The Art Behind the Business

What breaks or makes a success? Do you know? Can you tell if you are going in the right direction? ‘Here she goes again on KPIs!’ Not today, that is second derivative of this. Today the question is more fundamental than this. You have a strategy, you have your priorities or areas of focus. But do you know what it takes to get there? Of course I do, isn’t that obvious It is less than obvious really. As an example, at A Little Gesture, our mission is to promote the improvement of living condition for underprivileged children and their families in Mozambique. We believe that access to education and nutrition will help them break the inter generational cycle of poverty. We want to be out of business one day . But how? What do I need to get right - when do you get down to details? It is not about establishing 3 pre schools or sponsoring 800 children, but rather the activities that get me there: I need funding I need to find new donours every year: this mea...

Today I break my original plan to do a series on performance metrics as a topic has been lingering on my mind for a few days. Or shall I say a frustration instead.  It is clear by now I am a believer in business planning for established businesses, but mostly I am a believer in establishing goals, a direction and a way to measure progress on them, in order to evaluate late surprises. My view is not necessarily a shared view. In many places, business planning is a tick the box exercise that people need to deal with because management says so. And they go through it as fast and disconnected as they can.  As a new business planning cycle begins, I can feel the angst already. The rolling of the eyes as a new template goes out and the inevitable question of ‘why do we need all this’. There were moments in the past where I thought I was not really a strategist but rather a document producing machine. I too faced my own set planning cycles and wondered, I too challenged the...

Say you have launched a new business area and even planned ahead what you needed to get done across the business, who your new customers would be, where you were going to get revenues from, how you were going to acquire customers, how you would market yourself, how you would produce the goods needed. One day you wake up and something is not quite right. You still have not paid off the initial investment and it feels like this new business area is eating into your (slim) core business profitability. You thought you were investing for growth where it seems like you are getting yourself in a hole. But it is not a deep hole, and you can't quite figure out what is going on. You sit at your desk and ask, what is wrong, what did I miss. If you had no goals on paper, nothing to guide you, how do you know if you are executing to plan, how do you know if the plan is even working. Nothing tells you that your business idea is wrong, but potentially, you may just be going about it the ...

It is one of those stories that the old days come back to haunt you. I started my career as a Banker and am no stranger to due diligence lists. I have been both on the receiving end and in the creative end of those. I have created data rooms to respond, massive excel spreadsheets, and have trolled through data rooms to find more information. I have mention this before, I am always data hungry. For those paying attention you might ask - but aren't you done with your banking years and off due diligence lists? Well, not really. First, I was never entirely out of due diligence. In fact, I apply due diligence as a modus operandi for challenging the status quo. I just start looking at the numbers, and then ask question #1, which inevitably leads to #2 and is inevitably linked to #3. It does not take a form of an excel spreadsheet and I don't get answers back via data rooms, but the concept is constant - a truly inquisitive nature with the purpose of understand and evalua...

Everyone talks about them - large or small businesses, established or start-up companies. I had a conversation today about how some new products got established without ever having made it to paper-  so are business plans really needed? Aren’t we just adding un-necessary burdens and governance layers when we want is to be lean, fail fast and keep going? Isn’t lean the new black and business plans so 2 seasons ago? Not quite. Business plans serve different purposes in different organisations but there are commonalities in what they are able to achieve. It is not about the piece of paper or even necessarily the meeting in which they get presented if any, it is not even about the dollar forecast one puts in there. Time. Business plans create time. No, they don’t have the magic power to make a CEO day any longer, rather the reverse as most people will work on a business plan on top of their ‘day job’. But they create the most rare kind of time - time away from working IN th...

I am one of those 'non producers' that, per the name used, brings no production to the place I work for - read it no client or trading revenues. I am also called 'management' in a good day, central overhead in a bad day. With this start, why am I even talking about it? I moved into the management side, from a promising career in Investment Banking, 6.5 years ago. What originally started as an experiment because I was bored and wanted to grow, quickly became a career per se . I was astonished at the massive differential between the people producing in the business and those managing it (eg not producing). I knew then that my ability to make an impact for the Firm was beyond revenue generation and my IBD discipline and HBS critical approach were just what I needed.  Managing a business has clients and revenues at its core. But everything else around it determines its long term sustainability. The businesses that spend enough time governing themselves, measuring themselve...