To make sure the succession goes smoothly, always update or establish your strategic plan so it can be used as the guide for the person who takes over. This guide will help maintain financial stability and future growth of the company. We encourage you to also follow these steps to develop a succession plan:

• Write a job description for your successor. You know the requirements of the position you’ll be vacating better than anyone.
• Develop a training program for your successor. You know the needed skills and knowledge to be competent in your current position.
• Formalize and communicate the plan to all interested parties. Communicate your plan with detailed explanations and create any necessary legal documents to protect your business decisions.
• Create a management letter for your spouse (or significant other). You should craft a management letter to explain how you want to transfer your business. If you have a spouse or not, you should still detail what your goals are, who can be trusted and relied on in the current management team, and who can compose a dependable board of advisors.

Depending upon the circumstances of your departure, you might consider assembling a group of trusted advisors to help protect your assets and future desires. Outside expertise and resources can be invaluable when settling on a solid strategy. Some business owners prefer to appoint a business executor who essentially serves as an interim general manager to oversee and manage the business during a transition period. This business executor is charged with maintaining the value of the business on behalf of the estate and heirs while overseeing the orderly sale or liquidation of the business.

Visit these free online resources for more information on the transition process:

www.cashing-out.com
www.buysellbiz.com
www.thebizseller.com

It’s not uncommon for companies to falter simply because they’ve neglected to plan for the bad times. When FTD’s computer system failed just before Mother’s Day several years ago, the flower distribution company didn’t have a backup plan. Management was surprised by the disruption and lost a ton of orders. You don’t want disaster to strike your business, so continuity planning is a great way to prepare your business for an unpredictable future.

Continuity planning ensures that your business doesn’t stop running in a crisis and minimizes the impact for your employees, customers, and your reputation if it does. It’s a good idea to incorporate continuity planning into your regular strategic planning process because a good continuity plan should change as rapidly as your environment changes. It can be a one-page section at the end of your strategic plan, or it can stand on its own.

Use the following as a checklist for your business continuity plan. Each is an absolute necessity if your plan is to avoid panic in the presence of a threat. Consider, as well, how often and who is responsible for the tasks in each area.

• Data is backed up
• Current contact information is available in a hard copy format
• List of alternative suppliers and buyers is available
• Premises are secure
• Equipment and machinery is fully maintained
• Employees are cross-trained
• All insurance plans are current
• Employees know about the plan
• Employees are able to work offsite

Did you know that September is National Preparedness Month? This nationwide effort sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security encourages Americans to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses and schools. For more about continuity planning for businesses, visit www.ready.gov where you have access to additional detailed emergency planning information and checklists. And for further reading, check out Disaster Planning and Recovery: A Guide for Facility Professionals (Wiley) by Alan M. Levitt.

But
there are also a number of smaller scenarios that may hit closer to
home than the "big what ifs". Calling these smaller scenarios is a bit
of a misnomer because when they happen, they can happen quickly and
with devastating consequences, so they don’t seem too small. Consider,
for example, any of the following:

• What if sales are flat this year or if sales decline by 20 or 30 percent?
  The nation’s leading luxury home building company, Toll Brothers,
  recently reported that sales declined 21% during second quarter with
  "hesitant customers remaining on the sidelines".
• What if sales increase rapidly, such as 25 percent or more? One local tech company is growing faster than they can fill positions to meet customer demands.
• What if accounts receivable collections slow by an additional 30 days?
  Like a local manufacturer that experienced significant problems with
  his customers, making it very difficult to pay his suppliers.
• What if banks increase interest rates by several percentage points?
  Nevada has held one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation over
  the past four months - 1 of every 232 households. This has a huge
  ripple effect for numerous industries.
• What if our biggest customer goes out of business or if we lose our biggest client? Most every business has a handful of key accounts that are critical to business success.
• What if we have a major public relations crisis such as a bad product or a lawsuit? These are crises that often come out of nowhere and could happen to any business or organization.

Stepping into your future
Okay, so now that we’ve caught your attention maybe you’re ready to
consider some "what ifs" of your own. Here are the steps for running
your own scenario planning. One suggestion - this exercise need not be
exhaustive. Begin by identifying the risks from the list of big
"what-ifs" and smaller "what-ifs" and create a one-sheet for a few
realistic, possible scenarios that your organization might face in the
next few years.

