Business Plans to Game Plans: A Practical System for Turning Strategies into Action - Softcover

King, Jan B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471466166 ISBN 13: 9780471466161

Publisher: Wiley, 2003

Synopsis

Breaking down complex concepts into simple and effective action plans, author Jan King will help you profit from her extensive experience and avoid common mistakes. This new revised edition elaborates on the six critical principles of running a small business that helped guide King to success:

• Set standards and give your employees the tools to meet your goals
• Lead by example
• Look to the long term–the very long term
• Find the important details and focus on them
• Watch for variances from expected results
• Face reality when you look at your company and take action

Business Plans to Game Plans will help you turn your vision into a thriving business equipped to weather any market! Order today!

About this title

About the Author

JAN B. KING was the president and CEO of Merritt Publishing from 1991 through 1998, transforming this small business into a recognized financial publishing brand and one of the fifty largest woman-owned and run businesses in Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. She is currently a writer and business consultant, who in 2002 received the award for "Outstanding Performance as a Small Business Woman’s Advocate" from the SBA/California Small Business Development Centers.

From the Back Cover

"This book does something important: it takes abstract information and puts it in language and worksheets that make sense. This gives everyone including top managers a complete description of how a company s performing. And there s no better tool for improving performance than understanding."
Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business

"Know what is vital to the success of your business, enhance skills for confident prediction, and avert crisis management. This book offers all that for the price of lunch."
James C. Collins, Chairman Emeritus, Sizzler International, Inc.

"Most small business related books approach the implementation of business plans and strategic planning in a very traditional fashion. This one is different. It illustrates how to realistically turn a business plan into an action plan. But it does not stop there. The author discusses the most current methods of managing a business, e.g., total quality management techniques, not in textbook style but in practical, everyday language. Her style of instruction is nothing short of excellent. This readable, practical work is useful for all levels."
Fred Andrews, Springfield Community Technical College in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

"This how-to workbook for small businesses shows how to develop and communicate a vision and how to empower people so they can make the vision a reality."
Arizona Business Gazette

Transform your business plan into an action plan

This new revised edition elaborates on the six critical principles of running a small business that helped guide King to success:

• Set standards and give your employees the tools to meet your goals
• Lead by example
• Look to the long term the very long term
• Find the important details and focus on them
• Watch for variances from expected results
• Face reality when you look at your company and take action

King breaks down complex concepts into simple and effective action plans, helping you profit from her extensive experience and avoid common mistakes. With more than fifty worksheets and exercises to guide your implementation, Business Plans to Game Plans helps you turn your vision into a thriving business equipped to weather any market.

"Know what is vital to the success of your business, enhance skills for confident prediction, and avert crisis management. This book offers all that for the price of lunch."
–– James C. Collins, Chairman Emeritus, Sizzler International, Inc.

"Most small business—related books approach the implementation of business plans and strategic planning in a very traditional fashion. This one is different. It illustrates how to realistically turn a business plan into an action plan. But it does not stop there. The author discusses the most current methods of managing a business, e.g., total quality management techniques, not in textbook style but in practical, everyday language. Her style of ‘instruction’ is nothing short of excellent. This readable, practical work is useful for all levels."
–– Fred Andrews, Springfield Community Technical College in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

"This ‘how-to’ workbook for small businesses shows how to develop and communicate a vision and how to empower people so they can make the vision a reality."
–– Arizona Business Gazette

Transform your business plan into an action plan

This new revised edition elaborates on the six critical principles of running a small business that helped guide King to success:

• Set standards and give your employees the tools to meet your goals
• Lead by example
• Look to the long term–the very long term
• Find the important details and focus on them
• Watch for variances from expected results
• Face reality when you look at your company and take action

King breaks down complex concepts into simple and effective action plans, helping you profit from her extensive experience and avoid common mistakes. With more than fifty worksheets and exercises to guide your implementation, Business Plans to Game Plans helps you turn your vision into a thriving business equipped to weather any market.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Business Plans to Game Plans

A Practical System for Turning Strategies into ActionBy Jan B. King

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2003 Jan B. King
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-471-46616-1

Chapter One

Moving from Vision to Action

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. -Buckminster Fuller

I call this book Business Plans to Game Plans because it takes you from your business plan, that is, what you share with those outside your business, like investors, to your game plan, which is how you really run the business, and what you share with your employees.

