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How to improve your business performance

What If Everything You Think You Know About Your Business Is Wrong

Are you a leader or a laggard?

Your business…

It's not just a mechanism for generating commerce.

It’s your ultimate asset… the quintessential creator of wealth for you and your stakeholders.

Yet many laggard CEOs allow their businesses to severely underachieve their market opportunity.

But just look around – and look honestly. You'll find a select group of leader CEOs who are outperforming the rest.

It's the same economy for them, so why are they creating off-the-chart growth, while you’re in the doldrums?

Get your answers in this video series. Sign up here

     

The question of pricing is once central to the discussion of forecasting and planning for profitability.  Old wisdom says lowering prices will increase our customer base and more than offset the lower margins on our new prices, giving us a new competitive advantage over our competition…

But is this assumption correct in fast-moving, turbulent times?

In today’s video (see the end of this blog entry), I will answer that question by giving you the exact tools you need to assess how changing prices will impact your business’s true profitability.

 As you watch the video, you will discover

• The 4 strategies every CEO must understand clearly and focus on in order to succeed in today’s fast-moving and complex world.
• How lack of clarity and focus can create a downward spiral in your business and erode your confidence as a decision maker
• The steps to identify whether your company lacks sufficient strategic focus.
• Why updating your “mental models” is the key to your future success.
• Whether you should raise or lower your prices to improve your business profitability

Whether you should raise or lower your prices is directly attributed to your company’s strategic competitive position in your market. 

In this video, I introduce three critical What-if Predictive Scenario Calculators to give you the strategic focus you need to determine the answer to this crucial question of whether to raise or lower prices.

First I introduce the “Should Prices be Raised or Lowered Calculator” which clearly calculates the number of new customers necessary to offset a price decrease and the number of customers who can be sacrificed in a price increase to keep gross margin dollars consistent. 

Second, I introduce the “Customer Contribution Calculator” which provides you clarity on which customers you should be focusing on growing, and which are sucking your profits. 

Third, I introduce a calculator to actually calculate your value proposition in your market, and assess your real strategic competitive position.

To ensure you have the clarity, focus, and execution to make the right strategic decisions for you and your customers during these fast-moving times, I invite you to watch this video. 

You will learn more about which decisions to make based on your assessments when you join my e-learning by doing programs.  You can schedule an appointment for a consultation and discussion of which program is right for your business when you contact us using the form below.

 

     

Today, I bring you one of the most powerful tools I use to help CEOs leverage their assets and to create sustained and profitable sales growth. 

If there is one thing I have learned over and over in my career advising hundreds of powerful CEOs and leaders, it is that companies do NOT get killed by their competition.  They usually commit suicide by lack of true business understanding. 

Today’s video will show you exactly what you may be missing when you focus on certain business ratios in the wrong level of details and will open your eyes to new ways to view your business and grow your profits. 

As you go through the video and use my What-If Strategic Calculator ™  The Wealth Creation Formula, you will discover

• The major driver of sales and profits you almost assuredly are forgetting to include in your strategic planning for profitable growth.
• The best indicator of efficiency with which a company is deploying its assets and generating sales.
• Your most useful and underutilized component in your return on assets (ROA) calculation.
• The main reason lowering costs is precisely the wrong method for improving margin and what to focus on instead.
• The power of the Wealth Creation Formula and how to use each component to make critical, strategic decisions for your business.
• The best indicator to determine immediately whether your business is in wealth destruction or wealth creation mode.
• The reason a CEO must look at all components of the ROA calculation if they want to succeed in true wealth creation.
• How the ROA calculation provides management with new ways to connect and grow sales and profits, and why most CEOs miss the crucial connections.
• The only 3 ways to grow a business.

My programs, tools, and calculators provide you a new view of your business, giving you exactly the insight and strategies you need so you can take advantage of risks inherent in a fast-moving economy before your competitors. 

The Wealth Creation Planning Calculator leverages the 4 major business drivers - Asset Velocity, Return on Assets, Laser Sales Formula, and Operating Cash Flow to provide the clarity, focus, and execution necessary to become a high achieving CEO in these turbulent times.

Now I invite you to access the Wealth Creation Planning Calculator by registering at this link (our LMS) and enter in the how did you find out about us field the word "wealth blog".  We will give you 30 days of access to the Wealth Creation Planning Calculator course.  In this course, you can follow along with the video as I explain how to use the Wealth Creation Planning Calculator in your business.

If you wish to see the video, you can watch it below, and learn how the calculator can work to provide new and more effective direction to your profitable growth strategies.