1. Define a timeframe for each scenario. Some events may occur in 20 years, some in two. But you can’t work with indefinite, open-ended scenarios.
2. Establish the primary variable in your scenarios. Assess ways in which these variables may present opportunities or threats to your business.
3. Clearly articulate the scenario with a problem statement.
   On a white board, write down "What if _____?" and fill in the blank.
   For example, "What if we lose our biggest client this year, resulting
   in a 50 percent decrease in revenue? Or what if new housing starts
   decrease this year by 20%?
4. Flesh out the details of the scenario. Clarify exactly the situation your company would be in.
5. Develop a trigger point and an action plan if the scenario in Step 5 should occur. Know
   when to execute the action plan by having a clear trigger point. Then
   detail the top five steps you will take in the effect the trigger
   occurs. These are designed to work regardless of how the future turns
   out.

Many of these choices otherwise go
unnoticed if you focus obsessively on your organization’s present-day
situation. With scenario planning, you’re imagining not just one, but a
variety of future possibilities. All the great opportunities in the
world aren’t enough unless you have contingencies in place. And
remember, you’re not only preparing for unexpected threats but also
trying to foresee unanticipated opportunities.

It
is human nature to ignore the bad news rather than pay attention to it.
Whether you think you are immune to this slow down or not, consider the
ramifications of disregarding such an economic change. Wouldn’t you
sleep better if you had a clear idea how to mitigate real risks in your
business operations? One way to lessen the uncertainty of the present
is to plan for the future; have the courage to imagine the worst that
could happen and how you would handle it. A scenario plan will help you
do just that.

Scenario Planning: What If . . . ?
Scenario planning is a way of simplifying a complex future by providing
you the opportunity to ask the "what if" questions and to rehearse how
you may respond should a certain event or trend happen in the future.

Scenario planning was first developed and used by
the U.S. Air Force during World War II and gained acknowledgement in
the business world when Shell Oil utilized scenario planning techniques
to predict the oil crisis of the 1970s. For organizations, scenario
planning provides an invaluable opportunity to have a strategic
discussion around key drivers and critical uncertainties in your
operating environment.

Thinking about the BIG what ifs . . .
The most significant trends likely to affect the larger world are those forces that are the "big" what ifs - the driving forces. These cases tend to push your thinking and are usually classified as the big unknowns. The forces generally come in four flavors:

• Social dynamics: This area includes specific demographic issues such as how influential youth might be in ten years, the growth of the Hispanic community, the tight labor market and the aging baby boomer generation.
• Economic issues: Macroeconomic trends and forces shape the economy as a whole, such as those headlines about the credit market, the bond market and the local housing market.
• Political issues: Outcomes of legislative sessions can impact local businesses as government cuts back on spending due to lower sales tax receipts. Legislative changes can affect tax policies, regulatory issues, employment laws and the like.
• Technological issues: The key trends identified by research firm Gartner include mobile computing, change in telephony, the tight IT job market, business process outsourcing, and regulatory compliance issues.

Identifying which of the big what ifs might impact your firm is the key to scenario
planning for these forces. Some of these may seem farfetched, while
others are quite a bit more likely. Consider, for example, how lenders
have been raising requirements for home loans following the flood of
defaults and late payments on homes purchased with subprime mortgages.
This, combined with still falling prices across most of the US, has
deterred home buyers, leading to a string of poor results and losses
for major US homebuilders. Home ownership rates directly correlate to
the economy and facilitate economic growth. Without economic growth,
sales tax revenue decreases and results in less funding for government
agencies. As a result, a lot of local governments have not increased
spending which affects everyone with a government contract and impacts
the quality of services delivered by the agencies.

In addition to these "big" what ifs, there are also a number of smaller
scenarios that may also hit close to home. We’ll discuss those more in
detail next time in this column when we continue our discussion on
scenario planning.

• An understanding of what your customers want
• The knowledge of how to meet the customers’ needs
• The delivery of the product or service customers want

Many of you reading this may already be doing most of these activities. Great job! If you aren’t, it’s okay. Take some action to formalize your process. Studies show that companies that link these activities together achieve greater levels of performance when compared to their competitors. A company that increases its market focus by ten percent can see a growth of between 17 and 20 percent in overall performance.

Want to evaluate how market-focused your firm is? Check out this free, online assessment tool.

