I want to rebuild my business. Where do I start?

I’m just back from a trip to the bushfire-devastated Marysville region of Victoria, where we spent a few days helping the businesses get back on their feet.

Inspiringly, the business owners we spoke to were determined not only to rebuild their businesses but to use the abrupt cessation of their old business as the opportunity to come back with a better one.

Rebuilding is not just for businesses that have been physically wiped out but economically wiped out too.

A Sydney business I know is starting a rebuild. It had to. After many years of making a good profit, it booked a shock loss in January, and February followed suit.

The best place to start a rebuild is in the foundations of the business. Most specifically to rediscover or re-energise the purpose of the business; its reason for being.

Although often thought, especially by employees, that the purpose of a business is to simply make money, profit is really just a very important by-product. It’s a fact that companies with a “higher purpose” are profoundly more successful than those that simply set out to make money.

Not convinced? Take a look at this. Businesses with a strong, clear and engaging purpose find that they:

• Attract the very best people, people who want to do meaningful work and are enthused by the business’s stated purpose.
• Are quicker at decision making than their purpose-less counterparts because they apply a simple hurdle of “does this fit with our purpose”; off-purpose time wasters are quickly dismissed.
• Are more successful innovators. Employees who understand the true point of the business naturally focus their creativity energy in the most useful direction.

I encourage all businesses that are looking at building or rebuilding sustainable profitable growth to start by finding their purpose. So how do you do it? Simply by answering the question “why are we in the business that we are in?”. 

Once you have found your purpose you then need to articulate it in a clear, simple, slightly colloquial form. This is not a copywriting exercise, rather it’s about using the words and phrases ordinarily used by your employees.

You know you have a good purpose when everyone from the receptionist to the CEO understands it. Wal-Mart’s purpose of “to give ordinary folks the chance to buy the same things as rich people” ticks all the boxes.

Companies that are rebuilding often ask whether a company could, or even should, change their purpose. For many businesses it’s not about changing the purpose, but rather focusing it.

Sometimes though, times change and a change in purpose is a necessity. Cadbury’s purpose, when it was a tea, coffee and chocolate drink company, was “to provide an alternative to alcohol”. Now, almost 200 years and many chocolate bars later, it’s purpose is “to create brands people love”.

Which brings us back to the businesses in the Marysville region. While each business there clearly had its own specific purpose, for many it was, in some way, about providing an experience for tourists. With virtually no visitors to the region right now, the businesses are rather purposeless. Please hurry back.

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).