Entrepreneurs have a heads up on smart thinking

During the last week I have had the opportunity to meet a number of really inspiring people including the SmartCompany Start Up Award entrants – another great SmartCompany initiative acknowledging entrepreneurship and celebrating risk-taking and success.

Congratulations to all those who entered the awards and continue to take risks and add true value to the Australian economy.

While politicians and bureaucrats debate endlessly, wasting their time and our money, its good to know that there are so many Australians prepared to roll up their sleeves and create the wealth and jobs that give Australians the lifestyles that make this country the envy of the world.

I also had a speaker to my TEC group whose view of business is well worth repeating here – Dr Mark Rehn, who has been guiding businesses of all sizes all around the country into making incremental value adding changes. His thesis is that when companies focus on process design and improvement they get a far greater ROI return on investment than even for capital investments.

I am totally engaged with this concept as I have seen so many businesses struggle because of poor systems and processes.
In Mark’s words, less than 4% of the western world’s organisations are actively pursuing business excellence in a premeditated, holistic manner… what an opportunity for entrepreneurs!

Here are a few of his key ideas:

* The most valuable strategic plan is the one that is understandable, simplified and gets the whole team on board.
* The focus of the one page strategic plan needs to be on vision and a very small number of KPIs around finance, customers, processes and people.

As Mark said, improving process gets to the heart of the issue so that organisations move from:

* Win/lose to win/win
* Do it my way to teamwork
* Blame the people to blame the process
* Treat the symptoms to treat the root causes
* Save face to learn
* Conflict to collaboration
* Unempowered people to empowered people

I am really keen on consultants, speakers who refrain from jargon and embrace the simple truths.

Personally I am looking at our griffin+row processes and systems to make to make sure we are moving toward operational excellence.

To read more Marcia Griffin expert advice, click here.

Marcia’s latest book, High Heeled Success (pictured left), is a frank account of building a business from a solitary sales person to a multi-million dollar business with 4700 sales consultants around Australia and New Zealand. Contact Marcia to purchase. Marcia’s latest venture is skin care company griffin+row.