Growing your Business

A Handbook for Ambitious Owner-Managers

Gerard Burke, Liz Clarke, Paul Barrow, David Molian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134136254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Growing Your Business helps owner/managers develop growth strategies for their businesses by providing frameworks, ideas, inspiration and hands-on assignments. Its contents are a distillation of the authors knowledge and experience, which has successfully helped hundreds of owner/managers to grow and develop their businesses and themselves ov

part one
Where Are We Now?

Entrepreneurs and owner-managers have an almost irrepressible desire to move directly from spotting an opportunity to attempting to exploit it. This is rather like seeing an interesting place marked on a map and immediately setting off towards it (hopefully!) without knowing where you are starting from, how far you are away from the place of interest or whether there might be even more exciting destinations somewhere else on the map!

You can have all the grand intentions in the world but, like the Irishman being asked the way to Cork, who said, ‘I wouldn’t start from here!’, you still have to start from where you are now. It is even worse than this, because where you have been—your history—is still hanging around and potentially getting in the way of your plans for the future.

You can think of this part of the planning process as taking stock. It is also sometimes called a position audit.

The chapters and assignments in Part One are intended to help you establish the current position of your business. They pose the sort of questions which need answering in order to establish your strengths and weaknesses, the opportunities and threats in your markets, your financial position, your organizational capability and your management and leadership style.

Of course, in considering these ideas and questions, you may well identify some areas of immediate potential improvement. Our advice is to go right ahead and make those improvements straight away rather than wait until you have completed the whole growth strategy and plan. You might as well start getting the benefits immediately!

one
Your Business and its Markets

This chapter is primarily concerned with the relationship between your business and the environment in which it operates: it is about placing your business within the bigger picture. Every business that stays in business meets the needs of a group, or groups, of customers. Those needs can vary hugely not just across industries but within an industrial sector. Smaller businesses typically succeed through serving the needs of an identified group of customers, and grow by finding more customers like their existing ones. However, the ability to grow and build a business is, inevitably, influenced by outside forces. The environment in which a business operates may be benign, as a result of factors such as favourable government legislation, a strong economy or new, enabling technologies. Equally, the environment may be a challenging one, perhaps as a result of tighter regulation, a slowdown in the economy and new technologies which disrupt the existing structure of the market. By their very nature smaller businesses—and, come to that, many larger ones—cannot alter or even modify such outside forces. But, they can anticipate, assess and often exploit environmental changes through systematic evaluation, planning and adaptation.

We begin by examining your business purpose. What are you in business to achieve, and do your aspirations need revisiting? We then consider how your business operates: does it sell direct or through others, and does it serve other businesses or consumers, or both? We review the industry in which you operate and how you are positioned to extract value. The final section reviews the broader external environment as it currently affects your business. At various points in the chapter there are assignments for you to complete, to apply the frameworks presented to analyse your business. In the chapter that follows, we will look at the market segments your business serves, how you fare against your competitors and your marketing strategy.

What Does Your Business Do…and How Does It Do It?

Your Business Purpose

Ask an employee of Cobra Beer (learn more about Cobra Beer by visiting www.cobrabeer. com) what their business stands for and, without blinking, they will reply: ‘To aspire and achieve against all odds, with integrity’.

It is one of the first things which every new employee learns when they join this remarkable company. In nine words, this short sentence condenses the story of a business that was begun in 1988 by an Indian resident in the UK, Karan Bilimoria, who had a dream and a £20,000 student overdraft! He aspired to create a new kind of beer, a lager that would both be the perfect accompaniment to the cuisine of the Indian subcontinent and appeal to ale drinkers. He has achieved a business that in 2006 sold more than £100m of beer at retail value in over 60 countries around the world. He has done so by building a company in the teeth of the most competitive beer market in the world. And he has succeeded in doing so in accordance with his own personal code of ethics. Despite its dominant position in the tandoori restaurant sector, Cobra never demands exclusivity. ‘The customer must have a choice’, says Karan, when he returns to talk every year on BGP. ‘We have always said, “try us, give us a chance.”’

Cobra has more than earned the right to customers’ trust, having won numerous awards for its products, its advertising and as one of Britain’s best companies in which to work. At every major crossroads or decision point in the company’s history, Karan and the senior team have always revisited their corporate statement. Is this course of action in line with what we stand for? If we are forced to choose between alternatives, which fits better with our beliefs and values? In 2004 the business even made the company credo tangible, when the story of aspiration and achievement was retold through images on the Cobra beer bottle (and won yet more awards in the process!).

For the Cobra team their vision of the business is not a marketing gesture but an affirmation of what their business is. And the Cobra credo is like the tip of the iceberg. Undern...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Introduction
• part one Where Are We Now?
• part two Where Are We Going?
• part three How Do We Get There?
• Index