 

     

As the CEO of a corporate business, you are paid to think.  The success or failure of your company lies in your wisdom, experience, and ability to think deeply and strategically about your business now and in the future.

Back in the 80s and 90s, CEOs enjoyed a more consistent and predictable business environment.  The way to profitability was simply to do more of what was working well (and profitable) and do less of what was not.  Prior year results were a reliable indicator of future year performance.  Strategy could be developed using simple scenarios and calculations.  Cost savings or price increases were simple and easy ways to manage profits. 

Today’s business environment is radically different.  New businesses and entrepreneurs enjoy the ease of entry into even the most complex markets thanks to fast-moving technological advances.  Not only that, the lack of capital overhead allows these newer businesses to move more quickly to meet customer needs than ever before. 

Customers too have lost loyalty.  With more access to information and friend referrals than ever before, customers will easily move toward the business providing the best solution for their needs in the moment...and customer service can make or break a company as referrals and positive and negative press spread more quickly through social media.

In today’s turbulent times, you can only succeed if you are a CEO who can see the unseen, identify opportunities hiding from view, and focus on strategy rather than becoming sidetracked in the minutia of daily meetings and procedural distractions. 

In today’s video, I share ways you can take the time and learn to be a CEO who sees around corners, see the unseen, and take advantage of your creative strategic thinking to create sustained profitable growth for your corporation.

 

     

A short video explaining how to achieve the best return on strategic effectiveness

This is the third video in a series inviting you to experience a few of the Predictive Scenario Builders, known as What-If Strategic Calculators ™, I use with my clients to create meaningful strategic change and sustainable profitable growth in their corporate family businesses. 

These tools are proven to change the conversation and strategic focus of businesses I work with and improve all aspects of the business.  You can view the first and second tools here and here.

Return on Strategic Effectiveness

As a practical business advisor and former CEO, my role is to empower my clients to notice key data and to think strategically, about how your business can attain sustainable, profitable growth in these complex, turbulent times. 

A business understanding of the core elements of your business and their interconnectivity is critical.

I often start by asking my clients, “What is the Achilles heel of your business?”  Always, my clients initially respond with complaints about slow sales growth, declining cash flow, or lack of talent.  These answers prove to me the CEOs are not asking the right questions or looking at the right metrics as they make decisions in their business. 

Why?

Because cash flow, revenue growth, and lack of a talented workforce are RESULTS...not causes.  And when pressed further, the CEOs I speak with are often stunned to discover they have no idea of the causes for their dismal performance. 

How can a CEO create a thriving corporation in turbulent times when they are not certain of the levers to pull in their business to right the ship?

The Return on Strategic Effectiveness Calculator

The Return on Strategic Effectiveness Calculator is an extremely powerful tool for CEOs to identify precisely where their company is struggling and where to deploy financial and intellectual assets to create the most impactful, growth-generating results. 

The calculator considers each of the three determining factors of long-term sustainable profitable growth :

1. The drivers of cash flow
2. The components of growth
3. The three components of sustainable growth (the laser sales formula)

 ONLY #3 - the components of sustainable growth are causes.  The rest (the cash flow and the components of growth) are effects of sustainable growth.

 In this video, I will walk through the components of cash flow, growth, and sustainable growth, and give you examples of how one strategic change can impact the key metrics of your business. 

 You will understand the power of compounded average growth rate (CAGR) vs. average growth rate...and why using CAGR to monitor your business outcome can help you to identify hidden issues within your business. 

You will learn the power of the Laser Sales Formula on cash flow and growth.

The following video and attached calculator demonstrates how each input in the Return on Strategic Effectiveness calculation can change the profitability of the business, and how the model allows for a CEO to make impactful strategic decisions with far less risk...because they are asking the exact right questions.

A business understanding of the core elements is critical in fast-moving, turbulent times.  CEOs must understand how to connect the dots in their business so they can quickly identify weak areas in the business and customer relationships and beat out the competition.

Now I invite you to access the Return on Strategic Effectiveness What-If Calculator ™ by registering at this link (our LMS) and enter in the how did you find out about us field the word "rose blog".  We will give you 30 days of access to the Return on Strategic Effectiveness What-If Calculator ™ course.  In this course, you can follow along with the video as I explain how to use the Return on Strategic Effectiveness What-If Calculator ™ in your business.

If you wish to see the video, you can watch it below (Return on Strategic Effectiveness - ROSE The Harsh Reality of What is Really Unfolding in Your Business).