Executing Your Business Plans

 

By Jim Hingst

As important as creating a great plan is in achieving business goals, many shops need to shift their emphasis to the execution of the plan. The execution step is not a glamourous as creating a brilliant plan. What’s more, it takes much more effort. Writing a plan may only take a few days of brainstorming. On the other hand, executing a plan is a daily activity. It’s where the hard work really occurs.

 

 

Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan

 

Execution is difficult because it requires everyone to focus on those activities that are important to your strategy rather than react to the urgent but not necessarily important. These urgent demands on time often become proverbial Chinese fire drills that distract from the company goal.

 

In many cases execution requires good time management skills. Here are some skills you should develop:

 

• Get in the habit of creating a daily “things to do” list. Many people write their list at the beginning of the day. What’s better is to plan tomorrow’s work at the end of today’s workday.

 

• After you have assembled the list, prioritize your activities based on their importance to your company goals. Avoid those unimportant activities that waste time. These are generally activities that you want to do, but do not need to do. In most cases, you should simply scratch off any unimportant tasks from your list.

 

You cannot do everything. If you don’t have the resources to work on something, scratch it off of your “to do” list. In fact, you should eliminate all activities that do not align with your goals.

 

• When you get to the shop, focus on the most important tasks. These are the activities that align with your company’s primary goals and which will produce the greatest results. The temptation for most people is to work on tasks which are the easiest to do. Completing these tasks give you a false sense of accomplishment.

In many cases the most important tasks are the most difficult and usually the tasks that people act upon last. If possible, you should delegate the less consequential activities to subordinates.

 

If you know your associates well, you know their strengths and weaknesses. With this in mind, you should know what you can and cannot delegate to them.

 

If you know an associate’s weakness, you can coach them to improve their performance. If you know their professional aspirations, you can mentor them as they work toward their goals.  

 

Herding Cats

 

In working with teams getting everyone on the same page is often difficult, especially when working with creative people. Focusing the attention of strong-willed individuals is like herding cats.

 

Some feel that you shouldn’t even try. Just give your cats an assignment and a deadline and let them do their own thing. If you are independent by nature, a cat so to speak, it’s hard to disagree with this approach. That is, if you achieve the results that you want.

 

Teams are often more effective in following through on a plan, if allowed some degree of autonomy in how tasks are accomplished. Often some associates assume leadership roles. Team members can exert pressure on their peers to take responsibility for an assignment and get the job done. What’s more, peer pressure provides more motivation and less resentment than having a boss micromanage his employees.  

 

Your Role as a Coach. Not everyone can work independently. Some require a little more structure. That’s not to say that you should micromanage your employees – not at all. Instead, as a shop owner or manager, you need to act as a coach and mentor.

 

Coaching your employees as they participate in achieving goals is not a part time activity. To be an effective coach, you need work on it daily. As a manager and coach, here are the steps that you need to take:

 

• Define the Goals. As a manager you need to explain the company goals and describe what you are doing in each phase of the plan.

 

• Listen. Remember the advice of Dr. Stephen Covey, the author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood”. If you want your team to focus on the business’ goals and take ownership of for their role in achieving them, you need to involve them in the process. One way to do that, is to solicit their input on all aspects of your strategy, including the plans for achieving those goals; their responsibilities in executing the plan; and what metrics you will use to measure the performance of the team.

 

• Preparing the Plan. Based on the input from the workers in your shop and other business associates formulate your plan. In preparing your execution plan, leave nothing to chance or interpretation. Divide each major action step into its principal activities that you need to complete or accomplish.  

 

Specificity is critical in describing tasks. The plan should outline what needs to be done, when must the task be completed, who is responsible. You also need to explain how you will use to monitor performance.

 

You execution plan should also identify any resources or any changes in your shop operations needed to accomplish your business objectives needed to implement the plan.

 

To achieve the best the results, managers need to listen to the input from their employees and provide them with positive reinforcement. Words of encouragement usually work better than criticism and intimidation.

 

• Communication. It makes no sense for you to keep your grand business strategy a secret that you only share with a select few. Instead, you should make your formal execution plan available for everyone in your shop to review.

 

The key is to keep it simple. Your written business plans should be short, to the point and easy to read. After reading your plan, no one should have any question of what needs to be done and who is responsible for doing it.

 

In discussing the plan with your associates, you need to communicate how each action step or activity links to a key company goal. For example, a sales manager should explain the importance of making a required number of prospecting calls to the shop’s annual sales goal.

