Monty Python understood the raw feelings that co-owning a business can cause…

Hopefully your business isn't quite at the stage of directors jumping out of windows, but if you have business partners I'll bet there are times when you don't feel you're running off the same plan. 

Last week I helped 50/50 partners in a business to agree a new plan that motivates them both.  Their business is strong but they need different types of goals to keep them energised and positive, especially in a tough market.  One needs a long term, visionary goal while the other needs to know what the business will give him in a much shorter period.

Both of them are committed to the long term of the business, but they are motivated in very different ways.  Without them understanding this, they were getting annoyed with each other and not pulling in the same direction.

At the end of our meeting, they had clarity on how the business will deliver both long and short term goals and were buzzing with excitement to get on with it.

If it feels like you're not working well together, you might want to consider your business planning process.  I've noticed a few bad ways to do this while coaching small businesses on their business plans…

Three Common Approaches To Business Planning…

As a business coach it's easy to look from the outside and see the things you don't realise when you're in the thick of it.  Here are three great ways to sabotage your long term business success…

1 – Business Plan?  We Just Plan To Survive!

You'll hear this a fair bit when you talk to people running small businesses.  The trouble is, if all you ever set out to do is just survive, you'll barely manage even to do that.

The most common reason for this is that you don't have effective business controls in place – you'll have late paying customers, late invoicing, poor cashflow etc.  It's no wonder survival is the first thing on your mind!

Perhaps it's also easier to say that you just want to survive than admitting that you don't want to change, learn new ways of doing things and make your small business really successful.  This is the complete opposite to the next one…

2 – This TIme Next Year, We'll Be Millionaires…

Made famous by Delboy Trotter from Only Fools & Horses fame, this is the vague hope that carrying on doing the same things you've always done will suddenly produce different results. 

No hope!  If you want to reach a far-off business destination, you'd better choose precisely where you're going and have a very clear idea of at least the first few steps to get you there. 

The good thing is you are a positive thinker, though, so if you can just get some strategies in place to lift your business performance and get it heading in the right direction, you can easily grow a lot more than you did last year.

3 – The Headless Chicken 

If you're the headless chicken, you're so busy running around doing stuff that you never stand back to think about where you're going.  This is like setting sale for America without a compass – you'll never get there.  Instead you'll just keep going around in circles, claiming that "all this vision stuff is a load of bullsh*t".

The headless chicken is always too busy to plan, to improve, to grow.  The headless chicken gets worn out eventually and gives up, switching to the "just surviving would be nice" strategy.

Was Your Last Business Plan Written In A Coffee Break?

For a typical small business, plans are what you talk about over coffee when there's time.  Nothing gets written down and the partner who shouts loudest, or who has been there longest, rules the roost by dominating the conversation.  Other partners feel surpressed and unable to share their point of view.

One of my clients has a business inherited from family.  Through the generations though, it's been handed down a bit like a family heirloom and kept more or less the same as the day it opened over a century ago. 

It took a tough session at a round table to sort out the differences – deciding who was really in control of the business and then some rules to let them run the business successfully, instead of suffering constant interference.  Up until then, the previous generation had been meddling in the changes and keeping the business in a time-warp. 

Freeing up the current generation's MD to get on with the job had a huge impact on sales, reduced stock costs and improved morale and motivation with the staff.

A Parting Shot…

If your business has two or more partners, have you got a written, agreed exit plan to get out of the business at a specific time in the future, or will you struggle to deal with that the day it happens?  You need to consider what would happen if it was forced upon you early.

When my father died unexpectedly, my mother had to deal with the consequences of no clear exit plan for the business at the same time as she was coming to terms with her loss.  It wasn't easy for her or the business.  The business has now gone altogether and I now know that a bit of exit planning could have made the whole thing a lot easier at a difficult time. 

Will you business be an asset to your family and business partners if you weren't around anymore, or will they feel like jumping out of the window too?

Some Bloggers' Thoughts on Exit Plans

Mercer & Horne's SME Blog talking about exit planning ready for selling your business

Self made minds' post about the importance of creating your exit plan well in advance for getting out of an Internet business

And finally, SmallBizPod is a podcasting site with some interesting interviews you can download for listening on your iPod or MP3 player.  You do have an MP3 player don't you?  In the show in the linked post, Martin Webb, the presenter of Channel 4's "Risking It All" business startup programme is interviewed.  Later in the programme various thoughts are aired about the value of creating an exit plan well in advance.  The show is SmallBizPod #50

Everywhere she looked, there were problems and nothing seemed to be going right.  She pressed on and worked hard, but was feeling angry and frustrated with all the problems that seemed to have suddenly overtaken her successful business.

"A vision without action is a dream, action without vision is a nightmare"

I called by chance as she is a past client of mine.  We talked briefly about things that were going on and realised that she was giving all of her attention to the issues and had forgotten to keep her direction set towards her vision.  When we lose direction, we are like a boat at see without a rudder – all we can do is try to keep low in the boat and hope the next big wave doesn't hit us.

