sole practitioners as well:

  • Are revenues steadily increasing?
  • Are profits steadily increasing?
  • Are the clients desirable and high quality?
  • Can the practice demonstrate understanding of client requirements?
  • Is repeat business generated?
  • Is there a quality marketing machine?
  • Is there a quality sales machine?
  • Is there a quality delivery process?
  • Do relationship reviews take place and is action taken as a result?
  • Is there a culture of personal development and continuous improvement?
  • How loyal are consultants?
  • How many clients are considered trusted partners?
  • Are there effective partnerships and alliances in place?
  • Can the firm display technical excellence?
  • Are communication and listening skills strong?
  • Do the consultants display business acumen?
  • How responsive are the consultants?
  • Is revenue spread across an acceptable range of clients or concentrated on one or two?
  • Is there a high dependence on one consultant (re. both sourcing and delivering work)?
  • Is the consultancy offering countercyclical?

I encourage you to consider this list in a moment of calm and identify three priority areas for improvement. Whether it is you, or you plus others, it might make the difference between you just surviving, and actively prospering.

It may also help you decide what type, or types, of people you need to complement your skills, talents and experience, and improve your responses to the above list of questions.

If you think you are struggling at all in any of these areas and aren’t sure how to improve, feel free to contact me.

So, that’s it for 2014 it seems! I look forward to sharing more of my expert articles with you over the New Year and hope you will continue to enjoy them as much as I enjoy writing them.

Posted in: Growing Businesses

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#22: 10 tips for presenting a bid

This month we are going to continue on from my previous article on bid writing, and today I am going to share with you my top ten tips to doing this effectively.

Your written bid has done its job, and you have been invited to present it in person. The first rule is whatever you do, don’t “wing it” – it will very rarely work for you. The second rule is there is only one rule (thank you Monty Python!).

First, let’s consider a few general tips about how to deal with the audience:

  1. Plan your presentation from the listener’s perspective.
  2. Create for your listener an awareness of the need to act now.
  3. Maintain and build the listener’s interest.
  4. Tell the listener all they need to know about your services as far as they are relevant to him/her.
  5. Explain the benefits of your service.
  6. Check to ensure you have not lost the listener’s attention.
  7. Be prepared for questions, and make sure you have robust answers for the questions you would least like to be asked.
  8. Don’t use jargon.
  9. Have a component in your presentation that makes you and your bid distinctive.
  10. Don’t forget that if you have more than one listener, they may be looking for different things from you, based on their behaviour preferences and respective roles in the business.

 

I would like to finish with a couple of thoughts on how to structure your presentation.

Firstly, keep it as short as you can and focus on the essentials. What are the key issues you need to highlight from your proposal, and don’t spend much time telling them how good you are – they appreciate that or you wouldn’t have been short-listed.

Secondly, make sure the proposal has a structure, so that you lead the listener through to a positive decision-inducing position (i.e. acceptance). Items you may want to reference could include:

  • The objectives of the assignment
  • Measures of success (e.g. indicators of progress being made)
  • Expressions of value (what improvements and enhancements can be expected; in other words what success could look like)
  • Methodologies and options (how you will address the issues)
  • Timing (so both parties’ expectations are managed)
  • Joint accountabilities (who is responsible for what)
  • Key terms and conditions

Above all, just try to be your natural self – if you try to be someone you are not it will probably undermine your performance. So, let them see the authentic you!

I look forward to sharing more articles with you after the New Year. In the meantime, if you have any enquires or feel you need some more guidance please don’t hesitate to contact me.

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#22: Research Exercise

Research is one of the most important aspects of building your business successfully. Finding out who your competition is and how your business competes with them on a professional level will enable you to plan strategies around them, so that you don’t lose customers and, inevitably, profit.

We started off by talking about what your product or service is. There will probably be some assumptions at this stage. Once you have done that you are in a position to go and talk to a few people, wearing your research hat, who are potentially going to be clients.

  • You could take some soundings at this stage by asking potential clients what they think of your offering, how does it fit with other offerings, are there any gaps it does not address? Because you are in research mode people are more likely to talk to you and give you an honest view.
  • Armed with that you can then start thinking about who you are competing with; people now put so much information on their websites in terms of who their clients are, what they offer, what makes them different, case studies, testimonials and so on; you can get a pretty good handle on what is being offered.
  • If you test your assumptions with potential clients, and then benchmark your assumptions against your competition you may find that you can tweak what you offer to your advantage.

Following these three steps, you can then increase the likelihood that you will be launching with a better fit with what the client is looking for, rather than relying on your own assumptions as to what you think they want. It just increases the chances that you will be offering something they want to buy.