As a business-planning consultant, I have written countless business plans. While many of them received the funding they were hoping to attract, a number of these businesses failed in the first several years or never got out of the planning stage. In fact, a few of the entrepreneurs I worked with expected the business plan to be a blueprint for how to run the business. They couldn't be more wrong.

Here is one major difference between the business plan and the game plan: A business plan is written to impress others with how much you already know so that they can decide if they want to invest money in your venture. Entrepreneurs need to build their weaknesses into some sort of plan so that they don't neglect to take care of them. It's acceptable to admit you don't have all of the answers in the game plan, but you never see any such admissions in a successful business plan.

Business plans do not include implementation instructions, because the writers of business plans focus on accomplishment. They write as if once you dream the dream, it magically becomes reality. They don't write about the hard part-that is, the work it takes to gain success.

Implementing a business plan and a game plan takes hard work. It takes wisdom, discipline, courage, an eye for detail, and, most of all, persistence. It also requires an outward focus and an inward focus. You must set goals, communicate them, review them, monitor their realization, and stick to them when other people might abandon them. Your hard work will pay off, and with the tools I offer in this book, you can make your company a success.

INVENTING YOUR COMPANY

I know how hard it can be to run a business. In 1990, I suddenly found myself running a publishing company where I'd worked for seven years. In a matter of weeks, I had to grapple with a wide range of management problems; with little relevant experience and no formal business education, I had to learn to take control.

My company had been in business since 1957. I came to it as a writer and editor, then as the company's editorial director-a solid middle management position. The company also had the good fortune to be so profitable and cash rich in its formative years that there had been little need to project or monitor sales or expenses, cash or profit. The downside of this was that very little had been done to set expectations or monitor performance. It was hard to tell how well we were doing at any given time-or how well we would do in the future.

By the time I began running the company, we were no longer cash rich and our markets were changing dramatically, primarily due to new technologies that both made entry into our markets much easier and changed traditional distribution methods dramatically. Without cash to invest in our own growth, I knew we would not survive over the long term.

We had no choice but to reinvent the company. In effect, we were a 40-year-old start-up. We needed a business plan and we needed a game plan. We had to translate a new vision into action.

In the months that followed, I realized that the key to our survival was to get a handle on where our cash was going and reduce our expenses. We needed to change the corporate culture from a happy family business to one where accountability played a significant role. Last, but maybe most importantly, we also had to have a better understanding of what our business was fundamentally, who we were selling products to and what they would want in the future, and which of our over 200 products were profitable.

Challenge #1: Finance

Although my background was not in finance (or in business), company invoices were much like the bills I paid at home: I knew we paid rent, utilities, insurance, and salaries. I also knew that we paid for the products we produced and their marketing. Then, there were many other items like the outside professionals, computers, and miscellaneous items like office supplies.

Over several weeks, we sorted these invoices from the just-ended fiscal year into categories that seemed to make sense and covered all the types of invoices we found. In questioning people about what each individual invoice pertained to, we found-to our amazement-that many bills had been paid for services we no longer received. This was particularly true for maintenance contracts on equipment we no longer owned. Once the accounting department had been told to expect a particular bill each month, they continued to pay it without question. Many bills are addressed to accounts payable, and paid without anyone else ever seeing them. We cut about $77,000 in expenses simply by questioning old invoices. That was the first step to taking control of the business and to the development of the worksheets in this book.

