Roy's Blog: October 2023

October 2, 2023

Why the current business planning methods are wrong and need to be rejected

Business plan

Why the current business planning methods are wrong and need to be rejected.

Current business planning methods are wrong.

They are totally out of touch with what organizations need to be successful.

And they need to be rejected and replaced with a planning process that recognizes the challenges organizations face in today’s environment of rapid change, unpredictability, uncertainty and ‘chaos’.

Here’s my quick rundown of the shortfalls of traditional business planning methods.

#1. Time — It takes too long to develop a business plan using standard pedagogical methods. Weeks can turn into months of analysis, modeling, risk assessment, strategy option comparisons and status reviews before the business planning process is concluded.
And as time passes by people lose interest in the outcome, and what began as an exciting task erodes into a laborious exercise.

#2. Cost — It’s an expensive process to deliver a business plan. At anywhere from $200 -$300 per hour it doesn’t take long to run up a $25,000 bill to have the business plan developed.

#3. Direction overload — Priority is given to getting the business plan direction ‘perfect’.
In fact most of the business plan development time is spent on defining the strategy direction exactly and precisely. Precision is given the utmost priority. Literally over 80% of the time spent is on getting the business plan direction EXACTLY RIGHT.

Analytics are used to attempt to squeeze perfection out of the plan.

#4. Execution MIA — With the overwhelming focus on business plan direction, little time is allocated to determining how the plan will be implemented.
The details of who does what by when are unfortunately not dealt with, leaving the plan “a brave idea” with no roadmap describing exactly how the intent of the plan will be achieved.
I’ve sat through planning sessions where so much time was spent on the WHAT, there was no time left for the HOW.

#5. Benchmarking — Under the guise of innovation, looking at ‘Best in Class’ organizations to determine what changes are needed overwhelms the direction setting process.
The amount of original thought and audacious creativity (https://www.bedifferentorbedead.com/blog/item/786) going into the business plan is meager at best.

Most organizations have an ongoing ‘love affair’ with benchmarking.

#6. Differentiation — There’s much talk about how to create a competitive advantage in the market, but it’s mostly smoke with no substance.

CLAPTRAP, ASPIRATIONS and NARCISSISM pervade this discussion. People declare they are ‘the best’ at this and ‘#1’ at that.
They all agree they are ‘market leaders’ with respect to some competence or skill that gives them the competitive edge that will vault their performance to astronomical heights.

In the end, the tough work of declaring what makes them truly unique among their competitors never gets done. The capabilities and competencies needed to “be the ONLY ones that they do” never gets addressed.
Reliance on the same-old textbook differential advantage rhetoric continues with no real change to their competitive position.

The objective of any business plan is to establish your organization as the ONLY one that does what you do.

#7. Leader fingerprints — Current business planning methodologies rely heavily on the opinions of consultants and other SME’s—Subject Matter Experts— either internal or external to the organization to guide the direction of the plan.

THEIR views, based on their alleged experience and expertise in developing high performing organizations, influence the strategic imperatives of the organization that results in the future allocation of investments.

Fingerprint leadership, in a nutshell, has a leader strategically micromanaging in their organization.

The truth is, in this business planning model, leaders review the opinions and recommendations of these SME’s and provide their approval on the strategic journey out to them, but rarely do they offer anything unique in terms of business strategy.

Their individual perspectives on strategy get little airtime because they’re not asked to plot the course of the organization from a blank sheet of paper.

The opportunity costs to the organization of giving too much power to the SME Influencers are significant. First, the business plan fails to capture and incorporate the experience and expertise of the leaders and second, leadership accountability is weakened.

With no direct skin in the game other than approving someone else’s proposal, a leader isn’t compelled to apply the same energy to implementing the plan as they would if they had more of an Influencer role.

strong<>#8. Textbooks and models — What SHOULD work in theory or academic pedagogy gets priority over what direction best fits the unique requirements of the particular organization the business plan involves.

The “Paper Plan” gets completed with virtually no frontline input. Models are used to predict expected demand from the plethora of assumptions made about customer take rates and competitive behavior.

Academia influences the direction and Doing doesn’t. If the results of the current strategy are falling short of expectations, the automatic assumption is that the STRATEGY—i.e. the plan direction—is wrong when in fact it might be an execution issue.

The landscape of business planning needs to change.

Business Planning should:

▪️Be relevant.
▪️Be engaging and fun.
▪️Engage the leadership team extensively, and draw on their knowledge and experience.
▪️Be reasonably quick to develop and not cost ‘an arm and a leg’.
▪️Focus more on execution.
▪️Establish leadership accountability.
▪️Be influenced more by the people in the trenches dealing with customers and competitors.

