While you might be great at making plans, if you can’t execute, you’ll be sitting dead in the water; but you wouldn’t be alone. Many small businesses fail because they can’t follow through on their plans. Focusing on weekly goals is one way to get beyond this hurdle.
That was part of the guidance offered by three experts featured on BIV’s Business Excellence Series panel on business growth last month. The panel discussed several areas that are challenges to business growth, but one of the key issues identified was execution.
“As businesses grow, people get bogged down in complexities and managing business as opposed to simplifying and focusing on what needs to be accomplished on as little as a weekly or daily basis,” said Neil Belenkie, CEO, GrowthPoint Group, “so consistently refocus priorities, executing only what needs to be done in the short term to make sure the business gets driven forward.”
Natalia Venida, manager, HR and business optimization for MNP LLP, also pinpointed execution as a common weakness.
“You have to have an overall strategy and vision for the company,” said Venida. “Second, you have to find the right people to execute that vision, and third is monitoring and execution. One of my favourite business sayings is, ‘Strategy without execution is hallucination.’”
The onus of execution is not just on company staff, according to Amielle Lake, founder of Tagga Media. Lake admitted that as a CEO, she also found it hard to execute what she had promised.
“My Step 1 was to hire someone who was a lot better at it than I was and to do my best to get out of the way,” she said. “That’s done a lot of great things for the company in terms of helping us focus, because when you’re the founder and you’re new at business, you kind of flail a little bit trying to figure out what you need to do – the right practices and tools you need to implement to get your team going in the right direction and who to hire.”
Belenkie added that people have to watch for the pitfall of getting bogged down in trying to execute everything rather than consistently reassessing what the priorities are.
“Knowing exactly what needs to be done is worth the time it takes, rather than executing the heck out of everything,” said Belenkie, who is also CEO of biochem company Sirona. “At Sirona, we refocus every single week on specifically what must be accomplished that week for the company to be successful.
“We put it on a whiteboard every Monday morning and people cross off every task they took on for that week. ... You wouldn’t believe how much you can get done if you focus only on what you need to be successful.”
The next Business Excellence Series breakfast panel will focus on recruitment and retention. Visit www.biv.com/events/biv/recruitment for details and to purchase tickets.
