Sarah Lakhani Consulting

Where Brand and Business Come Together This is the space where ambitious women come to bring clarity to their ideas, structure to their growth, and meaning to the businesses they’re building.

business success

The 3 Business Success Factors

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I love strategy just as much as the next management consultant, but as a business owner, I’ve got to say, there are 3 business success factors, and strategy is just one of them.  The other two are action and mindset.  And more than ever, when you’re starting/running your own business, you’ll notice the (negative) effects when you’re focused on only one or two of these areas.  They may not all need equal amounts of your time, but they do all need your attention.  

Why these three factors?

How did we get here?  What makes these three things the areas that everything else falls into?  Well… it’s quite simple really:

Strategy keeps you moving in the right direction.

Mindset ensures you’re removing your own blocks and moving forward in a way that feels good.

And action keeps you moving.  

Lack of Strategy

Most of my clients come to me for strategy.  And that’s totally understandable.  Strategy is deciding where you want to be, how you want to position yourself and mapping out a roadmap to get there.  It covers your overall business strategy, brand strategy and all the pieces that fit into them, such as your marketing strategy, your sales strategy and your customer strategy.  

When you have a gap in this particular business success factor, you’ll find that you’re either lost, not taking any steps forward because you just don’t know what to do or you’ll find yourself jumping from one strategy to another.  You’ll likely also be listening to multiple people, maybe multiple mentors or business coaches, and consuming all their free content.  Piecing all this free content together to form a strategy is near impossible.  Why?  Because each piece is part of a different strategy. 

Instead, what you need to do if this sounds like the situation you’re in is to commit to one strategy.  One way of making money, of selling, of marketing, of moving people through your customer journey.  Define that one way and then map out how you’re going to get there.  Commit to that.  And stop listening to and being swayed by other strategies.  The truth is, many strategies will work.  The trick is to find the one that suits you and your strengths the most.  

Lack of Action

It goes without saying that not taking action is going to result in not getting anywhere, right?  Logically, this makes sense.  But many of us (myself included, once upon a time!) love the strategy and mindset elements and just end up spending most of our time there.  Action is moving your business along the roadmap that you’ve created from your strategy work.  It’s moving the needle every day, taking action, implementing a part of your strategy.  

When you have a gap in this business success factor, you’ll notice that you have lots of great ideas, an incredibly well defined strategy, but nothing that others can see.  It’s all virtual, or in documents, but nothing has been implemented.  To be honest, I’ve seen a lot of strategy work end without any action being taken.  And the truth is, no amount of strategy work is going to helpful if you don’t take the required action.  

So if you find that you’re the type of business owner who loves to spend time in strategy mode and not enough time implementing, here are my three recommendations:

  1. Take small action.  Any action is better than no action.  So break things down into bite-sized chunks and do a small bit every day.
  2. Reward yourself for completing your action.  Save that piece of chocolate until after you’ve completed your task. 
  3. Remind yourself how far you’ve come and put things into perspective.  It wasn’t as difficult as you imagined it would be, right?  And the benefits of taking action far outweigh the benefits of not taking action.  Read that again if you need to.  

Lack of Mindset

Ah, mindset.  The one thing no one thinks they need until they realize they need it.  Personally, I try to impact mindset through sharing my positivity, my energy and my way of thinking with my clients.  But that’s not enough.  Mindset includes figuring out why you are resisting certain things that you know you should be doing, and then working through those reasons.  

When you have a mindset block, you’ll most likely be living out one (or a few) limiting beliefs.  Perhaps you don’t believe you’re ready to take action.  Or you don’t think you deserve to make money.  Or you think sales is icky.  These beliefs then drive your subconscious and you’ll live them out without realizing it.  You’ll give a less-than-stellar strategy call or pitch.  You’ll be too busy to do any marketing.  Or you’ll spend minimal amount of time, if at all, “selling”.  

Watch out for your thoughts.  What do you tell yourself frequently?  “I am terrible at marketing”? “I don’t want to be that type of sales person”? “Sure, she’s making $50k a month, but I could never”?  Your thoughts drive your beliefs which drive your actions.  If you think you can’t, if you think you shouldn’t, if you think you don’t deserve it, etc, you won’t do it or get it.  You might not realize it, or see it happening, but your thoughts literally drive everything you do – in life and in business.  

Now you know the 3 business success factors. What’s next?

Now that you know what the 3 business success factors are, I challenge you to take the time to really watch yourself.  Find out where you’re falling short.  And then use the tips above to fill in that gap.  When you do, you’ll see the changes start to unfold right in front of your eyes.  These 3 factors literally drive the success of your business.  You’ve got this! 

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Giving Your Strategy its Best Chance for Success

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Every now and again – whether because of competitors and competition, an external disruption, an internal change, the new year, or a vast number of other factors – a business will have to adjust its strategy.  Undoubtedly, you’ve had to adjust strategy too, at some point over the course of your business.  The big question is – did it work?  Were you able to successfully implement your new business strategy?  If you’ve been through a few strategic changes, perhaps you’ve noticed that some have worked out better than others.  Why is that?  