 

Reinforce your messaging about your goals, plans and activities as often as you can. In production planning, you may need to remind your associates of the importance of better job layout to improve material utilization and reduce scrap. In sales and marketing, you may need to reiterate the significance of increasing website traffic; producing new content each week for the company website and blog; making prospecting calls or generating estimates.  

 

How effective you are in communicating the hopes and dreams for your shop will greatly depend on the relationships that you have developed with your associates. For this reason, you should work on building strong connections with these people.

 

Successful communication also hinges on the passion that you demonstrate in working on your business strategy.   You cannot expect employees or team members to be excited about the company vision or a project, if you aren’t excited yourself. A real passion for the business is contagious. Your enthusiasm can create a bond with your employees and serve as a catalyst for a team to gel.

 

• Maintain Focus. Most plans fail, not because the business plans are flawed, but that the participants in the plan don’t focus. Instead, the action steps are treated as extracurricular activities that you sometimes do when you have time. In order for the plan to come together, you need to consider them as primary responsibilities of the job. Attention to key action items of your strategic plans demands continual attention.

 

• Measurement and Accountability. Success in executing your business plans depends on holding the people responsible for the action steps in your plan and accountable for the outcomes. For this reason, you must continually track the progress toward accomplishing tasks on time through weekly or monthly reporting.

 

When I managed the sales and marketing program at a graphics company, we tracked our progress each week by running a report for the company owners. This report recorded the number of new records added to the dbase; the number of prospecting calls made; and the number of direct mail packages sent. The report also tracked the activities of the sales people. Reporting ensured accountability of those responsible for specific activities.

 

In sales a rolling forecast is another method of tracking performance. The forecast for your shop should indicate the sales potential by salesperson, the probability and forecasted sales amount for a specific period.

 

Using a forecast tells a manager if the shop’s sales and marketing strategy is working or needs work.  That way you can quickly identify problems and take corrective action. For example, tracking sales activity can alert you to a downturn in the economy or the entry of a new competitor in your market.  

 

Forecasting provides you with an early warning system, so you can redirect your sales resources to adapt to changes in the business environment as well as providing you ample time to improve your sales process. Failure to maintain a forecast can result a failure to recognize weaknesses in your operation and formidable competitive threats.

 

• Provide Motivation. If you are a business owner or manager, execution requires you to motivate others as well as oversee and assist them in their progress to get their jobs done.

 

To get the most from your associates, you should set the bar high. You should connect these high standards that you demand with key company activities, such as lowering your scrap rate, reducing returns and allowances, or cutting shop and administrative costs.

 

When your associates produce the results that you demand, you need to acknowledge their efforts. You can show your appreciation in many different ways.  Recognition of a job well done is often just as important as a monetary incentive.  One of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the need to feel accomplishment.

 

As your company works toward a goal, a visual display helps everyone to keep their eyes on the prize and to sustain motivation. If your sales budget is $1 million in annual sales, a wall chart showing the shop’s monthly growth in revenue is a daily reminder of your goal.

 

Taking action doesn’t take a genius. Instead, it requires everyone involved in a project has the discipline to complete tasks according to deadlines set. 

Related Articles

In developing a business strategy, the two steps prior to the execution stage are to set your goals and then develop your plan. These two steps are covered in earlier blog posts:

Setting Goals for Your Business

Developing a Sales and Marketing Plan

About Jim Hingst: Sign business authority on vehicle wraps, vinyl graphics, screen printing, marketing, sales, gold leaf, woodcarving and painting. 

After fourteen years as Business Development Manager at RTape, Jim Hingst retired. He was involved in many facets of the company’s business, including marketing, sales, product development and technical service.

Hingst began his career 42 years ago in the graphic arts field creating and producing advertising and promotional materials for a large test equipment manufacturer.  Working for offset printers, large format screen printers, vinyl film manufacturers, and application tape companies, his experience included estimating, production planning, purchasing and production art, as well as sales and marketing. In his capacity as a salesman, Hingst was recognized with numerous sales achievement awards.

Drawing on his experience in production and as graphics installation subcontractor, Hingst provided the industry with practical advice, publishing more than 190 articles for  publications, such as  Signs Canada, SignCraft,  Signs of the Times, Screen Printing, Sign and Digital Graphics and  Sign Builder Illustrated. He also posted more than 500 stories on his blog (hingstssignpost.blogspot.com). In 2007 Hingst’s book, Vinyl Sign Techniques, was published.  Vinyl Sign Techniques is available at sign supply distributors and at Amazon. 

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