Your Pain
Are you feeling:
- Worried about the best way for business growth?
- Concerned about cash flow?
- Unsure what strategy is required to get to the ‘next stage’?
- Not sure how to keep your senior management and people on-side?
It can be a lonely place.
At different stages, your business stresses and strains as management, admin, sales and marketing plans cease to be appropriate for the current stage of business growth.
Understanding your place in the business lifecycle is a starting point.
Questions key for Strategic Planning:
- Will what got us here, get us there?
- What do we want to be?
- What are the opportunities? How can we exploit them?
- What would success look like?
We can help! – Call us today!
How We Can Help
We have devised a system called the Strategy Workout which will enable you to explore, develop and design a business development plan that is realistic, deliverable and based on sense-checking every aspect of the strategy. We are not in the business of creating risk. Quite the reverse. The process will reduce risk and increase the likelihood of success.
The Strategy Workout asks three essential questions:
- ‘Where are you now?’
- ‘Where are you going?’
- ‘How are you going to get there?’
Our business consultants have grown their own businesses as well as those of our clients. We know about strategic growth pains because we have ‘been-there-and-done-it’. We have the scars from learning the hard way.
Clients that we’ve helped develop and mentor through growth strategy include:
Who This Worked For
Adventure Bars approached the Directors’ Centre just after they had bought their first large West End cocktail bar to supplement a series of smaller suburban bars they already owned.
Tom Kidd, Adventure Bars:
“Business growth to date had been random and without great purpose and direction. We were learning by making mistakes and we felt convinced that there must be an easier way to grow a business.”
The consultancy process was a mix of one-to-one conversations, desk and market research (the industry, market, customers and competitors) to understand the options, possibilities and appetite for growth.
Key questions had to be addresses by the directors (as a team and as individuals):
- Just how good is the business?
- What is our potential to grow the business?
- What is the business strategy? Where do we want the business to be in three years’ time?
- What is possible? Is the risk-reward ratio acceptable?
- What are the steps on the way? What must we keep? What must we lose?
- How will we track our performance and hold ourselves accountable?
Through a process of discussions, debate and argument, a strategic plan emerged that literally ticks all the boxes, and more! Something ambitious, sense-checked, practical, realistic, tested and deliverable.
“
The ability to help us understand and refocus on the really important parts of the business has been key in our recent growth.
The Directors’ Centre consultants acted as both sounding board and voice of sanity, a unique perspective and directness, which never feels clumsy or offensive.
Tom Kidd, Adventure Bars
The Client’s Story
“The Directors’ Centre’s original role was to come in and help us to understand how to structure our business more effectively in order to achieve our financial and personal goals.
At the time we had very little formal structure and even less strategic planning. Objectives throughout the company were mixed and the board was fragmented. The Directors’ Centre and Robert Craven helped us firstly to understand the importance of organising ourselves in a way that would make us more productive and ultimately more happy with what we were doing.
Once this stage of re-organisation was complete, The Directors’ Centre helped mentor us through the process of introducing a boardroom meeting strategy and board level KPIs and the associated issues that come with this.
We have been helped with the more grey areas such as board dynamic and understanding each other which in turn ultimately allows us to work more effectively together. This has helped us to bring the values we feel most strongly about, such as culture, work place satisfaction and delivery of brilliance to the fore.
Whilst I have distilled the activities into rather small paragraphs I feel it necessary to iterate how important many of these activities have been.”
Tom Kidd, Adventure Bars
Further Reading