I created the Strategic Game Plan to address the frailties of traditional planning methods.

It guided us to take a startup to A BILLION IN SALES! and has helped many businesses achieve the growth and success their leaders never experienced before!

Cheers,
Roy
My 75+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.

My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION.

My BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

‘Audacious’ is my latest.

  • Posted 10.2.23 at 07:00 am by Roy Osing
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September 24, 2023

Why a great business plan has blood stains on it

Blood
Source: Unsplash

Why a great business plan has blood stains on it.

Should your business plan document have 2 faces to it?

Should it have more than one purpose?

Most organizations look at their strategy document as a description of their desired future.

It is the culmination of hours of excruciating work that has tested a number of alternative courses of action and has landed on one that is believed to deliver the maximum benefit.

Indeed the strategy document does perform this valuable role. It communicates to one and all (although I have seen instances where the strategy is held in confidence on a need-to- know basis for fear that its unintentional release would cause irreparable harm to the company) where you are going and the activities necessary to get you there.

From this perspective it is an essential tool in the internal communications plan to ensure all employees are on board.

Use your strategy document as a record of progress.

But I think there is a more vital role that the strategy document plays - to record the things we learn in the course of executing the strategy.

It’s one thing to declare the direction we intend to take. It’s quite another to witness the extent to which we conform to our grand intentions in the market with real customers and real competitors.

I believe in planning on the run, the notion that you set your direction and you adjust it based on the learning you get from executing it.

The plan never turns out the way you imagined; there are too many random market variables impacting us that get in the way.

That said, the strategy document must be viewed as a destination for depositing everything that we have learned during the arduous execution process.

What worked?
What didn’t? Why?
What is the variance diagnosis?

You need to record your experiences just like you would journalize what’s going on in your personal life.

Documented experiences lead to learning which leads to adjustments to your strategy.

Dump on your planning document! It’s ok to have pages ear-marked, coffee stained, scribbling and the odd blood stained paper cut. It shows that it has been used to journalize your strategic journey.

The dirtier your business plan the better.

Cheers,
Roy
My 50+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.

Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

  • Posted 9.24.23 at 05:25 am by Roy Osing
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September 14, 2023

Great leaders ‘eat their own dog food’ in these 10 easy ways


Source: Pexels

Great leaders ‘eat their own dog food’ in these 10 easy ways.

How often have you heard a leader in your organization preach a set of values and yet don’t consistently demonstrate them? For these people it is easier to give other people advice than to listen to their own words and practice them unconditionally.

They talk about creating a risk-taking culture but punish those that make mistakes.

They talk about being customer focused but they have no calendar time dedicated to meeting with customers.

They talk about people as the most important asset of the organization but they have a closed-door policy and it is impossible for employees to get face time with them.

This type of behaviour does not go unnoticed by the tribes in the organization. Employees see the inconsistency between words and action and they are left with the conclusion that it is all a facade and the leader doesn’t really mean what they say.

As a result the organization falters. Little progress is made towards a healthier future. Employee satisfaction plummets. Competitors plunder.

The business eventually fails.

These are the things great leaders do to ‘eat their own dog food’:

They:

▪️ passionately communicate the business plan of the organization in minute detail to define the precise behaviours necessary to successfully execute it.

▪️ focus on the critical few things that must be done to make the strategy come alive and they model the appropriate behaviour.

▪️ are nosy leaders. They spend copious amounts of time with employees identifying roadblocks to progress and clarifying the behaviour expected to deliver the strategic imperatives of the organization.

▪️ believe in ‘do-it-yourself’ and never ask others to do anything they are not prepared to do themselves.

▪️ actively participate in the 360 feedback process for their own performance improvement, involving employees throughout the organization for feedback on their leadership.

▪️ Align every aspect of their position responsibilities to strategic goals and behave accordingly.

▪️ openly communicate their pain when difficult circumstances impact the organization. Employees need to see that leaders suffer disappointment like everyone else.

▪️ assign high potential managers to do their job for brief periods to get another perspective on how they could perform their role more effectively.

▪️ engage frontline people in improving the execution of their business plan. They initiate frontline panels as vehicles to get feedback on execution effectiveness and to provide direction for improving.

▪️ make a point of showing employees how they have matched words with action. They intentionally don’t delegate certain tasks in order to make the behaviour they want explicit for people.
The leader’s fingerprints are all over the activities that really matter.

The ‘do as I say and not what I do’ thing doesn’t work. It’s an insult to people’s intelligence.

So, if you think you’re a great leader you’d better be eating your own dog food.

Cheers,
Roy
My 75+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.

My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION.

My BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

‘Audacious’ is my latest.

  • Posted 9.14.23 at 07:00 am by Roy Osing
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September 1, 2023

Why the best marketing tool is ‘customer learning’ not marketing research


Source: Pexels

Why the best marketing tool is ‘customer learning’ not marketing research.

In my experience as a CMO for a number of years, a marketing organization that has a strategy with these three elements is miles ahead of other organizations, and becomes the best practice for the herd to follow.

The strategy they follow involves a unique approach to:

▪️ the process used to understand what people want and desire.
▪️ the information selected on people that makes a difference on whether or not someone chooses you as their provider.
▪️ how to transform the information into something that people will pay for over and over again.

The process to follow

The old adage that knowledge is power has a specific application in an environment where competition is fierce, economic shifts are dramatic and unpredictable and where customer wants and desires are changing almost every hour on the hour.

Most organizations employ market research as the tool for discovering the mood and needs of customer groups; the studies are typically performed by an external firm and are done periodically.

Market research has limitations.

— First and foremost, as the name suggests, it deals with ‘markets’; aggregations of individuals who express similar needs. The problem is that no two people are identical in any way, so when you look at market data you are looking at a blend of individuals where no one specifically is like the data gathered.

— Second, the fact that it is done periodically means that the rapid pace of changing needs could put organizations out of touch with what the current priorities are for the customer.
What people desire in this moment are likely different from what they yearned for a moment ago.

— Third, being outsourced to 3rd party contractors puts the management of customer knowledge outside the organization, and the understanding and application of it in the hands of a few employees.
Marketing receives the customer data and decides what it means to their marketing programs.

A new research model is needed; one that leverages the gathering of customer insights on the run to be a core competency of an organization that is unmatched by others.

A core competency that applies the continuous stream of changing customer needs discovered to create opportunities and solutions for the customer that others simply are unable to do.

Customer learning is the answer.

Customer learning is the continuous process of capturing customer needs, wants and desires real time in the moment they touch the organization.

The idea is that every time a customer “touches” the organization, it represents an opportunity to learn something about them.
My approach was to define all touch points in the organization and focus on the ones that represented 80% of the action.

Any customer touch point can yield productive learning if you consider it as a strategic learning opportunity rather than just a customer contact.

The challenge is to engineer the contact to produce the maximum amount of learning. Structure the engagement to allow you to easily gather their information you seek; ask the right questions, be unobtrusive and let the magic begin.

Obviously one of the engineering issues organizations need to get over is the amount of time an employee is allowed to spend with a customer. If they are managed by how long the engagement takes, the amount of quality information on the customer will be reduced.

And, for online applications, the engagement process must be structured to encourage people to provide information on the website. This has limitations, of course, because it’s not a conversation where the dialogue opens up opportunities to obtain more information from a person.

A touch point that paid off handsomely for me was rhe customer complaint; when a customer called in with a complaint about something.

Dealing with complaining customers may not rank #1 on the rewarding experience scale for employees, but the complaint can, if listened to closely, produce useful information on how you can better serve your customers.

As an aside, I’m not a fan of being pointed to a FAQ web page as the organization’s way of handling my complaint. The questions are rarely relevant — because they’ve been prepared by employees from encounters with other people — and the moment leaves me frustrated and annoyed.
On the other hand, I’ve had some terrific experiences with the Chat function; more resources should be deployed here.

What to do with all the information gathered from customer moments? Store them in a repository that is used by marketers to develop meaningful solutions to the problems and opportunities buried in the data.

The scope of customer learning is to look at the customer holistically; what their needs and wants are at the highest and broadest level.
The idea is to look laterally across their persona to discover their integrated needs rather than to look vertically to define a narrow — slice — need.

A holistic need for a consumer could be to travel every 6 months with their family; a slice need could be to have faster internet speed.
For a business a holistic need could be to leverage technology into a competitive advantage; a slice need could be to increase inventory turns by twofold.

To be able to use your marketing machine to standout from your competitors, it starts with institutionalizing a process to continually learn about your customers.

The information to gather

The challenge in a world where virtually everyone has their basic needs satisfied is determining how an organization can stand out and be noticed. How does it get tagged with being remarkable and indispensable by their customers?

Today people are looking beyond their basic needs to feed their wants and desires. They are driven to a higher level to seek happiness; basic needs satisfaction may give people a lift for a period of time but the lustre soon fades — a new SUV soon becomes a used car.

As marketers, if we continue to focus on what people need we will miss the opportunities that lead to market leadership and enhanced profitability. The source of this huge untapped potential are the untapped secrets hidden in the deepest nooks and crannies of every individual that define who they are and how they want to express themselves.

