In a business meeting today, the person I met described me as 'Cerebral' in my approach to business. For those who actually know me in business, social settings and in my family, they would laugh aloud at the description.
Applying some cerebral power to the comment I could understand the person's train of thought. I had described how I go about executing, and how I believe in thinking something through, devising my plan or strategy, and then rigorously executing on it, with a final step in the process of reviewing the results before adjusting and continuing to execute. It's a tried and tested process but in the heat of a sales battle, often rapid action is preferred as any perceived dalliance is itself deemed as indecisive.
Planning - The Vital Key To Success
In the last few years it has been a feature of business to drive business through a series of short term actions, often with short term goals in mind. Monthly targets are a key driver for this and we all know these are essential in business but they can lead to poor habits. However, as we suffer a deep recession, many of the exponents of short term actions have been the first to hand their organisations over to 'cost cutting' or 'restructuring experts' because they simply ran out of ideas for the next actions. One minute the garden looked rosy, the next it went to pot.
I have blogged about planning for a recession. Many people have said that I was talking a recession up and bringing it on myself, while others have commented that a lack of a positive approach leads you away from the opportunities. The latter may be true but as a person, although I may not always show it, I am a naturally worrier. I am always thinking about where my next sale will come from and making a success of the projects I am involved with.
When I plan for myself, I plan first for survival and then next for the upside.
I may not be the world's greatest at grabbing success by the horns but I have a better understanding of how things can fail and so avoid them more effectively. In this recession, my business has gone up and I would reassure myself that it was because I worried early about how I would survive so that I put into place a plan of actions that not only has so far got me through the recession but has actually help me to do better than I expected.
I still worry each night before I switch off the light, but at least I am thinking ahead to my next day in business.
The Power of Thought
To constantly think about something and do nothing, is a plan that rarely succeeds. To just do things without thought, is a fool's game - it will end in disaster. To think and then do, is the basis for success.
I advise people, when making decisions about their next actions, to think what they want to achieve in terms of strategy and sales 3 or even 5 years down the line, because your decisions today are likely to have a profound effect on that. I worked for John Weatherhead at Frontline who always said that what you do tomorrow morning will either make you or lose you millions - because it is the effect of your decision a year or so down the line that will be an outcome of your next action. That always made me think about things rather than just jumping in and doing them.
So if you do nothing for one day, it costs you the value of a day's sales a year or more later because you pushed it away by another day.
Similarly, if you make a decision today which has only a short term effect and buys you a problem a year down the line, then you have lost the value of the future sales.
Very often, Channel sales plans of emerging companies go exactly that way. Short term goals buy long term legacy problems that hinder sales at crucial inflexion points when graphs should be shooting upwards. You may be left with a small, boutique Distributor when you need one with financial and logistical muscle to take advantage of the market a short way down the line.
Thinking that little bit more should not cost time - it is a logical process that should focus on what you need to achieve and what the path to that success looks like and with a clear view on what can impact that success positively or negatively on the way.
It's not cerebral, it isn't rocket science, but experience does help.
I would contend that the Credit Crunch is the result of short term profit focus by banks who lost sight of the 'cause and effect' of their actions. Anyone looking in from the outside could see it was a stupid strategy which had simple flaws and many single points of stress or failure which would bring the whole thing down but short term profit has a terrible lure. When coupled with a flawed earnings scheme there can only be one outcome - total disaster. The issue has been that the solutions have been executed with the vision of restoring the status quo when any fool would know that you have to sort out the fundamental flaw first, restructure the system and ensure that banks focus on their core skills of supplying capital and credit instead of making money out of nothing.
Planning Through a Recession
Many of the bullish, sales-orientated CEOs who have handed their companies to accountants to sort out the mess, are those who have weak planning skills and the inability to think ahead properly or at least more than just when the graphs all point upwards. Recessions, if faced up to and planned for properly, can be times when new opportunities arise which fundamentally change companies and give them new, sustainable profit opportunities. For those who do not change, they can indeed get caught out.
Warren Buffett famously describes it as being caught with no trunks on when the tide goes out - i.e. a lack of strategy. Many retail businesses have collapsed because of this as they relied solely on the amount of money in people's pockets being large enough so that their products would be bought by the law of statistics rather than product differentiation. For many businesses in business to business sales, it has been the failure to strengthen and prove their Value Proposition which has caused problems. It is a dumb assumption to make that a business is either recession proof or customers always need your products. In recessions, everything changes and no assumption is always right.
Recruiters are one of the most vulnerable businesses right now. Open vacancies have slumped to a low while unemployment has risen to 2million and is expected to reach 3million by the end of next year. Even Dragon's Den heroes have their mettle tested in such environments and I have heard rumours that one of James Caan's proteges is suffering, as are the mighty Michael Page and many others. Yet companies like Intramezzo are actually innovating by focusing on where there is investment. They are looking at emerging businesses and ideas and matching experienced entrepreneurs with new money as VCs actually have plenty of it for new ideas but don't want to pump more into current businesses. It's that kind of clever thinking that will seed a new business opportunity for long after the recession and it came about through planning on how to make money in a recession.
Old Adages Die Hard in Recessions
'Half a plan, badly executed tomorrow, is better then doing nothing at all'. Tell that to the brainiacs rescuing the economy. Thinking does not take a long time but can save an awful lot of failure and money if done in conjunction with the proper devising and execution of a plan. Nothing beats a good plan, well executed - and it is always worth waiting for.
If that's cerebral, then call me Einstein. I think it's just learning from bitter experience and comes with age.
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