Tag Archives: leadership

Managing a Sustainable Business

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Business Strategy

Earlier this month, I presented a webinar on Managing a Sustainable Business. As you look to grow your business and ensure your company’s longevity, it’s important to remember regardless of size, businesses exist for two main reasons:

Provide a product or service that meets an unmet need

Generate an acceptable return on invested resources.

If your product or service isn’t meeting a need, then the business most likely will not be able to generate an adequate customer base, and in turn not be able to generate a return on invested resources. The four factors important for a business to be sustainable include:

Market Positioning – A business needs to be in a market that is large enough to support growth regardless of the percentage of market share your company serves.  There are two methods you can use to grow market share:

generate new customers for your existing products or services

generate new products and services for your existing customers

Sometimes a business is not ready for the market due to limiting factors, or the market is not mature enough to purchase the products and services being offered. Having a clear understanding of the market is key to managing a sustainable business.

Leadership – A business needs to promote learning for everyone involved in the process of operating the organization. This includes:

learning about how the business functions

learning about the products and services the business offers

learning how to collaborate

learning how to be customer focused. 

Mentoring and coaching employees for succession and growth can have a significant impact on organizational culture. Keep in mind that open and authentic communication should also be part of the culture.

Operations – Having systems in place so that the business can operate effectively and efficiently are also important. One of the most important factors in operations is to make sure that internal resources are aligned with external demands. If you own a seasonal business, there may be times where inventories are lower than others, as well as staffing needs and resources.  Addressing the ups and downs of the business cycle should include a review of how work is being considered, and make sure that the right tasks are being incentivized.

Planning – While many businesses don’t work from both a strategic plan and an operating plan, a sustainable business knows the value of both. It’s important to understand the difference between a strategic plan and an operating plan:

A strategic plan maps the way

An operating plan works the day

Planning creates a map of how the business will address short and long-term goals, and should be structured enough to provide stability to the business and flexible enough to allow for contingencies.

I hope these highlights have been valuable, and please check out my upcoming webinars. If you have any questions or would like help managing a sustainable business please email me at jillian@wisewomenleadership.com.

Setting Goals

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Dream Big – Set Goal – Take Action text with many light bulbs

This month I shared some tips about setting goals in the newsletter, and thought I would continue this topic here in the blog. Some people are really good a setting both long and short-term goals, while others struggle to set weekly and monthly goals. There are three main pieces to goal setting:

Know where you are now – take inventory of your personal and professional life and make a note of what you like and what you would like to change.

Think about where you want to be – this could be 6 months from now, 1 year, or 10 years. The key is to be clear in your mind what that future looks like.

Create a plan to get from where you are to where you want to be – this may sound simple, but you will find that you will need to make changes and adjustments along the way because life will throw you challenges.

Another important factor is to have that future goal – or where you want to be – as clear as possible. Creating clear, actionable goals is accomplished by making them:

  • Specific and easy to understand. Be as specific as you can try to include your senses in your description of what you want to accomplish
  • Measurable so you know how far you have gone to reaching your goal. A large or long-term goal can be broken down into small action steps that you can celebrate completing.
  • Achievable based on the resources you have at your disposal. You may find that you will need to acquire of build the resources you need to complete the goal, and this should also be part of the consideration before you undertake the task.
  • Relevant to you and your lifestyle. If a goal doesn’t resonate with you an all levels then you are less likely to reach the goal. It may be the right goal but the wrong timing!
  • Time-bound so that there is an end date to the process. As you create your goal and the subsequent action steps towards the goal, assign due dates and check off and celebrate when you reach each step.

I hope this helps you if you are setting goals or making adjustments to goals you already have in place. If you have any questions or would like help setting goals please let me know mailto:jillian@wisewomenleadership.com