At the beginning of the year, like many other businesses and organizations leaders you may find yourself working on the plans for your company’s future operations. One of biggest challenges with this task is how to translate Strategic Plans into the detailed and tactical steps that are necessary to achieve the goals in your Strategic Plan.
A good example of this challenge is a very successful, residential service company we were working with several years ago. Their revenue was about $1,000,000 per year and during a strategic planning session the business owner shared that he felt their revenue would be at $8,000,000 five years down the road. Even though they were very well run, I thought an 700% growth in five years was a pretty aggressive objective.
What Would This Look Like?
I thought a good way to see if this was achievable was to say “let’s take a look at what would be necessary in your Sales Department for this to occur”. As we discussed this he told me he had two part-time, so-so salespersons and himself and that he personally brought in about $600,000 in sales (but he had to split his time between sales and running the company) and each of the part-time people generated about $200,000 in revenue.
He shared that a really-good, full-time sales person could bring in about $750,000 per year in revenue. Therefore, if he was to move out of sales and into managing the company full-time, in addition to the two part-time salespersons he would need to add 10 full-time salespeople.
Then I said, who would manage these 12 salespeople? He shared they would need to add a Sales Director to manage the department and four sales assistants to take care of all of the paperwork and scheduling so that the 12 salespersons could focus on selling, and not get bogged down with all of the administrative activities required by their sales activities. He then realized that to achieve his goal, he would need to have 17 people is in sales area – which was a whole lot more that he had initially envisioned.
What does this all mean?
An Organization’s Personnel and Systems
When you look at any organization you do not see, or interact with their Vision, Strategy or Goals. What you interact with is an organization’s Personnel and Systems. In other words, the most visible part of your company are the Systems that are utilized and the personnel that operate the systems.
Consequently, to achieve the Vision, Strategy and Goals for your company, you must plan for putting the future Systems you will require and related Personnel in place. But how can you know what it will take in terms of Personnel and Systems and how they should be structured?
We have used a process to accomplish this task that whittles this daunting task down to a manageable endeavor.
What is needed is a roadmap of how to move your operations from where they are at today to what you want them to look like in the future. However, there is a very straightforward two-step method of creating a roadmap to the organization structure that will achieve your Vision, Strategy and Goals. It starts with what you know already, which are your current Systems and Personnel resources.
A Two-step Method of Creating a Roadmap
First, review in detail your Vision Statement and the goals and objectives included in your five-year plan and then create a well-defined Personnel Organization Chart that reflects what your business would need to look like from a personnel standpoint to achieve your five-year Vision. For this exercise to be effective, for each position that appears in your future Personnel Organization Chart you need to include the position title, the number of people needed in each role and a general, bulleted list of their responsibilities.
Second, using the above detailed Organization Chart, define the general Systems/Processes that you would need to have in place to achieve your Vision. This requires that you examine the current operational setup of your company and see what you need to change to take your business from where it is at today to where it needs to be to support your future Vision.
Once this is completed you will have a picture of what your business’ overall structure needs to look like in the future. Then you can work backwards to the present with the intention of changing your current organizational structure to move it towards your Vision.
Achieving Your One and Three-Year Vision Statements
Once you have the 5-year identification of your Personnel and related Systems, you can create Personnel Organization Charts for your one and three-year Vision statements. Keep in mind that you would go through the same process for each of the areas of your company – Marketing, Production, Finance and Administration…
When we did this for the above client, what did this process look like? His one year Vision called for revenue of $2,000,000 – and this meant that he would need to add two more salespersons and a sales assistant.
His three-year Vision called for revenue of $4,000,000 – this would mean that he would need to add four more salespersons (in addition to the two, part-time people he had) and two sales assistants. Additionally, at this point since he would have 8 people in his Sales Department, he would need to bring in a Sales Manager, who ideally could grow into being the future Sales Director.
As a result of going through this two-step process of defining his future organization, he obtained clarity of what he needed to do in his company to set it securely on the path of achieving the Vision, Strategy and Goals for it.
If you need assistance with taking your business or organization from where it is now to realizing your company’s future goals, please contact us using the below information so we can show you how create the business you desire.
Fountainhead Consulting Group, Inc. is an Innovation and Business Planning firm. During the past 17 years we have shown over 1,200 companies how to achieve their goals by using our unique, comprehensive and systematic, innovation, business planning and growth Structure of Success™, Innovation Academy™ and FastTrak Innovation Program™ methodologies. Using the components in these methodologies, each month we examine an aspect of how to transform your business or organization into a true 21st Century operation.
Office phone: (770) 642-4220
www.FountainheadConsultingGroup.com
George.Horrigan@FountainheadConsultingGroup.com
Tags: Business Planning, entrepreneur, front end of innovation, innovation, invention, small business consulting, small business planning, start a business
