Featured Article:

Is Your Company Frozen?
By Don Zillioux, Ph.D.

If your company is struggling to gain competitive advantage, solidify its business strategy, straighten up its marketplace priorities or simply to make a predictable profit, you are in danger of losing ground while your competition builds momentum and true value.

In our years of experience in consulting with companies from start-up to Fortune 500, we have often run across companies we refer to as “Frozen” - organizations that may have hit the wall, that are locked in as state of indecision, false starts and frequent changes of direction in their quest for growth and profitability. Executive teams are often unable to reach consensus about where the company is headed or have trouble deciding how to best leverage their products or services. They often have an unclear view of their market and the best path to sustainable profitability and the value they had in mind when the business was first started. The result is confusion, frustration and inevitable mistakes in positioning and execution.Meanwhile, astute competitors continue to move forward, putting these companies at a disadvantage and steadily widening the profit gap between them.

There can be many reasons why companies become frozen, including changes on the management team, significant new products or solutions introduced by competitors or simple dissatisfaction with the company’s growth or market penetration. Often, the management team has simply run out of ideas or the company has grown past their “managerial comfort zones.” Regardless of the reasons why, the unfortunate outcome tends to be one of the following scenarios:

• Efforts that worked in the past are repeated but do not yield desired results
• Owners are frustrated that they’ve little to show for all the hard work and see no way out
• Profit is unsustainable and certainly not predictable - value not measurable

Any one of these possible outcomes, and many more, can slow and even stop the forward momentum of a company bogged down in this frozen state. That’s why it is imperative for the executive team to take immediate steps to get the company back on track.

You’re Frozen - Now What Do You Do?

If you are finding that your company is frozen (or your are afraid that it may be), due to an inability to solidify its top-line profitability, clarify its future direction and make crucial decisions, (operations, competitiveness, even exit strategy), there are steps you can take to move the company forward:

1. Recognize the problem and acknowledge its negative impact on your company’s potential. Frozen companies and their executives often have a hard time stepping back to see how indecision, false starts and frequent frustrating changes in direction (or the opposite - failure to do anything differently) are hurting their business success. For clarity to emerge, company executives should focus the organization on a few high impact objectives, formulate a core strategy to drive company success and concentrate on a highly focused target audience.
2. Conduct an “Annual Physical”, this one for your organization. Just as you want to keep track of your health in order to head off predictable illness, business owners need to do the same for their businesses. If the business isn’t sustainably healthy, you won’t create the value you had in mind when you started the enterprise in the first place. First diagnose the health of your business, then treat it - it will live a long time and you will prosper. Fact-based decision making is powerful because you will know your are on the right track and if not, you can fix it. Research gives you the confidence to make informed choices and it empowers you to be bold in your approach to the marketplace.
3. Pull together the executive team to discuss research findings (results of the Annual Physical) and to brainstorm about the direction of the company. An outside, objective development consultant can prove helpful in a company strategy session to help generate ideas and discuss them in an organized way to start building consensus.
4. Ultimately, there must be a guide out of the “old” and into the new - renewed strategy, plans for execution, measurement systems that measure the “right stuff”, value goals and coherent, time bounded exit strategies. After these critical decisions are made, the company must stay on course with consistent execution and measurement in order to build trust, brand equity and profitability. Frozen companies go in so many different directions they end up going no place at all. By acknowledging the problem, making fact-based decisions, working to build and execute a renewal, profit driven plan and staying on track once the course is set, companies can regain their momentum and accelerate their growth results exponentially.

At SDW, we work with a broad range of companies in various stages of growth and profitability. Our focus is in helping small and mid-sized companies develop powerful and predictable top-line profit and the value that should (but often doesn’t) go with that profitability. As a result, we are involved from boardroom to shop floor, strategy to execution, start-up to exit, and typically begin with what we call the “Annual Physical for Your Organization.” Our expertise builds organizations designed to support the owners business and profitability strategies and to accelerate sustainable growth and imbedded value.