Challenge #2: Corporate Culture

My next challenge was in determining employee accountability on a larger scale. How could I hold the employees accountable if they did not know how the company was doing? Because my company was (at the time) partially employee owned, the answer was to share financial information with everyone. I've heard the arguments against this kind of openness, the most compelling of which was that competitors could use this information against you. However, I took employee ownership seriously and expected everyone at the company to help run our business. I couldn't expect others to do what I couldn't do myself-namely, to run a business without knowing those numbers by which we measure success or failure. Too, I shared financial documents with my employees in the hope that they would see how the numbers sprang from their own work. I wanted my employees to grasp the numbers as proof of the importance to the company of everything they did.

In short, I gave my employees access to the financial statements and other documents to help them make intelligent decisions about their work. I educated them about what the numbers meant in the expectation that they would use those numbers not just to gauge our success, but to guide their actions. I discovered the remarkable power you harness by doing this. I discuss in further detail how to empower your employees to understand their impact on the bottom line in Chapter 2.

Informing your employees can have a profound impact on all aspects of your business. Of all the memories I have of the early years, the one I value most came after I started circulating the financial and operational reports. At a rather ordinary operations meeting, an employee suggested that we reduce inventory, saying that this would increase our cash position going into the critical months of our year.

It was an extraordinary moment. Financial consultants talk to boards of directors for hours about inventory accountancy, but on his own, this employee figured out that a tight inventory meant more available cash for us. His comprehension signaled to me that my openness with the numbers had paid off. Moreover, this episode reminded me that when I had been a nonmanagement employee, I had never stopped to think about the impact of inventory on cash in the bank. This is the subject of Chapter 5.

Challenge #3: Marketing and Sales

Like many entrepreneurs, the founder of my company hadn't believed in sharing financial information with his employees. We received monthly sales reports, and the bonus program for managers depended on profits. I knew that profits depended on sales, and sales interested me insofar as it pleased me to see that the books I wrote actually sold. However, sales seemed magical to me; I had no way to predict them. More important, I didn't think I could affect them in any immediate way. I eagerly awaited the accountant's proclamation at the end of each year-to find out whether I'd get a bonus. I had no clue how I personally could impact sales.

When I became CEO, I found that trying to boost sales was hard, but I developed a number of steps you can take to make your forecasts more accurate, as I'll discuss throughout the book. In my case, I did the following things, all of which are covered in the book:

I listed all the products we sold, from the biggest revenue earner to the least; I then made the same list using our customer data. I was eventually able to calculate the profitability for each product and each customer. This became my company's guide as to which products to sell most aggressively, and to which customers, as I'll discuss in Chapter 4.

We discontinued products where we were unable to reduce costs or raised prices where we thought the market would allow it. Some programs worked well, others didn't work at all.

We closely tracked all our marketing efforts and duplicated those that worked well in tests, as discussed in Chapter 6.

We constantly tested new approaches; and we worked out kinks in marketing, production, and fulfillment.

We refined and simplified our corporate vision and mission statements, as covered later in this chapter.

We began to develop offshoots of our most successful products.

We paid close attention to what our largest customers liked and didn't like and constantly improved our existing products. This resulted in a doubling of our sales in a few short years.

We simplified our reports and key indicators, focusing them on things of importance and ridding them of everything else. These had started out unnecessarily complex, based on imprecise formulas and assumptions. The longer we used them, the more basic they became. I cover this area in Chapter 3 on understanding the numbers.

Finally, personally, I had to train myself to understand how the business was doing on a daily basis. Equally important, I had to make sure the other employees knew how the business was doing so that they would work toward the objectives we developed. I discuss tactics for motivating your employees and communicating your goals in Chapters 7 and 8.

Challenge #4: Creating a Future for the Company

After I had been CEO for almost two years, the founder of the company passed away, leaving us without a plan for a change in ownership. The company was already 40 percent employee owned, and we had decided together to take it to 100 percent. Some of the money had to be generated internally, so we had to become more profitable. Some of the money had to be borrowed, which forced us to put together a written business and marketing plan.

