A simple assessment—Are you up to the challenge?

Without knowing anything about your business, we can tell you with 99 percent certainty that you will not be able to answer “yes” to all of the following five questions. In fact, you will be lucky to even say “yes” to more than two questions of this simple assessment. Here are the five questions that stump most businesspeople we have worked with over the years:

1. Do you have a written and clearly articulated vision statement that is understood by your employees and customers? Is your vision inspiring to anyone who learns about it, and does it provide a clear direction that motivates your staff to work together toward a common purpose?

2. Have you positioned your business so that prospects and customers understand the unique advantage you have over the competition, and is this advantage part of an integrated communication effort that allows others to recognize the distinct benefits your products or company offers?

3. Do you have a marketing or strategic growth plan that you have written or updated within the last year and that effectively gets more customers to buy more products more frequently?

4. Do you have documented policies and procedures that are frequently used by your employees, and reviewed regularly to determine the most effective and efficient methods to operate your business?

5. If an emergency occurred today that required you to leave island tomorrow and not communicate with your staff for the next four weeks, would you be able to leave and feel confident that the business was operating smoothly without you there?

If you are one of the very few business owners who can answer with a resounding “yes,” to all of the questions, you can stop reading because your business is already in top form. However, the other 99 percent of you should keep reading to learn what it takes to place your business in the top one percent.

We know that you do not have a written marketing or strategic growth plan because out of the 400+ business we’ve worked with, less than five could show us a copy of their plan that they used on a regular basis – that’s about one percent. Even fewer could tell us in less than three sentences their “unique strategic advantage” that they use to differentiate their business from the competition.

Now you may have a vision for your company in your head, but is it written and clearly understood by everyone within the company? And almost all business owners we have interviewed were so critical to the success of their organization that they could not leave their business for more than a few days without serious consequences. Some did have written policies and procedures, but they were not used effectively.

When a panel of successful entrepreneurs, who had grown their businesses from $0 to at least $100 million, were asked what contributed the most to the successful growth of their businesses, the common denominator among all of them was that they had implemented policies, plans and procedures. They had a vision of what they wanted to achieve, created a plan that outlined a unique advantage the business offered customers, developed policies and procedures to provide guidelines for decision making and to ensure that consistent steps were taken to create predictable results. In other words, they had systems in place that allowed the business to operate without their constant intervention.

Most businesses are people-dependent, not systems-dependent. If you hire the right people, your business will function smoothly. However, if you don’t hire the best people, or one or more key individuals leave your business, it will suffer. Without effective systems a business owner constantly wonders why employees need so much supervision and why it is so difficult to leave the organization for an extended length of time without worrying about how the business is doing.

If you do not have a written plan, and documented policies and procedures now, you may inadvertently be the limitation that keeps your company from growing any larger. Once you have reached your limit to personally manage every facet of your organization effectively, you will also reach your limits of growth.

With a systems-dependent business, the success of your organization depends more on training people in the systems, versus finding exactly the right person for each position. Larger, more successful companies can answer “yes” to most of the five questions above – which is why they are larger and more successful! Would you like to be one of them?

(Rik is a business instructor at NMC and Janel is the owner of Positively Outrageous Results. They have consulted with over 400 businesses in 40 different industries. For better business results go to BizResults.biz to read previous articles.)