We have found over the last 20 years that there are typically between 20 and 40 short-term initiatives in a business that can deliver an immediate boost to results.
We call them Quick Wins. They are low- to no-cost initiatives like:
- Changing a sales conversion process to include an extra step or remove a step that is an obstacle to the sale.
- Running a campaign to liquidate slow-moving stock to free up operating capital that can be put behind faster moving lines. Buying more of what you know you can sell quickly is a great way to make more profit fast.
- Correcting an easily diagnosed issue in a shopping cart that causes abandonment before completion
- Ceasing to sell unprofitable product or service lines, automatically redirecting resources to more profitable lines
- Refreshing ties with past referrers of business, to bring them up-to-speed on the business and drive new referrals
- Refreshing marketing collateral to assist the sales team
- Reviewing prices and making subtle changes to persuade your market to buy more each time they purchase
You get the idea. These are actions that do not have to be put through market or competitive intelligence-gathering projects to prove their value. Once identified, the leadership team can easily agree that they will reduce or remove obstacles to profit and they can be implemented immediately.
Cumulatively, making a raft of quick, profitable changes can add a great deal to your company. In fact, in some cases we have had to delay the introduction of a long-term strategic plan because the Primary Growth Plan (which contains the details of a company’s Quick Wins) grew the business by too much to handle even more growth on top.
It is easy to dismiss this idea as something that might not apply to your own business because you are at the coalface every day, but we have never failed to identify many initiatives that pay back multiple times their investment cost in any business we have taken through our Quick Win identification process.
An external consultant brings a certain objective eye to your business, mixed with the experience of dealing with tens if not hundreds of businesses like yours in the past.
If you want to know what it’s like to work with Corporate Momentum, ask us about a Primary Growth Plan. It requires a smaller investment than a long-term planning process and you get to experience quick gains as a result. Call us on 1300 36 20 27 or fill in this form.
Footnote
* Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed the asterisk next to the very first step of strategic planning. It is there for good reason because in a Corporate Momentum assignment, often we start one step back from the intel-gathering and talk to the leadership team and equity stakeholders about their personal and professional goals and values.
You see, the world’s best strategy will inevitably fail if it is in conflict with the values and goals of the people responsible for implementing it. Time and again, we have seen strategic initiatives fail because they required more or different actions from those in charge of implementation. Sometimes, in fact quite frequently, team members are unconscious of the conflict and write off strategy failure as being beaten by competitors or a failure in the planning stage.
Here is a real-life example from our past. Putting a senior executive in charge of the marketing planning process when his personal values are to be seen as busy, but not to be held accountable for outcomes means your strategy will fail to even be researched properly, let alone written and implemented. The executive will use “busyness” as a continual excuse for failing to complete the work.
Understanding personal goals and values means you can navigate the particular values (and corresponding behaviour) of your team to reduce the risk of failure and achieve the result the company needs.
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