In Chapter 3: Planning Properly (Thinking — from Information to Plans) we covered, primarily, the importance of thinking, which TINA defines as using information to make informed decisions that are then complied into plans that can be implemented. As your foremost responsibility as a new business owner is to ensure that your business survives its early years, your ability to think will be your most powerful tool.
It’s vital that you embed proper thinking practices into your business. That means that it isn’t just you who does the thinking. In the same way that you must delegate responsibility and authority to other members of your team, you must delegate some of the thinking. If you don’t, then you’ll have two problems: firstly, everyone will turn to you for an answer to the question ‘What should I do now?’ every time they have finished what you told them to do last time and, secondly, you won’t sleep for the next few years.
Don’t forget that if you are delegating thinking, then you must delegate acquisition of the fuel for thinking, information, as well. Allow the people who are to do the thinking access to the information that they require to make their informed decisions. Quick example: don’t require them to ensure that their department is staffed by the right numbers of people using the correct type of equipment and then not tell them what their budget is going to be. That’s daft. Give them the financial information that they need to make good decisions, or they will go for expediency and that will not help you avoid the failure abyss.
Thinking is the hardest work there is…
On the subject of expediency: yes, I know that starting and running a business is hard (have I repeated that enough times yet?), but be wary of making decisions that are the ‘easiest’ rather than the ‘best’. You might well get away with making the fast and easy decision most of the time, but your chances of failure will increase if you do so. Hedging your bets is okay, but you must balance your decision making so that you are making good, well—informed ‘difficult’ decisions to counter any expediency. And it goes without saying that you’ll get away with expediency more often if those decisions relate to things that are less important in your business. Please don’t make expedient recruitment decisions, or expedient customer complaint decisions. If these do come back and bite you, then it will hurt.
Delegation is a vital skill that good managers and business owners must have. You cannot do everything yourself, so learn to swallow your pride and ask your team for help when you need it. Also, accept help when it is offered, if it is appropriate. It can be very motivating for your team to feel that the Boss wants or needs their help. Conversely, it can be very demotivating to have your offers of help continually rejected even when you can see that the Boss is struggling.
A good manager can be identified by the behaviours that he or she exhibits. How many of us have met managers who think that they are great only to find that their subordinates and colleagues describe them as someone who ‘doesn’t listen’? The set of behaviours that a manager uses on a regular basis can be considered as tools in their management toolbox, and it goes without saying that the more tools in the tool box, the better the manager. Why? Well, it means that they are capable of dealing effectively with a variety of situations (jobs). Someone with fewer tools cannot be as effective.
One of the core tools in any manager’s toolbox should be the ability to organise and conduct effective meetings. We are a social species and meetings are a good way to ensure that cohesive teams are built, that opinions are canvassed, and that everyone is told the same thing. The use of an agenda for a meeting takes little effort to deploy and is an easy way to organise and conduct meetings well. By setting specific start and finish times and sticking to them, by having a list of agenda items that will be discussed and not allowing too much in the way of deviation, and by generating agreed actions as a result of the meeting, you’ll be using your management tools effectively. If meetings don’t produce actions, then they are just ‘talking—shops’. Conducting a meeting without an agenda is the equivalent of using a hammer to screw to planks of wood together. It’ll result in a bodged job with which nobody will be truly happy.
Once you and your team have made your informed decisions, you must write them down, or type them up, your choice. Remember the mantra: ‘If it’s not written down, it’s a rumour.’ Your plans, your targets, your expectations, your job descriptions, your meeting minutes (in brief, please), etc., must all be committed to some medium other than your memory. It allows the planner the luxury of not having to carry the information around in their heads all the time (because they’ve written it down), it allows multiple recipients to receive the same plan, and you won’t be creating a monster in your business; it only lives when you (or the managers doing the planning) are there.
The most important mind—nugget that you must commit to paper (other media are available), and to which you and your team must commit yourselves, is your mission statement. A mission statement tells everyone why your business exists and the values to which you intend to be held. If your business buys up end—of—line clothing to sell at discount prices, then create a mission statement that references ‘availability’ and ‘economy’. Don’t start presenting your business as ‘high—quality’ and ‘innovative’, no—one will believe you. Similarly, if your business helps the long term unemployed to re—train, so that they can re—enter the job market, it would probably be inappropriate to produce a mission statement emphasising your commitment to ‘doing whatever it takes to increase shareholder value’!
The final part of the chapter dealing with TINA’s Thinking sector covered communication with your customers. It should be a truism that every business must find out what its (potential) customers want before setting about trying to make it, but this is one of the most common reasons that start—up businesses fail. If your customers won’t buy it, then there’s no point making it!
Reviewing what your customers tell you and communicating with your customers in return helps enormously with avoiding failure. The mantra that can be used here is: Market—Media Message. Decide to whom you wish to sell your products and services. Then decide what it is that you want to tell them in order to encourage them to buy from you. Checking back to your mission statement, do you want your message to be one of economy, prestige and social responsibility, or would you prefer speed, longevity and accessibility? It’s up to you. Finally, determine the best route to get your message to your market.
A meeting without an agenda is merely a chat
n summary, TINA’s Thinking sector prompts you to collect information from whichever sources are most useful to you, encourages you and your team have a really good think and make your all—important informed decisions, and then reminds you to create your plans. Knowing what your customers want is crucial if you are to give it to them and that requires two way communication. In the next section, we’ll summarise how you implement your plans, in order that your customer gets what your customer wants, in a way that keeps them wanting it.