How do you keep your business sustainable? Of course there is more to it then LUCK – check out how this acronym can help create positive results in your business.
Business Competencies and Business values have direct impact on the financial results you achieve. These aspects are interrelated with both the Profit you earn and the long term financial sustainability of your business.
Business competencies are intentionally very generic and designed to be wide ranging in application. They also tie in to the acronym LUCK, which connects with the qualities needed most to be a successful CEO of your small business.
Leadership – applying appropriate guidance with yourself, your team, your clients, your suppliers, in fact every business relationship you have. Gradually create a Leadership team, which is significantly more than a management team. A critical step in achieving better return on investment is to learn how to be the leader of that team.
Understanding – one aspect of this is where Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is so important. Failure to have a reasonable level of EQ can cost a business owner in additional staff recruitment costs, client churn costs, reputational risk costs – all impacting bottom line results by either reducing revenue or increasing spend. People want to deal with people that are fun to deal with.
Just as relevant, is your ability to understand the impact a decision in one area of your business may have on another area of your business, i.e. the flow on effect or fallout that may be created. How additional sales might impact your systems for example. So the costs of not understanding the relationships of your decisions are equally costly in customer or staff retention, as well as lost revenue simply through inadequate systems. This is one of the biggest causes of reduced profit in SMEs where they start to grow and reach the delegation and coordination phases of growth.
The ‘Think it’, ‘Plan it’, ‘Skill it’, ‘Drive it’ sequence helps with your wider understanding and the ramifications of the interrelationships between varying areas of a business and the impact of your decisions.
Connections – your ability to create mutually supportive relationships saves a business owner a huge amount of time, effort and advertising spend. Become an influencer and do this in a spirit of giving. Nurtured loyal connections equally benefit financially, when done with sound intent.
The other aspect is to ensure you have the right connections. I mean people that pass the competency test as well as being in alignment with their own business values and operating style. They don’t need to be the same type of people as yourself, but there should be enough similarities that you value each other’s strengths and have a desire to compensate and be compassionate towards each other weaknesses.
Knowledge – this is the last listed business competency cornerstone for a few reasons. Not having enough depth in both knowledge and specific business operations as your business grows, can hamstring your development efforts. Often this is a factor of having the right people in the right seats, on the right bus. Taking the Henry Ford approach, information/specific knowledge can be found anywhere, either via a google search or a phone call/email to a trusted advisor.
The above competencies Leadership, Understanding, Connections and Knowledge together will bring a lot of positivity to your business, all by themselves.
However, to be sustainable, sound business values and resilience are also needed for the long haul.
Please contact me here if you would like some assistance in applying any of this in practice.