Most business owners are passionate about what they do and relish the opportunity to build a successful company. While there’s no shortage of programs, grants, and online guidance available to help smaller enterprises get off the ground, you may find that you run into difficulties keeping it on the road to success. Passion is great, but you need processes too.
Turning a business idea into a well-functioning company can be a challenge even for seasoned entrepreneurs. When you’re operating your first startup, you may run into issues with staffing, business planning, and other matters that can affect so many small businesses during their first few years.
In his book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, Gino Wickman provides a system that can ensure consistency in your processes and growth from the moment you open your doors. Whether your company isn’t as profitable as you hoped, growth appears to be stalled, or you’re having issues with team performance, this book will provide you with a series of tools for effectively running your business.
Know Your Values
One of these tools is the Vision/Traction Organizer (VTO), which helps you focus on core concepts like your 1-year goals and 3-year picture. When you know consistently have these goals in front of you, it’s easier to identify the products, customers, and employees that support them. If you don’t have a value system in place, you risk conflict, tension, and poor performance.
Wickman’s general advice is to focus on a few things that you do better than anyone else and to execute accordingly. When you expand the scope of your business without a solid and informed rationale, it can detract from your core values. Doing so simply to chase more revenue is not likely to yield positive results.
For example, if you run a boutique family law firm and decide to get into cannabis law because “that’s where the money is now,” you’re going to need to develop new capabilities. Dispensaries, for example, are concerned about permits and commercial leases, not child support or alimony. While there’s nothing wrong with expanding the firm’s scope, this growth must align with its values or it’s not sustainable.
Find the Right People for Each Role
Wickman writes that you must surround yourself with good people; and by “good,” he means those who align with the company’s values. No matter how skilled or talented they are, if an employee’s values aren’t compatible with company culture, it affects performance and morale. Getting the right person in the right position is well worth the time and effort involved.
Once you’ve got a solid team, Wickman recommends that everyone have a metric they are responsible for optimizing (KPI). Examples include leads generated, deadlines met, or more rapid invoice payments. When each person in an organization knows their number, they work together toward achieving the organization’s overall success.
What Can Traction Do For Your Business?
If you’re running a business and trying to decide how to move the organization forward, you can benefit from reading Traction and putting its lessons into practice. We did it at Spotlight Branding and we’ve seen a huge difference in how our business has run. This book provides a solid foundation for startups and can even help more established businesses both tighten their operations and get management and staff working together more effectively.
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