A customer secret is what someone craves, aches and hungers for.

A customer secret has little to do with what someone needs. They need food, shelter, water and dependable communications — they expect to get them and pay as little as possible when they do; they might crave to see a Liverpool game played at Anfield in England and are willing to pay more for the opportunity to have their dream come true.

In a business setting, they might need power to run their manufacturing facility, but would be delighted to have a consultant recommend how alternative technologies could be employed to drive costs down and efficiency up.


Source: Pexels

Exactly how does one gather secrets? People divulge their secrets only to others they trust, have confidence in, and have a strong relationship with.
If you are an outsider, they won’t tell you anything (other than perhaps what they need) and you won’t discover the gold that will enable you to have a profitable long-term relationship with them.

So, focus on relationship building with people you choose to serve. And don’t expect results overnight. It’s a long term investment; you can’t earn someone’s trust in a 60-minute interaction with them.

Secret gathering is a personal affair. Commit to informally meeting face-to-face with customers every week as a personal priority; you can’t discover secrets from your office. And have a casual conversation with the person you’re meeting; it’s not a formal market research interview — and don’t try and sell them on anything.

Avoid prying into personal matters unless it is a natural lead-in based on the conversation you are having. After the ice-breaker question, be guided by what they say.
And take lots of notes if it’s ok with them. It shows you’re interested in what they have to say.

How to use the information you gather

Marketing with the focus on products and services is the way most companies engage with the market and compete today.

Nothing wrong with this, but it’s hard to find a unique niche where your competitors won’t find you.
Product competition is always challenged with how to provide features others don’t.

Rather than the traditional product-centric approach, unforgettable marketing is moving to offering packages of value that reflect the broad holistic view of the target customer in terms of their needs, wants and desires.

The key question is, of course, how do you move to the package creation mode when you have been stuck in the product-only gear for so long?
Here are the 5 steps to follow to create packages around your products and services.

Define the core product — start with your core product. It will be the anchor for your package and generally represents the key product or service that you want to offer.

Add elements to your core product — Identify additional components that can be “wrapped around”, or added to, your core product.
The choice of what value to add is based on what you have learned — through the customer learning process — about your target customers. The more you know about the customer the easier it is to choose what added elements are appropriate.

Your end game is to create a package that addresses a relevant want or desire in the most compelling way possible.

Resist the temptation to add too many value elements; don’t complicate the package.
Try to add just three additional value components that present a consistent and seamless value proposition to the customer and a natural add-on to your core product.

You can always add more elements later if you discover there are unsatisfied wants evident or if your competition does something creative and you need to respond.

Choose synergistic value components to create your package in order to present a cohesive theme to the customer.
If the value components don’t work well together, your target customer group won’t understand the overall benefits your package provides.

If you are in the financial business, for example, with an anchor product of financial advice, you might consider additional value elements such as on-line self management investment tracking tools and quarterly financial management seminars which all play well together.

Or you might consider wrapping these elements around a four seasons resort hotel room:
— spa services
— yoga classes
— resort activities such as zip lining and water rafting
— a bottle of the customer’s favourite wine with a meal
— day care services

Create the value proposition — Define the value proposition for your package — what is the collective benefit the package provides to the customer?
This is not a statement that simply adds together the benefits of each package component rather it’s a declaration of the overall benefits of all package elements working seamlessly together.

In my example above, how might you define the collective benefits of financial advice, on-line tracking tools and regular seminars? You need to express the theme they collectively express. How about something like “investment self-management”?

Brand the package — Brand your package reflecting the value proposition you’ve created.There is no sense creating something new and not taking credit for your innovation. Too many organizations are into the bundling where product elements are simply added together and a discounted price is applied.

That’s not what I advocate.

Packaging is all about creating something new; bundling is merely slapping currents products together with reduced prices being offered with the volume increase.

Your new brand should reflect the collection of benefits provided. In the example that we have been using how about branding the package ‘The self-management Investment Plan?

Price your package — Price your package in terms of the market value provided.

Think premium pricing. Avoid the bundling mentality — and commodity thinking — of discounting the package based on the number of components in it

If you have hit the mark with relevant, compelling value you should be able to command a premium price and realize healthy margins.
If you learn that you can’t price your package at a premium level, you have not defined it well enough — your package doesn’t contain the right combination of elements that result in a value proposition people are willing to pay more for.

Go back to the drawing board. Start over.

If you love your marketing craft and want to excel in it, do it the right way. Do it in a way no one else does.

Practise the process I’ve given you here and I guarantee success will be waiting.

Cheers,
Roy
My 50+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.

Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

  • Posted 9.1.23 at 11:20 am by Roy Osing
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