Formula 1 for Business - O'Connor Daniel

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on fixed and variable costs, supplies, channels and potential partnerships, to enhance and extend our outcome-activity ratio.

       What Can Go Wrong?

      In most cases, business owners have had some exposure to business consulting or coaching, with little or mixed results. In a lot of cases, this may have less to do with the programs and more to do with the turbulence or confusion it can create in an uncontrolled change interval.

      The temptation (particularly when you have just acquired a business) is to make a list of changes you would like to implement and then rush into changing them all at once. The result for most businesses is turbulence. Employees do not perform at their peak if everything around them is being changed, including the rules they work by and the accountabilities with which they are measured.

      The three key principals for managing organisational or operational change in any organisation is (1) To keep change to minor, incremental changes over time, changing one area at a time if possible, (2) To have a change interval, followed by a period of consolidation (to embed the changes), before looking to implement another change interval, and (3) Communicate the intent to all team members and explain what outcomes you are trying to achieve. These three simple rules will help your changes to be received positively and to become standard operational procedures within a much shorter time.

      Once you have set up your structure and prepared your growth and change program, you are ready to build your racing business vehicle to be competitive in the races you enter and ultimately, to be dominant in your industry.

       What Happens When your Business Accelerates?

      This book is presented as an easy-to-read operators guide for small high-growth businesses, but as you continue to understand the process, you will begin to see this as far more. Once you have completed a diagnostic review of your current business, ensured the processes are documented, the kinks ironed out, the tweaks implemented and the improvements measured and proven, you will find that your own role will transition from operator, to driver, to owner and later to the entrepreneur. At present, you might be working hard in your business and looking for a way to reduce your working hours without reducing your income.

      One of the most common first reactions that business owners have to the suggestion that they need to be out of their business, is “My business can’t do without me.” This is all too common thinking, for managers as well as the thinking some business owners have for key personnel. In most cases, there is no foundation to this thinking.

      In August of 2011, Apple announced that their charismatic leader and chief innovator was stepping down for health reasons. Analysts predicted a share price plunge, from its then present position of $368. As we know, Steve Jobs died a month or two later but some 12 months after his death, the shares were trading at $624. If such a pivotal key person can make such a small difference in his exit, in one of the largest companies in the world, what impact do you really think your exit would have?

      The longer-term objective for us as authors and management consultants is to have you hone the skills of assessing, buying, building and either selling businesses or building a portfolio of cashflow businesses that can provide you with far greater returns than property or equities in publically listed mature companies.

      Somewhere along this continuum you are going to choose to stop your journey and this could become your “comfort-zone” for months, years or even decades. We are hoping you revisit this book when you become restless and continue your journey to entrepreneur and develop your E-factor to the point where you collect cashflow companies like properties in a game of monopoly.

      CHAPTER 2

       ‘THE DREAM’ – VISION, MISSION, AND VALUES

      Vision, mission, and values are the foundation on which great efforts in organisation are built. Whether in the competitive arena of the racetrack, on the fast-paced business racetrack or some other human group effort, these three elements are critical in driving your collective resources towards a successful outcome.

      It is all too commonly the case that owners and managers of small to medium enterprises (SME’s) dismiss the significance of vision, mission, and values as mere ‘fluff’ when considering the future plans of their organisation. Seldom in fact do we find an appropriate level of focus and commitment directed towards these things when embarking on a commercial venture and this may be one of the key factors in the low level of success in the world of the SME. After all, it is difficult to succeed on a journey for which there is no clear destination (vision), no stated ‘reason to be’ (Mission), and no set of rules to govern behaviour and decisions (values).

      Each of these form an integral to the success of any business or group effort whether or not they are boldly and formerly stated or subtly communicated and understood through commitment to action.

      All great journeys, projects, and endeavours begin with a vision. Initially this may take the form of a vague and nebulous dream but long before there is any consideration of planning for action there is always considerable time and energy devoted to refining this dream into a clear and distinct set of possibilities; a vision.

      If you have a drivers licence you may be a car enthusiast. If so, your vision of you as a driver most probably started before primary school. Most boys dream of driving a car long before they are old enough to own one. They may start with a toy car or tricycle and graduate to a go-kart. I still recall the very first time I was able to slip into the driver’s seat of a car and turn the wheel while I pumped away at the pedals.

      There was no risk of me setting this car in motion, as it was without wheels (and possibly an engine) in my Uncle’s back yard. I can still recall the smell of leather and the shine of the chrome strip across the top of the dash that joined the glove box to the single dial on the driver’s side. For that brief moment, I was in charge and I could go anywhere…

      A business vision is a seductive image of an ideal future, one that is seen clearly enough to be articulated in a form which will provide inspiration and motivation to all those who are willing to share it and accompany the leader on the journey towards attaining it. Every great person and business that started with a vision has provided real excitement and passion because their vision represented a ‘destination’; it establishes clearly, where they were headed by answering the question ‘where are we going?’

      Steve Jobs revealed his vision of technology’s future to Inc. Magazine in 1989 (after famously being fired from his own company in 1985) in an interview. He spoke about “the big insight”, as he called it, that he and others had had in the 1970’s regarding the importance of putting computers into the possession of regular folk. He believed in the enormous creative capacity of individuals - if given the right tools. He proposed, “a thousand people with microcomputers will always outperform one person with a supercomputer” and that “because people are inherently creative, they will use tools in ways the toolmakers never thought possible, and then they will share what they’ve learned”. This revealed an extraordinarily accurate vision of the future for personal computing.

      In 1997, the year when Jobs returned to Apple, at the World Developers Conference he said “We’ve tried to come up with a strategy and vision for Apple—it started with: ‘What incredible benefits can we give the customer?’ and did not start with: ‘Let’s sit down with the engineers, and figure out what awesome technology we have and then figure out how to market that.’” Going right back to the 1970’s, and 80’s Steve Jobs has had a rich vision for the future which has actually shaped what is now the present, where individuals enjoy the benefits of tools which Apple pioneered. Jobs always had a strong response to the ‘where are we going?’ question and there are thousands of

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