The Eight Pillars Of Business Prosperity

Explaining The Eight Pillars Of Business Prosperity 

When I start working with a new client I focus on two essential issues:

Where are you now?

How is your business currently performing?

Too many business owners don’t know and try to manage the business based on feelings and emotions rather than facts.

I find it very revealing when I see what is measured and how often. It tells me how results oriented the business owner is, how well the business owner understands his economic business model and to what extent the entrpreneur controls what happens.

Even more interesting than what is measured is the answer to “what do you do with the information?”

Too often I have seen performance information and management accounts produced too late. It discourages action because the tendency is to hope that the problem is a blip and has got better by itself. It saves making a decision and taking action and sometimes the problem has gone away. Other times the problem has become even worse.

Establishing a clear focus on your key numbers is the first pillar and involves understanding your business model and establishing benchmark performance levels.

Where do you want to go

Business can become matter of day to day survival and people lose the original vision and the dreams they had when they first started.

But it is that vision that created the passion and enthusiasm to start the business and it is an essential part of being able to continue to drive the business forward.

As the saying goes “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.”

Clarifying your vision is the topic of the second pillar. When you have a clear vision and direction for the future, you should set goals to establish a pathway with milestones from the presnet day “here” to the future “there”.

For example you may set your vision to be the largest specialist retailer in your area in five years time and you decide that to achieve your vision, your goal is to grow from sales of £400k per year to £5 million. It is ambitious but if you aim low, you may achieve even less.

By breaking down the goal into milestones

Year 1 0.6 million
Year 2 1.0 million
Year 3 2.0 million
Year 4 3.5 million
Year 5 5.0 million

it forces you to focus on the changes which must happen in your business if you are to achieve your vision.

Those goals drive the priorities for actions that need to be taken. These important priorities need be introduced into your normal working week so that the day-to-day urgent tasks of running your business don’t drive out your important business building actions.

How You Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be

There is a section below that starts to explain the other six Pillars of Business Prosperity.

I am in the process of creating additional, more detailed lens on each Pillar but it will take time.

At the moment I am not sure whether it is better to produce one definitive pillar on performance measurement or the skeletons of all eight pillars and add to each as inspiration arises. Perhaps you would like to share your thoughts on this dilemma in the feedback box.