Sustainable Business Success Nugget (NID31)

Introducing Sustainable Business Success

How does a business owner get satisfaction from running their business?

We think the reasons for owner satisfaction fall into two principle groups.  If the owner is not happy about either of these groups, they will not be maximizing their satisfaction from running their business.  Our mission at 12Faces is to help business owners achieve satisfaction on both these fronts.  In this podcast, we outline these two measures of satisfaction for owners of small business.

We think there are two general business areas where a business owner measures their satisfaction with their business. We call these two principle groups where the owner needs to be happy as firstly achieving and second sustaining success. Our Mission is your Sustainable Business Success. So let’s look at success in a little more detail.

Achieving Success in your Business

There’s no real one measure of success. It varies with each individual owner, and it can also vary over time.

An owner’s circumstances, like say family pressure, may change what they want from their business at some point in time. And as they get older, they tend to want to change their pace of life. Eventually, the business owner probably wants to sell the business at some point.

Experience has suggested that there are three general categories of success in the minds of owners.

Categories of Small Business Success

Firstly, growth.  This is initially from startup, but generally growth continues for some time until it plateaus at what the owner considers to be an acceptable level.

At this time, the second general category of success, which we call lifestyle, kicks in at some point.  The owners interest in the daily grind of business life fades and they’re increasingly interested in less demands from a business and maybe more time and opportunity to have time with a family or travel or other pursuits.

Third and finally, the business owner probably wants to exit the business.

So the three stages that we typically recognize are Growth, Lifestyle and Exit. Now, each of these requires the owner to configure the business in different ways to achieve the desired success outcomes. They also need a program of work to achieve the desired success outcome.

Setting a Destination

We call this desired success outcome, the destination.

It is typically a destination point to where the owner wants to be in (say) three years. Still growing, on the point of exit or having a comfortable lifestyle.  No matter what the destination is, the owner needs a way to get from where they are now to whatever the desired destination is.

Using GamePlans to reach Business Goals

We think it’s difficult for any owner to look too far ahead. There’s just too many variables to be able to predict where you’re going to be in, say, three years time. For this reason, we largely discount the idea of three year plan. We generally work in three month projects, which we call GamePlans,  for convenient measurement and reporting.

They’re usually tied to one GamePlan per financial quarter. We think an owner can see ahead for three months and hence the length of the GamePlan.   If things change, they can alter the next GamePlan to reflect the changed circumstances.

These GamePlans tend to follow on from each other, like a trail of breadcrumbs, and eventually a number of GamePlans linked together reached the desired destination.

We talk more about GamePlans in another podcast, so this brief broadcast has been an outline of the success element of our Mission to help you with your Sustainable Business Success.  It introduced the concept of having a general destination to reach in the next three years and indicated that the most common destinations are growth, lifestyle, and exit.

Any and all of these destinations can be measures of your business success at different points in the lifetime of the business.  None of them are right or wrong.  Just a reflection of what’s in your mind at this stage in your business. 

As already mentioned, our mission is your sustainable business success, so let’s look now at sustaining your success in a little more detail.

Sustaining Success

By sustainable, we mean that as you progress towards your Destination,  the systems in your business are adapted to achieve two goals.

The first goal is that we want to remove those parts of your business that cause you Pain so that your business increasingly gives you more pleasure as you move towards your success destination.

Three typical pains are;

1. having enough income to be comfortable.
2. working a comfortable number of hours a week and
3. having a comfortable level of stress.

So in 12Faces, we have programs to help move the needle on each of these pain points into your comfort zone.

The second goal is that we want to help you prevent backsliding from your current level of success once you’ve achieved it.

Ratcheting Onwards and Upwards

Our methodology for removing pain and preventing backsliding has been built into our ratchet system method.

Now, you may be familiar with ratchets. They are a cogwheel with a built-in device, so they can only rotate in one direction. That’s what we want with your sustainable improvement.  Improvements that move forward without the risk of backsliding.  We have a process to help you achieve both of these embedded in our Mission of your Sustainable Success.

Ratchets are typically quite short, maybe one to two weeks. They’re steps for you to put in place to fix something that improves the business without much risk of making a mistake.

Summary on Sustainable Business Success

We are now at the end of this short podcast so now might be a good time for you to think for a few minutes about what your preferred destination is in three years time.

So to wrap up, our Mission is to help you as a business owner achieve your Sustainable Business Success. We put that in our logo to demonstrate our commitment to that as a mission.

We believe sustainable means less pain and lower risk of backsliding and success is whatever you decide your destination is in three years time.  But typically your destination is going to be more growth or a more comfortable lifestyle or exiting the business.