Strategy is not Enough

The truth is, you need more than just a strategy.  You need to ensure that your organization is set up to be able to deliver against that strategy and to be able to achieve the objectives set out in the strategy.  So let’s break that down.  How do you assess and then, if needed, set your organization up to deliver against your new strategy?  

There are several aspects of the organization that you’ll need to look at.  I’ve broken them down below, and provided examples of what you should be looking for.  If you find that your organization is not set up in a manner that supports the strategy, start making changes to create that alignment and support.  Otherwise, there’s a good chance you’ll find a big gap between your expectations and the outcome.  

These are the most important elements of your organization that will provide the support needed to bring your strategy to life. 

#1 – Ensure the right people and skills are in place

Sometimes – actually a lot of the time – leaders tend to think that once a strategic plan has been put into place and communicated to the business, everyone will just start doing what they’re meant to be doing with the new strategy in mind.  But the truth is, sometimes that new strategy requires people with different (new!) skills, and sometimes even entire teams.  So before you build an expectation that your team will be able to achieve the strategic objectives you’ve set out, ask yourself:

  • What skills are needed for these objectives to be brought to life?
  • Does my team have these skills?
  • Do the people who have these skills also have the time to spend on the new activities, or is their time already taken up doing other activities that are also required?  

#2 – Provide flexible principles for your team to use when managing new situations or decisions

We all know that you can’t plan for every possible situation or decision that each person in your business will need to make at some point.  So instead of trying, it makes a lot more sense, both in terms of your time and in terms of your sanity, to create a set of principles that can guide people within your organization to make the right decisions.  For example, if your business is built on great customer service, then making that a clear principle helps frontline staff know to put great customer service above all else when talking with customers.  On the other hand, if low cost is what your business is built on, a frontline member of your team may have to make a different decision.  Bear in mind, you can’t have it all.  Know that there are trade-offs, embrace them, make them known to your team, and provide clear priorities for everyone to follow.  

#3 – Take stock of your culture and make changes as needed

Your culture has to support your strategy.  It’s an absolute necessity.  Think about the activities you’re asking your organization to undertake, and determine the values, behaviors and leadership styles that are necessary for them to be successfully implemented.  Are these in place right now, or is your organization currently set up in a completely different manner?  For example, if you need your team to be developing more ideas, then you’ll have to create a culture where experimentation (and failure!) is supported – not just passively, but also actively, for example: Do people have the time to create and test new things?  Or perhaps your new strategy requires people to work together, but your teams are still very silo’d, and don’t trust each other.  Be diligent and ensure that your culture and your strategy align.  Even the best strategy won’t amount to much with a culture that doesn’t align to it.  

#4 – Make sure the technology and data that is needed for success is available

It is extremely important to make sure that the resources, particularly the technology and data, that a person (or team) needs in order to effectively do their job is available to them.  Look through your strategic plan and make sure that you highlight activities that require different technology and data as compared to what is available today.  How can you obtain these?  In the absence of these, how can your team adjust their activities to still deliver value, albeit not the full value that your future state outlines? 

#5 – Re-engineer your processes and activities so they reinforce, support and complement the new strategy

Revisit your processes and activities.  These were designed with your old strategy in mind.  They supported what your team used to deliver, in ways that made the most of their skills in line with the old strategy.  Your old processes may have been perfectly fine for your previous strategy, but that doesn’t mean they’re the right way to do things for your new strategy.   Now that you have a new direction that you’d like the business to go in, you’ll need to make sure your processes and your teams’ activities support it.  Re-engineer old processes, end-to-end, to make sure that your teams’ time is spent on activities that deliver value, in the most efficient and effective way, for your new strategy. 

#6 – Measure the right indicators 

When you change your strategic priorities, you absolutely need to review the metrics you and your teams measure, and adjust them so that they continue to bring to light the important measures that you and your team will want to track your success against.  Make sure, too, that your metrics don’t clash with one another.  Asking a call center team to focus on delivering excellent customer service but then measuring them on reducing their call time isn’t going to produce great results.  Go through your metrics, team by team, and make sure they are designed to be supportive of your new strategy.  

#7 – Communicate the change at every level

Finally, communicate the change in strategy to the entire organization.  You might not need to communicate everything to everyone – it depends on your team size and functions – but it is critically important for everyone to know that a change is taking place, and how they contribute to it.  Everyone needs to know and be very clear on how their daily activities need to change in order for them to continue to be an active contributor to the business.  Understanding the key principles behind the new strategy also helps people at every level know whether what they are doing is helping or hindering the implementation of the new direction.  

Support your strategy with necessary changes

Don’t be scared to change your strategy.  Work through the areas outlined above and put the right resources and elements in place.  It may not have always gone to plan in the past, but you can give your strategy the best chance of success by setting it up with the support it needs to grow, live and thrive.  

Are you working on a new strategy?  Which of the elements above do you think could be the largest hurdle for your organization? Post your comments and any questions below, and if you can help anyone else, don’t hesitate to do so! As always, if you’ve found this article useful, share it with someone who’ll benefit from it as well!