Somewhere in your office there is a plan you paid good money for. A strategic plan from a retreat, a consultant's report, an operations manual, a succession plan from your attorney. Getting that far took work. You saw a problem before it got worse, found someone good, and paid to have it thought through properly. Most owners never get a plan made at all. You did.
The advice was good. That is not where it went wrong.
Then it went in a drawer. No one disagreed with it. The problem was capacity. Everyone was already full with their own work, and turning the plan into practice was a job on its own, taken one step at a time until it ran without them. No one had room for that job, so the plan stayed on paper.
Six questions to find out what is sitting in your drawer.
- What plan, report or manual have you paid for in the last five years, and what did it cost?
- Which of its recommendations are actually running today?
- Whose job was it to make them happen, and did they have the time?
- Ask three of your people how the same task should be done. Would you get one answer or three?
- When something goes wrong, do your people open the manual or call you?
- Which of the changes the plan called for would keep going if you stopped pushing them?
If the answer to question five was you, the plan is not running the business. You are.
The thinking is rarely the problem
Good advisors earn their fees. An attorney, an accountant or a consultant does the thinking, and the plan that comes back is sound.
It breaks down on Monday morning, when it meets a full calendar. You are running the business. Your manager is running the floor. Every step in the plan needs a decision, a conversation, a new habit, and someone to keep at it past the point where it feels like extra work. Nobody's job description says that, so everyone puts it off. Put it off long enough and everyone moves on, and the plan is back in the drawer.
Written down is not the same as known
Most owners who try to get the business out of their head start by writing it down. That is the right instinct, and it is where a lot of the effort stops. A binder on a shelf does not change what happens on the shop floor or at the front desk. People do the job the way they learned it, from whoever trained them.
Gallup has found that only about half of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work. Gallup's point is that people need more than a job description. They need to know when they are doing well and when they are not. A manual cannot tell them that. A person can.
You pay for the gap in time, and time is payroll. McKinsey estimated that managers and professionals spend nearly 20 percent of the working week looking for information or tracking down someone who can help. That is close to one day a week of every salary you pay them. In a lot of small businesses, the someone they track down is the owner.
Somebody has to own the doing
Peter Drucker, who shaped the modern practice of management, said it decades ago. "If objectives are only good intentions, they are worthless. They must degenerate into work."
A plan that changes a business has an owner for the doing, not just the deciding. That person turns the first recommendation into a first step. They get the right people in a room, write the procedure with the person who does the work, and check back the following week to see if it held. Then they do it again until it holds without them.
It is not glamorous work. It is the groundwork. In a large company it belongs to a chief operating officer or a project team. In a business of 20 or 50 people it usually belongs to nobody, so it falls back to the owner, who has the least time for it.
We have built operations from almost nothing more than once. The plan was never the hard part. Getting the people who do the work to own it was.
What done looks like
Done is not a finished document. Done is a business that shows it can do the thing without you.
A buyer, a banker or a successor will not ask whether you have a procedure. They will ask what happens when you are not there, and they will want to see it. So test it the same way. Hand the scheduling, the quoting or the month-end books to someone else for a few weeks and watch what comes back to your desk. Whatever comes back is the part the business still cannot do without you.
The second bill
You paid for the plan once. Every month it sits in the drawer, you pay again, in the problem it was meant to fix and in the hours you spend covering for it. Start with what you paid for the plan in question one. Then add what the problem has cost you since. We wrote about what waiting costs in The Shrinking Menu.
If the plan is good and still sitting in a drawer, it does not need rewriting. It needs someone to do it.