Our business has lost its buzz, how can we get it back?

It’s interesting to observe the events that trigger an ‘aha’ moment for a business.

This week I caught up with the CEO of an events company. He wanted to show me a pitch that the company had been working on. This wasn’t just any pitch; it was the biggest and most high-profile event that the company had ever pitched for.

There was no doubt that the pitch did the company proud; you could tell by a quick flick through the presentation the magnitude of the effort that had gone into it. But it wasn’t the pitch itself that was remarkable but rather the impact that working on it had had on the organisation.

Clearly the CEO was delighted, if not slightly bemused, by the energy and creativity that permeated the entire business during the life of the pitch. He told stories of long hours, amazing ideas, incredible commitment and how even the most unlikely employees had embraced the challenge. But most of all he talked about “buzz”.

When the company was small the CEO felt that it had a special buzz, but over the years that buzz had waned. Until now the CEO had figured that lack of buzz went with the territory; the fun little company was now a sizeable organisation – it had simply “grown up”.

But the pitch changed his mind.

Not only did the CEO realise that his large-ish company was not too big to have a buzz, he also realised just how much he missed it and craved it.

Not surprisingly our conversation quickly turned to how the business might recreate that buzz. We discussed what other companies do to create, over and over again, the same sense of challenge and urgency that the pitch had generated for this particular business. In particular, we discussed the notion of a “quarterly theme” which has proved successful for many organisations.

The quarterly theme is, in essence, quite simple. It starts with the business picking a “single measurable focus” for the quarter – an area of pain that can be worked on by the whole company. Answering the questions: “What is the one thing that we can focus on to improve our company over the next quarter?” and “Where can we get the greatest benefit from the power of focus by all our employees?” will help you find it.

The next step is to set a quantitative goal for the focus, and then adorn the premises with scoreboards, thus creating a visible challenge. To further bring this to life and inject a bit of fun into your business, you create a theme for the challenge. The point here is that you want everyone – absolutely everyone – to be involved and theming the focus with something amusing and light-hearted does just that. Companies often use movies, catch phrases and songs as themes, although right now I know of at least three businesses channelling the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.

The quarterly theme, played well, energises the whole business – even enormous ones – and it is an infinitely more sustainable way of creating buzz than waiting for the next big pitch.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).

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