Planning Matters

This is the second blog post regarding the 10 Things I Accidentally Learned on the Path to Growth and is a topic many of us as small business owners take for granted. After 25 years in this business, it has become more apparent than ever that planning is a key to success. Zig Ziglar says it this way: “Unless you have definite, precise, clearly set goals, you are not going to realize the maximum potential that lies within you”.


No Plan
I didn’t have a plan for many years. So my examples are more what not to do than what to do. I formed SCCI (now HTS) as a hobby back in 1985. It was just going to be a small sideline business to allow me to help a few folks with their computers.

• Today it is 7 locations across 5 states with 80+ employees that will do over 16M in revenue. It is a hobby that is way out of control.


• Our headquarters office in Harlan has had 5 additions since we began in 1985. So today we have 12,000 square feet attached to the side of our home on the farm in rural Iowa. Not exactly the best plan knowing what I know today.


• HTG was started back in 2000 as a small peer group for four Iowa companies. Today it has become an international group with 240 plus member companies from four countries around the world. Certainly was not what my original expectations were.

Do as I say, not as I did
I could list a few dozen or hundred more examples of how things have happened that were not planned. The ones above are all positive results - maybe not everything they could have been – but not a list of all of my failed planning which doesn't always turn out that way. A failure to plan has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and caused a lot of pain and chaos. I admit it and can show you the battle scars from eBay sales of obsolete inventory because of no plan in how to control ordering, to business units that were totally unprofitable because they never had a business plan at all, to wasting hours and days of my life because it just happened to me without me taking control of my time with a plan. If you don’t plan, you will struggle to have success. It was back in the late 90’s when things began to unravel for us that I finally figured this out. During the last 10 years or more that planning has been part of our process, our growth and success has been completely different and positive. Planning does matter and it will for you too.

Four Plans
I think there are at least 4 areas you need to plan at a minimum:

• Company business plan – tells you where your company is going


• Leadership plan – tells you how you will lead your company to achieve their plan


• Life plan – tells you how you will balance life and work and achieve the things you say are most important to you


• Legacy plan – tells others what to do in the event your company or you are not able to continue status quo

I have written previously about each of these and you can follow the links to get more details.

Here is the way we see it in HTG - four plans - one we focus on each quarter - which provides a solid way to make sure we are getting things done.



Why don't we do it?

So why is it that most small businesses don’t plan? Here is a list of some of the common excuses I hear from folks. There really are no good reasons, but we convince ourselves these things:

• Planning is hard work and takes time


• Planning never ends


• Planning requires communication


• Planning requires introspection


• Planning requires follow-up and measurement


• Planning requires us to be honest with ourselves


• Planning is bigger than me, myself and I

Hand in hand

Planning goes hand in hand with strategy. You need strategy to give you the “why” to what you are going to work on. But planning takes strategy and tells us the “how, when, what, where, and who” to achieve that strategy. It is important that we take time to plan. It is critical for us to truly grow our company and move toward success. Time to stop making excuses and step up to lead. That means you take time to involve your team, stakeholders and anyone else that should be included – and you just get it done. If you don’t have a plan, you are planning to fail. Don’t let that happen. Get down to business, take the time, invest the energy, and put plans down on paper. It will make a huge difference in your outcome!

Strategy Matters

This is the first blog post regarding the 10 Things I Accidentally Learned on the Path to Growth and is a topic many of us as small business owners take for granted. After 25 years in this business, it has become more apparent than ever that strategy truly does matter. It isn't how things typically start. Certainly not in my case.

Many of us began our businesses because we were good at what we did and decided we could make a business from it. We are typically good technically or as sales people and begin to hire a person or two to help us serve more folks. In my case, I started the technology business as a hobby because I really enjoyed computers. 1985 was the start and there was not grand plan, no long range strategy, just myself and my bride (who wasn't all that sure of the idea) that started to sell and service Apply computers.

It was just me for the first five years and then I hired my first employee - which changes everything. No longer can I just do whatever whenever and be able to expect others to read my mind. That is how I tended to run things for quite some time. But osmosis doesn't really work, and people can't read my mind, so it was time to begin making some changes.

Over the years I have had to change how I lead. And one of the major adjustments has been to define and let people know about strategy. That requires thinking about things far beyond the normal day to day tactical operations which is where most small business owners are most comfortable. After all, we can fix most anything and sell what we need to without a strategy can't we? That is true for a while, but soon you hit a ceiling and one major reason is that others are not sure what the plan is or how to really help the company grow.

We have to identify that "house on the hill" or "BHAG" as it is oftened called if we want others on our team to be able to help join us in taking the company there. They can't just figure it out as we often think they should. It needs to be defined and written and shared. It must be measured and updated and adjusted. It is hard work but vital to keep the company growing.