Here’s what’s growing:

• Shortage of raw materials and development of new materials: With the cost of oil on the rise, demand for non petro-chemical-based materials is increasing. Same goes for other natural resources.
• Increasing population: By 2050, the global population is estimated to reach 9.2 billion people.
• Environmental sustainability: Huge opportunities exist with reusing, recycling, and creating biodegradable products. Clean energy is booming with solar cells, wind turbines, and eliminating preventable energy loss.

Leave it to DuPont to develop a product to replace plastic. Its newest product is called Sorona, a corn-based version of plastic. DuPont clearly identified the growing threat of high oil prices, and turned it into an opportunity by creating a solution. Sorona, referred to as the new nylon, is expected to hit the streets in a few years and could soon be in everything from underwear to carpet.

A strategic plan provides a business with the roadmap it needs to pursue a specific strategic direction and set of performance goals, deliver customer value, and be successful. However, this is just a plan; it doesn’t guarantee that the desired performance is reached any more than having a roadmap guarantees the traveler arrives at the desired destination. Remarkably, the majority of companies who have strategic plans fail to implement them. In fact, according to a Fortune cover story in 1999, nine out of ten organizations fail to implement their strategic plan.

We believe the new execution module helps you plan more effectively and use your time more efficiently to make more informed decisions with features like at-a-glance tracking that identifies goals and action items as completed, pending or overdue. But we encourage you not to overlook the components necessary for supporting a successful implementation. Consider these five key elements:

1. People – Make sure you surround yourself with the right people on board with the right competencies and skills to support your plan.
2. Resources – You’ll need sufficient funds and enough time to support implementation. True costs can include a realistic time commitment from your staff  to achieve a goal, a clear identification of expenses associated, or unexpected cost overruns by a vendor. Be prepared as well that employees will need enough time to implement what may be additional activities that they aren’t currently performing.
3. Structure – Be sure to set your structure of management, appropriate lines of authority, and clear lines of communication with your employees. A plan administrator and regular strategy meetings are two of the easiest ways to put a structure in place.
4. Systems – Both management and technology systems help track the progress of the plan and make it faster to adapt to changes. Be sure to include milestones with achievements and specified time frames as part of you plan.
5. Culture – Create an environment that connects your employees to the organization’s mission and that makes them feel comfortable. You can reinforce the importance of focusing on strategy and vision by rewarding success. There should be some creative positive and negative consequences for achieving or not achieving the strategy so people make it a priority.

Below are three generally accepted organization-wide strategies.

• Providing the lowest cost through operational excellence
• Providing the best products or services through continued innovation
• Providing complete customer solutions through intimately knowing their needs and wants

In case you’re tempted to execute all three, think again. That’s called being stuck in the middle or riding the fence. Executing a stuck in the middle strategy is like being in the middle seat of a five-seat row on a 747. You don’t know whether to crawl over the mom with he sleeping baby to the right or over the guy with his laptop on the left. It’s not a good place to be! Companies that find themselves in this position usually end up in a financial crisis or reorganization. That said, this doesn’t mean you don’t do the other activities well. You just don’t focus on them as much as the one that are central to creating value for your customers.

A value-creating strategy should be selected for each target customer group that you serve. For smaller organizations or departments, select one strategy for your whole company. Managing multiple value propositions can be nearly impossible.

Selection your organization-wide strategy really comes down to determining what your customers value the most about what you’re providing them. The low prices? Your cutting-edge products? Your ability to deliver a service that fits their needs exactly? Take a look at each option to see which strategy is the best fit for your company.

With their annual Social Capitalist Awards, Fast Company
(Jan 2007) celebrates those leaders who “combine savvy business models with
solutions to pressing social needs in ways that challenge our assumptions about
making a profit and making a difference.”  One 2007 award winner was TransFair USA which
certifies fair-trade coffee and other developing-nation crops, then works with
certified growers to get higher prices. When CEO Paul Rice hosted Perry Odak,
CEO of the Wild Oats Markets grocery chain, on a Mexican coffee trip, the strategy
played well for Wild Oats and for the farmers. Odak was impressed to learn from
farmers that joining a fair-trade cooperative could mean scholarships for their
kids, preventative health programs, and better futures for all. With a steady
income, many more young people are also staying in their communities and returning
to work on the fields. When Wild Oats promoted their fair-trade coffee with
giant signs that described to customers the effect of the labor, price and
environmental requirements of fair trade, volume
sales went up 20% despite a $2/pound price increase (organic beans cost
more to grow). The company’s purchase also yielded more than $1.5 million in
additional revenue for 100,000 farmers and their families. Needless to say, Wild Oats has introduced
fair-trade loose tea, bulk sugar and fruit as well.

