Reset & Relaunch Your Business (9 Steps)

Reset & Relaunch – A New Beginning For Your Business

In our last 2 blog posts we looked at reflecting and refocusing by asking the question: Is your business relevant right now? And revising purpose, mission, objectives in order to re-orientate yourself and your business.

Now, as we come out of an initial period of shock and reflection, we look at some ways to bring everything together and start creating a new beginning for your business to ensure you’re still relevant, offering value, and able to thrive.

 

Step 1: Act like you’re starting a new business

As part of the reflection and revision step, answer some foundational questions again:

• What problem are we solving?
• Who is experiencing this problem (our ideal market)?
• Who else is doing this? How are they doing it?
• What’s my Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?
• What I.P. and other resources do we already have?
• What I.P. and other resources do we need?
• How do we get the missing resources?
• What are the risks vs rewards?
• What are my chances of success?
• What are my other options?

 

Step 2: Know And Find Your Ideal Customers

Are your customers the same or are they changing? When was the last time you clearly defined your customer persona/avatar? We won’t reinvent the wheel by outlining how to create a customer avatar as there are plenty of marketing specialist out there just a google search away offering lots of free advice, templates, and even customer persona building tools.

Seek out the social platforms your customers are actually spending their time on so you can be present and active in the right place. Write your marketing and educational content focusing on speaking to this customer avatar rather than trying to speak to anyone who’ll listen. This will also help you spend your paid online advertising budget more wisely because you can anticipate the needs, behaviours and concerns of your target customers.

See: Match Your Business to Your Customers To Kick Start Growth And Personal Fulfillment

 

Step 3: Brainstorm All Ideas And Choose (And Stick To!) One Strategy

It’s important that at this stage you get everything out of your brain and onto the page. Think outside the box. Do this with someone else – two minds are better than one. Once you have all your ideas out, you can organise them and, rather than having 10 different possible paths in your head and feeling confused, you can decide on the one best strategy with which to go forward.

 

Step 4: Set Realistic Goals In Line With Your Purpose

Set realistic yet ambitious targets and incentives that fully reflect your and your organisation’s purpose and values. Make sure you’re sending out a consistent and credible message. If sustainability is fundamental to you, don’t make your company incentives only about financial performance. Once you have clear goals, communicate them well and engage the key operational leaders in creating compelling action plans.

 

Step 5: Reduce Dependency On You

If you’ve designed a business which relies on you and has been set up with your style and way of doing things in mind, it can be difficult to find team members you can trust enough to do things ‘as good as you’. But if you’re going to succeed, you need to break things down, reorganise, and rethink the whole model so you can let go and hand things over. Your business should never be entirely dependent on you or any other single person.

 

Step 6: Re-Define And Re-Purpose Required Talent

Once you’ve reflected on where you are and where you’re going, you’ll need to think about which talents and leadership styles you need for the next stage of your business and your new objectives. Write out the roles you need and then look at who you have on-board to fill these. For those key talents you don’t yet have in your team, plan where and how will you find them as soon as possible. Don’t forget to evaluate yourself. Ask yourself honestly if you are the best person to lead your business forward right now. If not, look to other partners/managers in your business or find the right people to support you.

See: The Potential Of Teams In Flow

Step 7: Create A To-Do Schedule For Your Goals Rather Than A To-Do List

It can be overwhelming to have a whole list of tasks required to implement new strategies and achieve certain goals. When we create a to-do list, we often beat ourselves up about the things we haven’t managed to tick off each day. Instead, create a to-do schedule of what needs to be achieved today, tomorrow, next week, next month and next quarter, etc. and add it to the diary/wall plan for those times. That way you can focus on the small chunked goals of the moment and celebrate them once done, without having to keep all the other stuff in your head simultaneously.

 

Step 8: Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate

Find yourself an ‘accountability buddy’, business support group network, and or coach/mentor. If you don’t already have one, start looking for a business partner or ‘right-hand-man’. It has been shown time and time again that successful people rarely go it alone. You will only get so far by trying to think of and do everything yourself. The era of fierce competition is being left behind and replaced with an era of collaboration. Tap into the minds and talents of others to help you on your journey. Find people who compliment you and can ‘fill the gaps’ where you fall short.

“In the long history of humankind, those who have learnt to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

–Charles Darwin

 

Step 9: Re-Think And Re-Design All Systems And Processes

Sooner or later we all have to face up to the fact that we need to have a presence online. And this crisis has shown us that we probably need to go a step further and start moving at least some of our business functions and offerings online. Do you have the right platforms and systems to sustainably build your community of customers and fans? Have you explored new management tools that would suit your business and help you redefine workflows? Are you still expecting to work with the same policies, procedures, and job descriptions, and get different results? Whether this audit is conducted by you, someone on your team, or an external consultant, it needs to happen. And with the future business climate looking so uncertain, I would say it’s wise to go through this process now.

 

Final Thoughts

Staying ahead of the game has never been so important. We need to make sure we’re questioning all those things we do out of ingrained habit (or because they’re what our customers/shareholders have come to expect and feel comfortable with). Once we’ve identified things that are not working, we must have the courage to stop doing them and change course.

If you’re not sure where to start, or you would like to chat about your current challenges and how you can make sure you’re still relevant in these changing times, get in touch and I’ll be happy to offer some initial informal advice.

 

Have a great week.

Cheers,

Ross.

Growing Organisations offers coaching and mentoring services to business owners and helps you lead through change and crisis.