Her vision is to build a business that her customers love, with a great team atmosphere, where everybody pulls together and supports the common aim of having a great place to work with delighted customers.  She has held her focus on this for over 12 months now and her business has really taken shape.  But, sailing into rough seas caused her to lose focus for a while.  After a quick impromptu coaching session,  her attention is back on her vision and the business is back on track.

Problems?  What problems?

Do YOU ever get out of the wrong side of bed in the morning?

You sometimes hear people talking about keeping a positive mental attitude.  When done to excess it can be a bit like an evangelising priest and really pushes people away.  But, when you do it genuinely from a feeling of making change in a specific direction, you give off a positive vibe that reflects back on you too.

For me, the most powerful start to being positive is knowing who you are and where you are going.  When I coach you, the most powerful thing I can do is help you to truly connect to who you are and what you can achieve.  When you get "in the flow" of moving towards your vision, you can move mountains.

When you have a bad day, nothing seems to go right.  Take a moment to focus again on what it is that you want to achieve and think of all the good things that are helping you to achieve it.  Blow away the fog of stress and problems by having a bright vision that pulls you towards it.

Homer Hickam, son of a coal-miner father, was so inspired by the launch of Sputnik 1 that he decided to build his own rockets.  He set his heart on winning a science fair that would grant him a scholarship to pay for him to go to university.  Almost nobody believed in him and many ridiculed his dream.  His head teacher, his father, many of his friends and other people besides.  These were people that children look up to and admire.  As I watched it, I realised that they were trying to steal his dream away from him to let him have a "secure" future in the coal-mine instead.

Ultimately Homer's passion wins through – he learns advanced mathematics for fun because he needs to know for his rocketeering.  A great quote that sums up what I am trying to say comes from Homer's teacher in the movie, helping him to deal with his dream stealers, "Sometimes, you just can't listen to what anybody else says.  You just got to listen inside".

I recommend you find the time to watch this film, October Sky, to think about your own past and who tried to steal your dreams.  Maybe even now somebody puts the dampers on things whenever you dare to dream big.  Also, remember that there are people who look up to you too – make sure you don't try to take their dreams away!

I believe that passion brings us alive and helps us to fly.  It is very hard to stay positive and stick at something for years unless you feel good about it.  Too many times in life we are guided by principles and advice to take the sensible route, rather than listening to our heart.

If you are not enjoying your business, it will be very hard to make it into something special.  Take a step back and decide what you really want from it, what you enjoy, or could enjoy if there were no major niggles.  Find something in your business that excites you and gives you energy and life.  In doing this you will start to connect to a more enjoyable and successful future. 

If you used to have passion but it's gone, it is time to relight your fire.  It is easy to become worn down by the daily grind and if this is you, decide to sort out the things that are making it a grind.  This will create space again for your passion.  If you recognise that you are just going through the motions these days, decide to change things for the better, starting today.

It's clear that some people in life can just see an idea and run with it.  If that's you, please post a comment on the blog about how you got your passion back.

For the rest of us, we need somebody to help us get the process going and keep us on track.  That's what I do – contact me to find out how to awaken your dreams again – it is never too late to let your dreams fly.

Do you have a favourite inspiring movie?  Tell me about it in the comments section…

At Google, the biggest search engine on the Internet, their vision is to "organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

So when the guys and gals at Google decide how they will sort the results of searches, they put a real priority on making results relevent and readable, so that the information is accessible and useful to them, even translating pages into your language if you want.  How accessible and useful is that?  Simply brilliant and all stemming from that one simple vision statement.

It's a really simple and powerful vision and I love it because of that.  It leaves you in no doubt what they set out to do every single day and it also hints at how they may evolve over time.

One of my favourite examples of a vision, although not from business, comes from Martin Luther King Jr.  In his "I Have A Dream" speech he describes his vision with details that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  How many people has he inspired with just this speech, I wonder?

 Watch the video of him delivering this speech here and listen carefully for the details of his vision.

 WIthin 12 months of him making this speech, an amendment to the American constitution was made that legally introduced equality for the black people of America.  His speech moves me deeply every time I hear it because of the depth of thought he has put into crafting every word of it, as well as his passionate delivery.

This beats hands-down the corporate visions and mission statements that seem to be created by a committee of tired old grey suits, trying to please everybody in the meeting.  The result is an obscure statement that uses lots of hollow words without real meanings all strung together to say nothing but sound impressive.  Something like "To facilitate the delivery of optimal solutions to suit our customers' every needs" is just like a bar of slippery soap.  There is no way you could identify what industry or business this came from and so you get nowhere.

Depending on the scale of the vision you have and how different it is to how things are at the moment, you may need to take the time to sit down and work out precisely what you want your business to become.  Most people have not spent the time to do  this and as a consequence they do not have that laser-directed sense of purpose that gives the most successful people their focus every day.

A well developed vision will be something that you can talk through and explain how it gives a great customer experience, how it ensures your market share for years to come and how it makes your business a great place to work.

To create your business vision, start by thinking about what it is you choose to be.  Then work through and put down all the things that your business will have to do in order to achieve this.  Don't just stop at words like "great customer service", think about what it will really mean you will do as a business.  Make it come alive so that you create on paper an inspiring future for your business.