TransFair’s whole model is based on consumers’ voting with
their wallets. Fair trade consumption is growing at 75% per year, CEO Rice
says, and TransFair has sparked partnerships with Costco, Sam’s Club, and even McDonald’s.
According to Jeff Hamaouli, founder of Origo Inc., a consulting firm that helps
both nonprofits and for-profits navigate this blended arena of social
enterprise, “Companies are beginning to realize that these questions of ‘How
can I accomplish more good in the world?’ and ‘Where is the market
opportunity?’ are essentially the same question.

Consider these approaches for finding opportunities to
include social responsibility in your business

1. Scout
   new market
2. Unleash
   the consumer
3. Invent
   new products

Failure to monitor and address advances may negatively impact your financial position in the market. Areas to watch include government spending on technology, big new discoveries or products, speed of technology transfer, and changes in business processes as a result of technology.

Here are some trends over the next ten years that may be opportunities or threats to your business:

• Embedding the Internet in every part of our lives: Internet technologies make it easier to have strategic partnerships; put the customer more in control of the buying process; reduce the costs of customer service; offer new ways to recruit, train, and retain employees; and provide new communication tools.
• Growth of robots: Robots and other automation-based technologies handle most repetitive tasks.
• More open source programs: Open source software - where the programming code that runs the application is accessible to anyone - is expected to grab more than 20 percent of the world-wide software market in five years. The estimated cost to software makers is $100 billion in revenue, according to the Gartner Group.

With more than 63 million Americans expected to be hooked up to broadband by 2008, companies large and small are making serious money by doing everything from working virtually, to offering online services, to distributing anything that is digital. Skype, the world’s fastest growing Internet telephony provider, was sold to eBay for $2.6 billion. Why the large price tag? It boasted more than 54 million customers worldwide using its service, virtually free.

Consider G-Sky, a Vancouver, British Columbia, company that installs
green roofs – vegetation and soil covered roofs that help lower heating
and air-conditioning costs along with dramatically reducing rainwater
runoff. According to an article in Business 2.0, the total square
footage of green roofs in the United States is already growing at the
healthy rate of 125 percent a year, and now some entrepreneurs like
G-Sky are “placing (their) bets on something even more
forward-thinking: green walls”.

Green walls can provide as much bill-saving insulation as green roofs,
and they put less load-bearing strain on the building. They can also
help offset the urban heat island effect caused by heat-absorbing city
surfaces that can raise temperatures as much as 8 degrees higher than
the surrounding countryside. When G-Sky started looking long-term, they
saw a world where “carbon-trading is king and companies are eager to
offset their greenhouse gas emissions”. Now, G-Sky is installing
plant-filled wall panels that can go on any vertical surface – meaning
that “G-Sky just quintupled its opportunity” since for every roof there are four walls. Early G-Sky clients include Whole Foods and the W Hotel chain.

What can we learn from this trailblazer?

• Build on your company’s strengths: Your strengths
  encompass everything that your company does well. Consider your
  company’s capabilities, skills and resources and draw on them to
  execute plans and actions.
• Consider your operational processes: What do you
  already excel at that might have other applications? G-Sky identified
  an opportunity to grow their business 4X with their existing expertise!
• Capitalize on any opportunities that may exist: Keep in mind that opportunities may be political, social, environmental or technological.

At a monthly meeting, the company starts by defining a series of actionable items based on the monthly reports. From there, action plans are developed and reported back on the one-page summary reports.

The CEO feels the benefits are usually quite substantial. After all, when action items are consistently elevated, department heads know they’re responsible for implementing the items as efficiently as possible (that’s called work peer pressure). The department heads appreciate this process because it raises the bar for everyone and keeps their staff focused on the right things.

