Accountability and momentum… keep the strategy alive.

In this, our third piece on strategy and planning for small business owners, we give you practical advice and tips to help you continue the process, action the actions and drive the change you want to see in your business. A strategic plan should be a living, breathing thing… read on to make sure you know how to keep it alive and kicking!

OK, I’ve started. What now?

Firstly, get the practical stuff in place to maintain momentum. As we advised in part 2 of this series: put your planning and strategy sessions in your calendar and DO NOT let them get sidelined by everyday tasks.

Business owners can (and often will!) find a million tasks to do rather than another planning meeting. Most of these tasks will be reactive firefighting, rather than structured or planned actions that will actually improve the business in the long run.

By getting sidelined, business owners stay very busy but may never actually improve. Make sure you notice this in yourself, if you’re disappearing down this route. Then treat the cause not the symptoms. Commit the time to this process and stick with it, until it becomes a genuine habit.

Action stations!

Many business owners get to the point of documenting a plan, but once the excitement of developing that plan fades they get stuck in the same old trap of working IN the business rather than ON it. They think the planning is “finished” (reality check: it never is!) and they lose momentum.

The key to making sure you continue to work towards your goals is the setting of ACTIONS. And, to make sure your actions are actually “actionable”, they need three attributes: identified, quantified and prioritised. This is what we mean by this:

• Identify the ACTIONS required to deliver the plan. If you haven’t created specific, tactical, measurable actions, then what you’ve done is an “objective” setting exercise rather than a full plan. So, make sure you set bite-sized actions for each objective.
• Quantify the ACTIONS that you’ve set against every objective. What needs to be done? Who can do each of them; who has both the skillset and the capacity? How are you measuring each action? An owner naturally tends to try to take on all tasks… but the reality is we do not usually have that capacity. It’s imperative to outsource some (many!) of the actions. This can be shared amongst internal people, which is great for bringing the team into the planning process, and for creating internal accountability. Or you can bring in external help, which often brings skills into the business that otherwise wouldn’t be available, improving the overall result while skill-sharing with you and your team for the future.
• Prioritise the ACTIONS by putting them in a structured, prioritised and sequential order, with budgets (where necessary). So… in what order does everything need to be done? By when? Do some actions have dependencies against others? How will this impact their actioning? Doing this makes the delivery of each bite-sized chunk (that is, each action) feel and be very achievable. Much more approachable and practical than trying to address a broad plan that can feel overwhelming.

Once you’ve worked through these three key steps and got your action plan set up… you are off and racing! Then just trust your plan and follow it through, action by action.

Accountability is the key

OK, you’ve got your plan, your sessions are diarised and you’ve got clear actions planned and owned. Now… how are you measuring these? And to whom are you accountable? It can feel tough to be accountable in a small business when we are our own boss!

If you’ve shared out actions internally, this already creates accountability because you’re empowering your team to take these actions and to report back to you – they’re accountable to you and you keep them on track!

Make sure there are clear milestones and metrics set against actions so that everyone understands the expectation. Don’t forget that, as a leader (and owner of actions), you’re accountable to your people too. It’s a two-way street.

As you move forward take the opportunities to celebrate milestones, and to adjust and learn from each step forward. Building (or re-enforcing) a culture of constant review and improvement can be a brilliant additional outcome from this kind of exercise.

Internal resources are great… but many of us may also need someone external to keep us accountable and progressing in the right direction. It’s a pretty tough ask for a small business owner to have the skills (and energy) required to cover every aspect of the business.

One good option can be to set up an Advisory Board. This can be a great way to provide the business with assistance to prepare the plan, and access guidance and discipline to follow it and deliver on it. We’ve worked with many businesses on setting up Advisory Boards, so do give us a shout if you’d like some advice on how to do this.

It can be highly motivational knowing that there is someone (whether it’s a consultant or an actual advisory board) waiting on weekly or monthly meetings to hear what you have been up to, to call you out when needed… and actually demand the best from you!

Getting help – what is available?

There is a lot to consider here, as a small business owner. If you need a hand, there are many sources of help available at different levels:

1. Specialists: Those who can help you deliver the different actions themselves. These tend to be specialists such as IT, telco, HR, Marketing, Accounting and Finance experts.
2. Generalists: Those who can help you and mange you (the owner) to create and then deliver the plan.

A great option, in many cases, is a combination of both.

As an owner, it can be incredibly effective to take on a generalist who can help you through the process, as your own strategic advisor. Someone who gives you guidance and mentorship; that you can work with and report to as you go through this journey. You need to have your head across the whole plan and this should be someone who will sit alongside you to advise you through that.

If there are specialist areas that also need input externally, they can be brought in as independent service providers, accountable to you and your advisor. Some consultants and advisors will have (as we do at Business Positive) a strong network of specialists they can recommend… but who remain completely independent. This is important as there is no loss of accountability, or conflict of interest.

One factor when considering external help for small businesses is always cost. Be reassured that there are a variety of ways to mitigate and/or spread that cost. We are experts in accessing government grants for SMEs, for example, that help cover many of the external costs involved in helping businesses grow and accelerate. There are also often options for staged payments which enable small businesses to access the services they need now but spread the cost.

Don’t forget, if you didn’t download our free SME Strategy Framework already, please access this resource to help you on your journey!

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We hope our 3-part series on STRATEGY for SMEs has been a helpful read. If you missed our first two parts you can find them here: (1) Strategy is not Sizeist and (2) Just dive in.

If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you and your business, we’d be delighted to have a chat. We love working with small business owners to help their business dreams come to fruition!

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