What it really means is that we must begin to think like a CEO. There are bad connotations to that role today, but it isn't the role that is an issue, but the people who fill that seat. For many small businesses - no one is sitting in that chair and no strategy happens. CEO thinking is strategic. It is forward looking and future facing. It is very different from how most of us are wired today. But it is critical. Here is a table showing some of the areas I believe we need to consider and the differences in the role of CEO think vs President or GM think.



We don't default to thinking like a CEO as the entrepreneur that founded the company. That is somewhat foreign territory for us. But if we want to take our company to the next level, we have to learn to think differently. We must begin to think strategically. That transformation does not happen overnight. It takes time and effort and a desire to learn. But it can happen, and when it does, your company will be poised to go to the next level.

Many of us lie about whether we truly have a business when the reality is we really just have a job. The way to transistion from a job that makes us......

• wear too many hats
• work too many hours
• handle too many things
• makes us a slave

.......is to change how we think and run our company. That is why strategy matters. It is the only way we can break out of our cycle of being controlled by the business and change it to what a business must be - one that serves the owner.

CEO thinking is not easy - but it is essential. HTG is committed to helping our members get there. We hold our CEO Forum twice a year to help focus owners on transitioning from the day to day to strategy. That is the leap we must make.

CEO Forum II Focuses on Strategy

This past week we also hosted our second HTG CEO Forum in Denver. Our initial meeting was talked about here. We had 14 companies represented and we had an amazing time together. Our time began with a checkup on goals from the last session. Some work still to be done there, but folks are working hard to make that transition to the CEO role. It is a very big change of mindset and thinking for most of us.

We had a special visit from Colleen Abdullah who is CEO of WOW – an Internet, cable, telephony provider. It was a very engaging hour and a half as she shared her transition into that role and the success she has had as she created a culture of being focused on the customer – both internal and external. That is the secret sauce – paying attention to people. Colleen is a great role model as she took over a company that was doing $9 million and today is doing many times that in revenue – over $500 million as I recall. She has done it by excelling in the people business. She admitted that her products were not all that different or unique – hard to differentiate in a market where everyone pretty much has the same tools and offerings. But where WOW wins is in the hearts of their customers and people as they provide a level of service and caring that is unique to their industry. They “WOW” their employees and end users and win in the markets they serve.

She also challenged us to stay close to customers and our teams. Her approach is to take time monthly to ride in the trucks and be on the phones with her staff. She stays connected to what is happening. She is also active in the association representing smaller cable providers. A great lesson here – we need to be engaged with our industry in watching legislation and other influences that will impact us. Silence is not golden when it comes to lobbying the legislative process.

We shifted gears after that as my son Pete shared about the importance of process. He taught us about Six Sigma and Lean as tools that can be used to help create standardized methodology and take cost out of our businesses. These are enterprise level tools but they contain many facets that will work effectively for us in small business. We just need to learn and understand how to use the things that fit to help keep us competitive in the marketplace. As commoditization ramps in managed services and cloud solutions – efficiency and taking cost out will be the name of the game. These types of skills will be important for us to compete effectively.

Day two was spent with Ryan Morris from MMP. He led us through a full day workshop on strategic planning – one of the key roles a CEO needs to fulfill. Ryan broke things down and helped us understand the basics of strategy. It isn’t necessarily rocket science, but rather a persistent and total focus on a single objective. Not the scatter gun, throw it up on the wall and see what sticks, hope I guessed right, sell to whoever will write a check kind of approach. Those don’t work as you grow a company. He assured us that we will not always get it right, but we need to set and then monitor and change our strategy on an ongoing basis.

The reality is that strategy is really only effective with about a 3 year look forward. Beyond that it is more of a general goal. His guidance is a detailed 6 month plan, followed by an 18 month set of objectives that point to a three year strategy. It must be evaluated and tweaked every quarter and is not failure if it needs adjustment. We learned that key factors that impact our strategic plan – like resources and external factors – are outside our control and will change. Sometimes that change will require us to tweak our strategy and we need to be on top of it so we get that done.

It was a great combination – discussion around strategy and process – as those are the two keys to running a successful long term organization. Both need to be on the radar of the CEO. They both are a lot of hard work, so job security is built in. But as we listened to our trainers, and to our guest expert, we had to have heard those words a few hundred times. Success is not accidental. Luck and timing can play a part for sure – but success happens when leaders plan and execute and tweak and execute and revise and execute. If things are not going well in your company – time to go look in the mirror. You may need to have a talk with yourself!