• Be a strategic leader. Lead by example and prioritize your strategic plan over everything else. Stay committed.
• Cut out the jargon. Make sure everyone in your organization really understands the plan.
• Hang your one-page strategic plan in the break room or another central location.
• Involve your staff in the final development of the plan. Ask for and use employee ideas.
• Create a "champion" or owner for every goal and action. Make strategy everyone’s job.
• Ask your employees to create the action items to support their assigned goals.
• Review the plan with management or the group. Align the organization with the strategy.
• Use a scorecard to monitor progress monthly.
• Schedule regular updates. Hold a monthly meeting, one-on-one with the team leaders, where you only discuss strategy. Hold a quarterly full staff strategy meeting to report on the progress.
• Challenge underlying assumptions. Revisit and refine the strategic plan three months from now.
• Hold yourself accountable through a mentor, personal coach, or business organization.
• Link strategy to performance.
• Continually scan your environment to identify changes that may impact your strategy.
• Reward success! Throw a party when significant goals are reached.

Want a good example of franchising? Great Harvest Bakery has successfully opened 206 franchises nationwide with an unusually loose model. The company encourages entrepreneurial spirit and open communication between storeowners, who enjoy the freedom to run their businesses their way. In fact, the Uniform Franchise Offering reads: "Anything not expressly prohibited is allowed." Because the company is privately held, financial information isn’t available, but its continued growth, with 13 stores expected to open this year, is an indicator that the company developed a very successful partnership model.

Wonder why you wouldn’t want to franchise?  Check out Jamba Juice, the maker of fruit-juice smoothies. They backed away from franchising as a growth strategy specifically because of the inability to control product quality. At the time the company was making the critical decision about how to grow, founder Kirk Perron decided that consistency in location, store design, in-store merchandise, and smoothie ingredients was what would lure repeat customers. By franchising, Jamba Juice didn’t have the ability to monitor the quality so important to the company’s distinctiveness. Opening wholly-owned stores funded by a handful of big name venture capitalist proved a winning strategy for the company. The company now has 500 stores nationwide with net sales of $300 million in 2005.

You’ll recall that I previously recommended narrowing your
options down to a select few for your strategic plan in order to maintain
focus. Now, I’d like to encourage you to balance out your strategic priorities
by using the Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard was introduced by
Robert Kaplan, a Harvard Business School professor, and David Norton, the
founder and president of Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Inc, in the early
1990s and has since become the hallmark of a well-run organization. It is an
excellent management tool that helps ensure you have a holistic and balanced
strategy framework by focusing on the four key areas that all organizations
must excel in to succeed. These areas are described as follows

• Financial/Mission:
  When you provide value to your customers, you achieve your financial or mission
  goals.
• Customer:
  If you want to generate additional revenue, you need to provide value to your
  customers.
• Internal/Operational:
  In order to provide value to your customers, you must have internal business
  processes to create that value.
• Employee
  (centered on learning and innovation): In order for your business processes to
  function, you need people who are skilled and knowledgeable.

Look at your short list of internal and external priorities
from step 4 (see Agreeing On Priorities)
to note where your priorities fall, and try to develop at least one long-term
strategic objective for each area above. Again, in the interest of maintaining focus,
I would caution against too many long-term strategic objectives (no more than
five) so your plan doesn’t become unwieldy. And if you’re short in an area,
consider developing additional priorities in order to have a balanced strategy.

Financial priorities revolve around either revenue
generation or productivity improvement, and they explain how your company looks
to shareholders (i.e. owners, investors). A solid strategic plan will have at
least one goal in each of these activities. For example, your financial goals
may include increasing revenue by 10% annually and improving overall
productivity.  In these cases, serving
your customer well will increase your revenue generation, and improving your
internal business processes will enhance your productivity improvement.

Customer priorities focus on meeting the needs of the customer
through products and services. Approach these goals by considering both current
and new customers. Strategic objectives here might include introducing new
products to both existing and new customers or increasing overall customer
retention.

Internal priorities serve several purposes: supporting the
customer and financial goals, focusing on administrative processes that have an
impact on creating customer value and satisfaction, and focusing on the
internal management activities and operational functions needed to support the
products and services. Essentially, internal priorities answer the question,
“To satisfy our customers, in what processes must we excel?” Examples include
improving internal processes, developing and implementing a promotional plan to
drive increased business, and increasing community outreach.

And, finally, employee priorities drive everything else in
your plan. These goals should focus on developing your people, increasing the
company’s knowledge base, improving through innovation, and discovering best
practices. Examples here include developing a broad set of skills useful for
customer support, improving your human resource development and training, and
continually adopting current best practices.

Next, you’ll need to turn your priorities into strategies,
objectives and goals. I’ll address that next time when I discuss identifying
next actions.