Creating a goal like this one generates unbeatable motivation. Suddenly, our definition of winning was more similar to an athletic game-there was a real dollar number we had to meet or beat to win. This was the genesis of the game plans I've used. They gave people real reasons to hold tight on expenses, and develop new products-reasons that people could get excited about for personal reasons. Every person working at the company had a reason to step up to the plate.

We decided to set up committees that would meet weekly and make sure the plans we made were being implemented. The two major committees monitored profitability (mostly from the revenue side) and expenses. Reporting to these committees were other subcommittees devoted to new products, customer service, strategic alliances, and other business functions. I asked for volunteers to serve on the major committees, and made sure that members from each department were present.

The committees used many of the ideas and worksheets in this book to monitor performance and progress toward our goal of 100 percent employee ownership. The worksheets allow for self-measurement. Employees become responsible for deciding what work needs to be done, and then for measuring what they do.

In 1996, Merritt Publishing became a 100 percent employee-owned company. This was not the end of the game-new challenges immediately confronted us, which meant, once again, a reevaluation of who we were and where we wanted to go. It meant a new business plan and a new game plan.

In 1998, we were approached with a new opportunity, and the employees voted unanimously to sell the company to a large computer-based training company. They believed in their abilities and wanted to participate as a player in the e-learning market. Many employees had ambitions to start and run their own companies where they would deal with the challenges and opportunities of growth and people management like we did as a group.

LIVING THE VISION

As a business leader, creating an overarching vision can have a profound effect on all aspects of your business. To do your job well, you have to start with four broad intentions:

1. To create the vision and mission that define your purpose.

2. To communicate these clearly and effectively and to translate the vision and mission into goals, objectives, and action items down to the individual level.

3. To measure success and encourage progress through others.

4. To stay the course and refocus on making changes in your action plan as needed.

If you accomplish these four goals, you've gone a long way toward realizing a fifth goal:

5. To build a culture that makes your company a good place to work-and thus improves your prospects for success. You need to give your company a strong sense of purpose.

If you achieve all of this, you'll truly be able to take control of your dreams. You'll be living your vision. Remember, the main goal is to avoid getting so busy managing today's business that tomorrow's business gets pushed aside. Goals are most useful when they help you decide what you and other employees should be doing at work today to help you achieve what you want for the future.

AN ONGOING PROCESS

When you've set the basic objectives you need to run a company efficiently, you'll usually find you've done much more work than you realized. These tools don't always come easily to entrepreneurial managers. You might doubt the value of something as abstract as a vision statement. But give the matter a chance-exercises that seem simplistic to you may have a fundamental impact on your employees or customers.

Think of your business as a place in which every person involved plays an indispensable role. This is an ongoing process that lasts as long as your company is in business. It's not over when your salespeople sign a customer. It's not over when you cash that customer's check. It's not over when you ship your product.

If ever, it's over when the phone rings again, and the same customer places another order. And then the whole process starts once more.

TOOLS FOR MOVING FROM VISION TO ACTION

In this chapter, we'll work through the following tasks within this ongoing process:

Creating your vision.

Crafting a mission statement.

Doing the SWOT analysis.

Defining corporate goals and objectives.

Action plans: Turning vision into action.

Visually representing your plan.

When you've finished, you should have a good idea of the best practical goals you can set for your company. You should be able to look toward the horizon without tripping over any obstacles at your feet.

Before we begin, ask yourself these questions about the future of your company:

Have you spent time, no matter how long your business has existed, in thinking about the future of your business?

Is your thinking about the future something you have adequately communicated to others who are involved in the business?

Has your thinking about the future changed due to changes in the market, the economy, and technology?

Are you willing to do whatever it takes to get to that future? Are you passionate and excited about the possibilities?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Business Plans to Game Plansby Jan B. King Copyright © 2003 by Jan B. King. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0471466166
• ISBN 13: 9780471466161
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 292