Five questions to build a ‘Cascadable’ performance dashboard
Communication of outcomes, from the strategic drivers of your business to what was produced in the last 5 minutes at a station on the factory floor, is increasingly recognised as the key to performance improvement. Communicating the right things, to the right...
Is price the driver or outcome of where you choose to play?
Customers read much into the price you choose to charge, the architecture of your price list, and willingness to deploy price tactically. Price can also override all your other marketing activity, as it is the quantitative reflection of what you think your customers...
Do you tell employees when you decide to sell?
When the owner of a medium sized business is thinking of selling, the road in front to complete a transaction is a rocky one. On top of the pressure and tension of financial and strategic due diligence, there are always questions about employee reaction. Will...
Train hard to improve sales and cash
Cash is the final arbiter of commercial success. You cannot live without it, too much of it and you get lazy, too little and you are wheezing, struggling to breathe, living moment to moment. There is a lot of advice around about how to manage your cash,...
The problem with strategy
Strategy is an essential ingredient for success. Without a clear, unambiguous, and well communicated strategy, there will be wasted effort, sub-optimal decision making, lack of alignment between functional responsibilities, and any number of other...
How do you overcome manufacturing’s WMB syndrome?
The term 'Washing Machine Brain' was used recently by a client as we sorted through all the competing tasks and priorities of his role running a small, rapidly expanding business. Everything was mixed up, tangled, swirling at a rate he found difficult to...
4 rules to make you a successful dissenter
Too often dissent is seen as just negative. Sometimes it is, particularly when the dissent is from a course of action that demands change, but even that can be useful. The nature of dissent, when removed from becoming personalised, is usually hugely positive,...
When is a price ‘guesstimate’ good enough?
Many small businesses operate a job-shop business model for some or all of their revenue. They do not produce products, then sell from inventory, they sell a product as specified by the buyer, which in the detail will be unique. However, from a higher perspective,...
Will the Facebook Metamorphous just deliver another uglier duck?
I cannot let the name change of 'Facebook', to 'Meta', go uncommented. They are not the first to undergo a name change, for a range of reasons. Mostly they are to escape bad publicity, sometimes because it made some strategic sense to do so given the nature of...
Is your Pricing architecture treated separately to your tactical pricing?
Your pricing architecture should be driven by your business model. Your tactical pricing decisions should be driven by the immediate competitive and market pressures. They are different, and while not mutually exclusive, are, or should be, largely separate....