A recent New York Times Magazine cover story chronicled the rise of Toyota from one-time textile loom manufacturer to “not only the best automaker in the world, but also maybe the best corporation”. Indeed, according to that article, Toyota has just about every major company in the world asking the question: “What can we learn from Toyota?” In fact, “what you can learn from Toyota is something even Bill Gates has pondered publicly.”

What doesn’t surprise anyone familiar with Toyota’s strategic history is that the company "never makes rash moves or false promises." One obvious example of Toyota’s approach is the Prius hybrid. Jim Press, president of Toyota Motors North America, said that ‘about the same time the Prius made its debut, Ford rolled out the huge S.U.V. franchise’ even though ‘both of us had the same tea leaves, the same research. One of us bet on hybrid, one of us bet on big S.U.V.s.’ Toyota pondered, according to Press, that ‘First of all, long term, is fuel going to get cheaper or more expensive? Is oil going to become more plentiful or less plentiful? Is the air going to become cleaner or more polluted? And so, do you do something proactive and innovative, to be in tune with where society is going? Or do you hold on to where it has been, and then don’t let go, to the bitter end?’ Toyota’s overarching principle, according to Press, is ‘to enrich society through the building of cars and trucks’, and the company’s decision to pursue hybrids ten years ago was the answer to the question, ‘What’s the right thing to do to sustain the ability to sell more cars and trucks?’

The New York Times Magazine article quoted a Toyota employee who said that ‘Toyota expects to be in business 100 years from now, long after oil has been depleted or rendered unusable because of its carbon content, and for that reason it has placed all its bets on hybrid technologies.’

Is your business equally prepared?

To that
end, let me begin at the requisite starting point – your mission statement. A
mission statement, we all know, is a statement of your company’s purpose or its
fundamental reason for existing, but it should also serve as both a guide for
day-to-day operations and the foundation for future decision-making. In other
words, it should determine your primary business and organization purpose AND
be the roadmap in a strategic plan to empower your employees to be more
effective. It should be specific, short, sharply focused, and memorable. The
mission statement of Olsen & Associates Public Relations is “Dedicated to
improving and optimizing public perceptions on behalf of our clients.” If the
company doesn’t live up to this mission, it has no reason to exist.

I encourage
you to think beyond bullet points on a memo or a posting on the break room
wall. Instead, think of your mission statement as the primary guideline for
leading your organization to higher levels of performance. It should provide
the framework for independent decisions and actions initiated by departments,
managers, and employees into a coordinated, company-wide game plan.

Your
vision, likewise, should provide long-term direction while it delineates what
kind of enterprise your company is trying to become and infuses the
organization with a sense of purposeful action. Identify your corporate values.
Create an image of what success will look like. Your vision statement needs to
be something you can achieve at some point in the future while also serving as
a unifying focal point for everyone in the organization – like a North Star. I
recommend developing one that’s far reaching but attainable. A vision statement
can be as far reaching as 100 years or as short as five. It just needs to work
for your company and the industry in which you operate.

Here are
two examples of visions that were very lofty at the time they were established,
but they don’t sound so crazy now:

• “We will put a man on the moon before the end
  of the decade and bring him back” (President John F Kennedy)
• “A
  computer on every desk and in every home using great software as an empowering
  tool” (Microsoft)

 Together
the mission and vision statements function to clarity why your organization
exists and what the end game is. In this way, your mission and vision should
drive every action and initiative on the road to where you are going and
provide a constant reference point to keep your strategic plan on track.

Join me
again as we continue with the Strategic Planning Process Checklist to keep you
and your team on track while also making the strategic planning process a
habit. Next time I’ll be discussing your Strategic
Position. And remember, success is
not a matter of chance, but rather success is a matter of choice.

Catalytica Pharmaceuticals: A 1,700 employee, Mountain View, California-based pharmaceutical outsourcer that made the world’s supply of such drugs as AZT and Wellbutrin. The company was founded in 1993 and was sold to DSM of Holland for $800 million in 2000.

MLMReporter.com: Founded in 2000, this company, which sells online marketing programs and systems, was sold two years later to KMT Media for just under $250,000 in April 2002.

Paypal: An online payment service based in San Jose was sold to eBay three years after it was founded for $1.5 billion in stock in June 2002.

MySpace: A social networking website (the fourth most popular English language website as of May 2006), was sold to media giant News Corp for $580 million in 2006 three years after it was founded.

