By Guest Contributor Chris Manley| Engenius
Remember that list of goals you and your management team created back in December laying out your grand plans for 2014?
It was the one filled with promises to market better, network more efficiently, energize clients, grow economic achievement and enough industry buzzwords to keep the thesaurus business solvent for the next decade to come.
If you are like most business people, those goals are a document on your computer that you have not looked at since about the time your New Year’s Resolution expired or pondered since sometime before Groundhog’s Day.
If you are a little more organized and motivated, that document became a binder that was handed out to everyone on your staff – and likely now resides somewhere gathering dust unless momentarily needed to end the life of a large insect.
Then there is a rarified leadership breed, usually seen in larger organizations, which has created a special action committee to review the goals and lay plans weekly. Those plans are then forwarded to someone in senior management who scans the reports on his or her mobile phone while waiting for a tee time.
Lastly is a group that actually looks at those reports often, implements them and refines them during the course of the years. The most successful businesses are able to do this. It may seem tough to make the jump from the worst group to the top group in this lineup, but it can be done with some simple spring-cleaning that can be finished by the time you play a round of golf.
Start at the top. Make that goal list a priority for your managers/company leaders. If they don’t buy in, no one else will. For a small business owner, this means carving out time each day to make sure you are reviewing goals.
Review the plan with your entire team. Use this time to engage them on ideas and thoughts. A simple task is to ask each team member what works and what doesn’t on the plan.
Change the plan as needed. What has worked and what hasn’t worked? What needs to be developed more? What can be scrapped? Create new goals as needed. This step can be especially key; part of the reason your company’s plan floundered is because it wasn’t working.
Get staff to feel ownership of the plan. A likely reason any plan fails is because staff didn’t buy in originally. One step to try is rewarding them when they accomplish something on the plan. This will get them excited to keep working off those documents.
Develop ways to integrate the plan among employees and departments. A problem many businesses face is business plans become housed in silos so that one part of the company doesn’t know what the other parts are doing. Encourage people to sit in on other meetings so they learn what others in your business are accomplishing.
But the biggest thing is to be persistent when getting these plans going again. A strong business plan is the lifeblood of a company. Implemented effectively it can motivate a team, create loyalty and at the end of the day build the most profitable high-valued companies on the planet.
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Chris Manley is the managing partner of Engenius, a Greenville web marketing and design firm. He was South Carolina’s 2013 Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Learn more at www.engeniusweb.com.