This is something worth taking note of.

With that I wish you all the best of luck for the upcoming New Year, and hope you continue to read my expert articles for more helpful tips, insights and plans for your start-up business. Remember, you can always get in touch with me anytime you feel you need a little extra help. It is Christmas after all!

Posted in: Start-ups

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#21: Exit Strategy

This month I want to talk about exit strategies, which I covered very early on in a previous article but want to return to before the year is up.

I am indebted to my good friend and trusted associate Julian Sawyer, with whom I had a fascinating discussion around exit planning for a consultancy practice. He should know a thing or two, as he has successfully achieved it!

In chatting over a coffee, we started to talk about what you need to do to make a consulting business saleable – is there something more than just a good P&L story and a management team? These hygiene factors clearly need to be there. A buyer will also, if they are smart, de-construct your P&L and re-build it – so there is a false sense of success if they apply market rates for salaries, take out a one off blip from one high earning client and apply attrition factors to the business. So are there other factors? Julian believes so, and they come down to four areas which should be noted to enhance your purchase price:

  1. What are you famous for?

Are you a trusted advisor to your clients or do you have a business based around a guru? Either can be a strong business strategy but they are very different in how you manage the business, reward the team and grow the business. The valuation and sale approach will be different (not to mention the lock in criteria!). Being quite good in both of these styles of business at the same time is fundamentally flawed. Purchasers will be looking to extend deeper into clients (selling more services or new services to your clients) or looking to position themselves behind the guru maybe as a technology provider in this space.

  1. Who are your clients?

Are they strong stable businesses, are they wide across the industry sectors and diverse? You also need more than one client and certainly more than the mate who has hired you! Preferred Supplier Arrangements, Master Service Contracts and long term, multi-engagement roles show the depth is there and the assurity about stability of income. This depth enables leverage of more consultants or additional products or services, which increases the upside for the purchaser.

  1. What are your methodologies and processes?

Having the black box, the repeatable process, is somewhat important (though sometimes over egged by consultancies!). Having a methodology and a set of processes helps a seller in two ways, it shows there is some residual IP in the business and the eternal hope that cheaper, younger resources can be trained and utilised to deliver high value consulting engagements.

  1. How much loyalty do your consultants have?

A consultancy where everyone is treated as peers (a group of mates that have come together) is not attractive or at the very least reduces the types of companies interested. Having a single point of failure (i.e. a rainmaker) increases the risk and reduces the overall value (or at least the distribution of the proceeds). The acquirer, again if smart, will realise the owners will move on and they need to ensure the rest of the team doesn’t walk.

Go through these points and ask yourself, do you really know how much your business is worth to others when, in reality, there may be many more people doing exactly the thing as you who can offer them the same deal or services. Will you be able to tell when the time is right to walk away and hand over your responsibilities and obligations to someone else, or will you stay just for the sake of staying?

Something to think about.

Posted in: Growing Businesses

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#21: Writing a bid

In my last article we went through the tendering process and how to get the best from your relationships with potential clients. Now we turn our attention to bid writing.

It is worthwhile spending time crafting a quality bid or proposal, as this will be the reference point on your offering when you are not in the prospect’s presence. I was very fortunate a few years ago to attend a workshop on Successfully Consultancy, hosted by the Institute of Directors, at which Harold Lewis shared some top tips on crafting a bid, which included:

  1. Do your research.
  2. Weigh up the competitive opportunity.
  3. Read tender documents thoroughly.
  4. Plan the bid writing process.
  5. Follow all clients’ instructions.
  6. Treat policy statements seriously.
  7. Focus on client priorities and your distinctive value.
  8. Justify everything.
  9. Be honest and realistic.
  10. Work on clarity.

I would like to add some further flavour to one of these tips, and then add one more.

So, firstly, preparation in general, and research in particular.

It pays to take every opportunity when you can interact with the potential client to glean more information and context. People buy people before they buy the service, so these are good opportunities to build empathy and rapport.

Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes – what’s going on in their world? If you can ask questions that lead to outcome-based objectives, so much the better. In addition makes sure you study their website, and any social media activity in which they engage. Finally, look for any recent press coverage, which might give clues on what is going on in the business.

And the additional point. In terms of stakeholder management, do keep in mind that there may be more than one party involved in the recommendation/decision, and that they may have different agendas.

So, if you can, try to weave in something that plays to these different audiences, their issues and concerns, and the way in which they like to receive information. If this challenge strikes a chord, do feel free to contact me and we can develop it further. Next time we will look at presenting your bid.

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