The standard growth strategies are numerous (and
confusing) such as partnerships, market expansion, acquisition, product
extension, and franchising. While these strategies are important and useful, I
believe growth is ultimately determined by providing value to your customers,
the people you hire, the processes they develop, and culture you choose to
build. So instead of thinking about the detailed strategies themselves, let’s
look at a few exciting and practical ways to help you move closer to the $1
million mark.

Drive the organization with big
vision. Growth requires thinking big,
then executing like crazy. Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent
persistence. But that 10 percent is critical, otherwise the 90 percent is lost,
aimless, and unproductive. According to Alvin Toffler, “You’ve got to think
about the big things while you’re doing the small things, so that all the small
things go in the right direction.” Growth comes from pursuing a worthwhile plan
with measurable rigor.

Account for big goals. Every organization sets goals, but sometimes they aren’t
big, and sometimes they are not written down! A big vision is achieved through
accomplishing big objectives and goals. That’s all execution really is – your
organization’s ability to achieve goals. First, pick 3 to 5 strategic goals
that you will focus on in 2007. Make sure all of these goals are focused on
growing your business to $1 million. Second, develop action plans for each
goal. Identify a responsible persona and a due date for each action item.
Review regularly and hold people accountable. Create a culture that people that
people feel responsible for “not missing a due date here.” That’s all there is
to it – it doesn’t have to be complicated, confusing or time consuming.

Celebrate wins along the way. Publicly share big accomplishments, milestone, project
completion, revenue goals. This sharing drives growth in two ways: 1) It
motivates the people driving those accomplishments to press on. 2) Success and
profit sharing breeds confidence, fueling enthusiasm for further growth.
Everyone wants to be appreciated and we often dwell on what we failed to
achieve, instead of celebrating the small wins. Do something special for yourself
and your team. After all, it’s the journey, not just the destination that
matters. Enviable growth business happens when you create something with ‘a
feeling that we’re in this together.’

Seek out new ideas. Invite left and right-brained people into your
organization to create a complete “brain trust” of skills and competencies. You
need both perspectives to invent creative solutions, challenge the status quo,
find hidden connections, new models, analyze data for discoveries, and explore
parallel industries for new methods. Henry Ford could not have grown faster
than everyone else had he not borrowed the division of labor manufacturing line
concept from a meat packing plant. Walgreens could not have grown as fast had
they not changed their approach to increased convenience instead of big stores,
big ticket items. Southwest could not have grown had they not reinvented
airline service and the hub-and-spoke approach. Challenge conventional wisdom
to solve your customers’ issues and pains with non-traditional approaches.

Ignore distractions. In tandem with new ideas, we must focus! This is the
never-ending struggle for entrepreneurs – too many ideas, too little resources.
In an increasingly competitive environment, growth comes from being great at
one thing at a time. Succeed at one thing that you know customers need. That
takes focus – focus on the customer and focus on what you choose to do better
than anybody. Use your vision as a filter to keep out distractions. If the
activity is not line with your big goals, even if it is a good idea, table it
and move on.

Empower through ownership. Inside almost every motivated employee is a frustrated
entrepreneur. As we know, entrepreneurs like to build and own their work. They
are achievement-oriented and take pride in results. Feed these engines with
premium fuel by assigning ownership. Recognition is the number one motivator.
You can unleash powerful output by clearly defining roles and responsibilities.
Give ownership of action plans. And help everyone in your organization
understand their purpose and impact on the big picture.

Neutralize negativity. There is no such thing as “try,” there is only “do.”
That’s the attitude of a sustainable growth company. The question is never,
“Are we going to make it?” The question is “What do you need to make it” and
the answer is “here’s how we can”. But be realistic. Most growth companies
don’t grow quickly without sustaining some damage. Consider how to avoid road
blocks and road bumps along the way.

Know your market cold. As a wise person (I can’t remember
whom) once said – sell something that people want to buy, not something you have to convince them to buy. In other words, know (don’t guess or assume)
the needs and wants of your customers. Offer them something that solves their
problems, makes their life better, something they can’t live without. Talk to
them, go to their business or home, and learn as much as you can about how they
use your product or service. And use that information to make your offering the
best it can be. Don’t forget, it is your customers that will get you to that $1
million mark!

Passion overall. If you’re motivated and excited about what you are doing,
people will follow and your organization will grow. This may be the most
important element because it is the true spirit behind growth.

To everyone out there who is striving to hit $1 million
(me included), may you hit that goal and them some!

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