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Nick krest - Best Strategies for Business Success
Planning
“You need a destination and you need a map to get there.” That is the role of a business
plan, explains Bob Wilson, co-principal of Stoney-Wilson Business Consulting, which
specializes in helping small and medium-sized companies with their banking needs. Key to
the exercise is an honest SWOT analysis — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and
threats. Wilson notes that other people will want to see the plan — such as lenders,
insurance companies, bonding companies — but emphasizes, “The primary reason you’re
writing it is for you; it will be your bible on how to get where you want to be.”
A business plan helps the business owner to think through issues and understand problems.
It’s the shorter-term plan — 12 months — as compared to the longer-term strategy plan.
The shorter term enables greater accuracy in completing the action steps to achieve the key
initiatives, Wilson explains. The company’s co-principal Julie Stoney recommends the plan
focus on only three to five key initiatives, as each initiative will require several steps. Among
the steps for “growing the business,” for instance, may be acquiring a complementary
business, developing new product lines and franchising.
Knowing the competition is an important component of a business plan. “In order to
compete, you must understand what the competition is doing, such as pricing and service
levels,” Stoney says. “It will also help you identify if there is something complementary that
your business should be doing. You can identify holes in your own organization or in the
industry you can address, and satisfy a need.”
Also helpful to a business owner is an advisory board. “With an advisory board, the business
owner surrounds himself with expertise in a lot of areas, and it becomes his touchstone on a
go-forward basis,” Stoney says, noting that many business owners have no one to turn to.
“An advisory board also increases accountability to the business plan — what’s been said,
what’s been done, new steps.”
Funding a Successful Business
Adequate and appropriate funding is an ongoing necessity for a healthy business. “With a
growing company, it’s always a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if,’” notes Jerry Mills, founder and
CEO of B2B CFO, which provides financial and strategic solutions to small and mid-market
companies. In addition to planned growth strategies, he refers to such things as a
Department of Labor audit, Environmental Protection Agency regulations and significant
increases on healthcare or liability premiums as he points out, “There’s always some
surprise out there that we don’t know will happen.”

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For this reason, he advises business owners to develop a relationship with their bank before
the need for a loan arises. Observing that it’s typical to rush to the bank with an urgent need
in an emergency, he says banks “don’t work well in that situation,” and cites the Dodd-Frank
Act and other regulations since 2008 that banks must follow and that make lending more
difficult for them.
Recommending community banks as easier to work with than national ones, Mills suggests
seeking a loan or a credit card when the business does not need it, and using it just to
develop credit and a personal relationship with the bank. This is a strategy he recently
followed for his own company. “My company has no debt, but there are things we will want
to do in the future. I asked for a credit card and got one within 20 minutes. We’ll buy things
with it and pay the charges when they’re due.” Having established credit with the bank is
handy when the business needs money that might be harder to get, such as working capital.
“It makes it easier for the banker to say, ‘Yes.’ When he goes to the loan committee, he can
say he’s known you for a long time, and you’ve always over-performed.”
In today’s always-on and connected world, there are more channels to reach people, but
Lane notes the essentials are still in good communication. “Take the time to understand
your customer and consider how your customer reacts to what you’re saying.” It’s best to
be simple, direct and defined in terms of what is being communicated. In spite of short
attention spans, smaller screens and limited time, Lane says, “What’s exciting and
challenging in today’s world is, there are more ways to have that interaction with the
customer.” Plus, the digital world enables businesses to track results and see customers’
behavior and how they are reacting.
But before anything else, Lane emphasizes the importance of strategy as a foundation for
any marketing effort. “It’s easy to create marketing materials, but the magic comes if you
have strong strategy behind that, that’s focused on objectives you have and targeted to
customers you’re trying to attract.”

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Sales to Drive Revenue
A new technology or “best” of a product or service may be the foundation for establishing a
business, but when the market gets competitive or the business hits a plateau, the
predictability of cash flow becomes unpredictable. Sales is the side of being in business that
provides predictable revenue growth, but sales trainer Mike Toney, founder and CEO of
Conquest Training Systems, notes there are three methodologies: transactional, focused
only on a quick sale and closing the deal; trusted advisor, working with a customer on a
problem the customer recognized; and strategic partner, bringing a solution to a problem
the customer had not known he had.
Toney shares six important aspects of sales. These are “Society” — knowing who is being
targeted and who is the ideal client; “Silo” — identifying the niche(s) the business can
dominate; “Solution” — recognizing the problems the business can solve that no other
businesses can solve; “Strategy” — developing a plan; “Structure” — accountability,
management and compensation of the sales force; and “Systems” — the methodology that
the business deploys.
A common problem, according to Toney, is having the wrong type of salesperson for the
desired role, such as a transactional sales representative in a strategic role. Noting that most
salespeople will show up to “sell” themselves to fill the job, Toney observes, “Most owners
don’t know how to hire.” It’s important to not have a “softball interview” but to put
pressure on the applicants so that they can’t stay in their safe mode. The owner can learn
more about the salesperson by seeing where he or she “cracks.”
Managing People, Process & Benefits
What makes a business successful, says Stephanie Waldrop, principal of Employee Benefits
International, “has a lot to do with its ability to attract and retain quality employees who will
be the face of the business.” A benefits program as part of a company’s compensation
package is a tool to build loyalty within an employee pool. “It shows how much an employer
cares about them. And employers who care get employees who care.”
A lot of attention has been focused lately on healthcare, as discussed in the three-part
healthcare series that concludes in this issue. But specific benefits aside, Waldrop states,
“The No. 1 thing employees want in a benefits program is stability.” It’s important for
employers to have a strategy to create that stability, from managing cost to creating a
three- to five-year plan of what they want the program to look like. “This allows them to
avoid a knee-jerk reaction, such as slicing benefits to offset a renewal increase.”

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An employer can achieve a win-win by surveying the employees as to what’s most
meaningful to them — but limit the choices to items the employer has already determined
are within his budget and he’s willing to act on.
Technology that Matters
“Technology is important for its ability to help all businesses scale — to provide repeatable
and consistent results with what they do for their customers,” says Clint Harder, chief
technology officer and senior VP of product strategy at OneNeck IT Solutions. He also points
to the advantage technology brings by enabling business owners and executives to connect
directly with [all the people they do business with] — customers, partners, vendors.”
Cloud outsourcing has become appropriate for businesses of all sizes, Harder observes,
explaining that instead of a business consuming technology with its own capital and bringing
it into its physical location, the cost is an operating expense remotely delivered.
Under the broad umbrella of “technology” are items developed for specific types of
businesses or industries, and the smaller companies that do not have a department
dedicated to researching and updating advances that could be useful to them “get that type
of advisory and forward-looking education from vendors they partner with for their IT,”
Harder says. Professional services organizations, whose inventory is people and time,
require a program to help manage labor costs and billing rates as well as needs around
document management. Retail focuses more on business processes — inventory of
merchandise, manufacturing cost, delivery systems to get goods to locations. And getting
detail-specific within industry-specific, Harder notes that dealing with certain types of oil
wells requires specific engineering technology software and hardware.
“Technology” also encompasses the type of service OneNeck provides — helping run all the
other technologies that support specific applications. The point is to protect and monetize
the data. Says Harder, “Everything else can be bought in a commoditized component basis
as an operating service, such as data co-location or cloud computing.”
Noting that core company information technology becomes purely obsolete in five years,
and has degraded capability — although is still functional — in just two to three years,
Harder says, “Using the cloud puts the obsolescence risk on the provider rather than on
yourself.”