News and Events:

Emphasizing the Positive
Grab the Opportunities and Download our Business Assessment Tool

Business owners everywhere are well aware of the issues in today’s economy and how it is directly affecting their ability to be as profitable in the market as they would like to be. There is little time to manage for efficiency and even profitability when times are good. Getting the work done and out the door becomes “Job 1” during a hot market.

While the struggling economy often translates to a difficult time for small and mid-size businesses, it also can offer a breather that allows the management team to step back and take a look at the current business model and its related implementation and effectiveness.

Should you still be running your business the way you always have?

Are there better ways of doing business, not just in today’s market, but also going forward as the economy and immediate business environment improve?

There is no better time than NOW to re-evaluate and implement business improvements!

• Employee morale may be low due to decreasing sales, but many studies have shown that there is nothing better for internal attitude than having employees feel that top management is paying attention to internal business including training and work environment.
• Customer service is of the ultimate importance. Customers have many choices. Price is not always the final decision. Increasing market share can make up for lost revenues but there must be a specific strategy to make that happen.
• How profitable are you, really? Cutting costs may increase profits in the very short term, but is that really the best way for your long-term business health?
• Have you made the shifts necessary to accommodate business changes and growth during the past few years or is the business straining under continuing to do things the “old way”.
• Have technological improvements passed you by due to lack of time for the necessary research needed to fully understand and implement new business processes?

These are only a few of the many issues that business owners should be considering now. Take advantage of the opportunity of available time!

Analysis of your existing business requires an organized and analytical look at how you have been doing things in the past and what kinds of improvements should be made to keep your business healthy in both current and future economic environments. Improvements are not necessarily costly – they mostly have just been ignored due to the habits and routines that have been continued despite the business evolving over time.

We, at SDW, can help you immediately to ask yourself the right questions in order to get the thought process started. The SDW assessment tool, “Top 19 Questions Regarding Your Firm” is designed to highlight the questions and concerns most likely to affect your business in order to bring focus to where the most effective improvements can be made quickly to obtain immediate and long-term results. To obtain this handy assessment tool, simply download the PDF here.

We cannot emphasize enough that the availability of time that most businesses currently have can be turned into opportunity to improve internal and external processes that will promote both current and future successes. To help our clients make the most of their time and energy in this regard, we have developed a unique concept in consulting for the small to mid-size business community. The SDW Small Business Initiative is designed to work with CEO’s and top-level executives in an atmosphere that provides both group and individual consulting opportunities at more than affordable pricing.

We encourage you to download our assessment tool questionnaire and review the information on our Small Business Initiative Program. You can also obtain additional information on the program by calling Strategic Development Worldwide at 619 269-7338 or send us a message using our Contact Form.

The Arte of Motivation:

“You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”

-Michael Jordan

Here’s a guy who needs no introducing. When talking about having a passion for their life and work many people often refer to Jordan and his 1998 autobiography For the Love of the Game. He always set the bar high and never quit until he reached it. High school, college, basketball, baseball and business – he’s been successful in every endeavor in every arena because he took time to understand and set the bar for his goals.

How high do you set your bar? Or maybe I should ask whether you even set a bar?? So many people go through the motions of life with no plan and no goals – and then wonder why they are unchallenged and unfulfilled. You need to get up each morning and tell yourself what you’re going to accomplish today; then write it down and put it in your pocket. Look at it often during the day to make sure you’re on-task and whether you need to adapt your plan to what’s happening. Just make sure you accomplish some or all of it before the day is over. Do the same for weekly and monthly goals too – both at home and at work. These little self-expectations will keep you focused and feeling good about who you are and what you do. You may not win championships like Jordan, but you’ll be a champion in your own arena. Just do it!

Successful companies set goals and SDW can help you develop and articulate them for your organization. Our team can you survey employees, assess supervisor’s talents and audit key practices so that you get baseline data from which to measure the success of your goals. Let us assist you in building a high output organization.

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