Larry’s Business Cents

Revolution, resolution, evolution, convolution, It must be the new year.

Sometimes after the year-end has passed and the holiday happiness and memories are put away for safe keeping; the world focuses in all its reality to our lives once again. We, for the most part, take a deep breath and give free enterprise another try no matter if we are an employee, and employer and supplier or a customer. It is almost as if when our feet hit the floor when we arise in the morning that we automatically say “so far, so good.” It happens everywhere in America, and at this reading you have most likely already experienced it anew.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. New year resolutions are essential for every business regardless of how successful they have been or think they have been over the past 12 months. These resolutions, information or transformation insure the business at least survives if not thrives during the next twelve months. It helps us to understand with great clarity once again “profit is theory, cash is reality” at a very appropriate time — the beginning of our annual renewal.

This new look, new reality, clean slate approach should be refreshing to any business. Looking sideways at your business, involving someone outside your business or having a formal assessment of your business at least yearly is as important as a physical exam is to your physical health and well being. This benchmarking opportunity provides an available tangible reference point or scale to get from past to present to future and helps you endeavor to see the “forest from the trees.”

Within all the paper and electronic/digital tracks you have made during the last 12 months are golden nuggets of information, trends, and attributes that can shape your business in a positive way for the next 12 months, if only you can find them. Which suppliers are most reliable, what criteria to relate to my employees for their own good, what characteristics identify my best customers are some of the answers that can be gleaned from this exercise. Am I applying that profile as I search to increase my market share, what product/service lines appear to be less attractive than they were a year ago? Do I have the courage to discontinue the items that are losing appeal? How are the employees motivated or are they willing accept change and how much? This information certainly would help you with your challenges of a new year.

Although it is best to do an assessment on your whole business, my company has found most companies/businesses in Wyoming are more comfortable with a partial assessment and I applaud that. The phrase “oatmeal is better than no meal” certainly is applicable in this case. Even though they are less pronounced or involved, these assessments can still have an impact on all phases of your business and prepare you gradually for looking at your business on a global basis in some future year. For example, we do energy and environmental assessment with many businesses each year across the state. These assessments always find material substitutions or energy use substitutions or rebates that become a cash reality for the business rather quickly. That reality is a wonderful gift compared to the profit theory and usually serves as a catalyst for future, more global assessments of the business.

“Practice makes permanent” aptly defines what happens when you start doing assessments. You find them addictive because they reward you with cash reality as well as strategies to experiment with for the next year to keep your business vibrant. Doing smaller assessments, leads to larger assessments and eventually leads to global enterprise assessments which fit nicely into the process of continuous improvement, the catch phrase for future success and thriving economies of you. So the things to remember, “Cash is reality, profit is only theory,” practice makes permanent and in light of continuous improvement can make you closer to perfect. Continued assessment leads to continuous change which leads to flexibility which leads to agility, the secret to tomorrow's success.

Change challenges the best in all of us and makes us prosper - reality or theory - you find out. Ladies and gentlemen start your engines

My very best,