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No. Na. Nope. Nya. Ummm … no. No siree. Not me. Oh, maybe, hang on a second, er, sorry, no.

I have no idea what should be in your budget and it’s a simple truth that no one else does either. They may have a first clue about what they want to be in there and what it should all add up to, but beyond that … they know nothing.

You do.

A play in three acts

In theory, budget setting is a simple play of three acts.

Act 1 — Setting — What happened last time, in words and numbers?

Act 2 — Thinking — What will change next time? Including anything that’s different inside the company, like targets and constraints, or outside the company, such as market conditions, competitor movements and new technologies making headway.

If you aren’t given objectives, set them yourself. If you don’t know what’s happening in the market, go find out.

The better you understand the variables the easier the planning will be (and the more robustly you can justify your choices during review meetings).

Act 3 — Planning — What do you plan to do, in words and numbers?

After discussion, comes decision. What will you spend in order to achieve the objectives? How is that different from last time? Why have you made those choices?

Give yourself a budget and a target. The budget is a promise, so don’t make promises you can’t keep. The target is a stretch motivator, something to shoot for, to achieve if … if … if, but not a fantasy. Pinning everything to a fantasy is the surest way to demotivate everyone and guarantee failure.

That’s the theory. What’s the reality?

Budget meetings can be bloody. Turn up with a low ball, last year +/- 10%, no thinking, generous pay rise, doubled marketing spend, steady state budget and you probably deserve to get juiced.

Budgets are all about numbers but like so much else, they’re really all about preparation. Get set, have a strong and reasoned argument for every change, be ready to walk through every penny — you’ll skip out of the meeting with a firm budget, a warm glow and a polished reputation.

Sadly, some review meetings are an ego trip for the finance team; they think it’s their job to beat you up. You owe it to your team to deal with them like any other bully — look ‘em in the eye and stand firm.

Ruined by game playing and phoney smiles, managing in the pursuit of skippiness means taking budget sessions as a brilliant opportunity to align your whole team behind a coherent plan.

Neatly filed under Keeping Promises,Making Promises on September 16, 2009

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Inside any kind of organisation bigger than the land of Me & My Mate, you’re probably surrounded by people who do a job that’s completely different to yours.

What do all those people do?

I’ve been thinking about the doing part of that question lately, rather than the people part. The way I see it, no matter what the job title or department, the doing falls in to one of only five categories:

Making Promises – easiest to think of as all the things that happen in sales or marketing, some customer services and board functions. Anything that makes any kind of commitment on behalf of the company is a making promises action.

Keeping Promises – everything that even vaguely fits into operations: all the tasks that make the product, perform the service, look after customers, pick up, package or deliver the thing.

Measure and control – all the things involving numbers or making sure nothing gets out of hand.

Support – what gets done in order to make everything else function; what normally happens under the headings of IT or HR for instance.

Leadership and innovation – without getting bogged down in book style definitions, leadership is about direction setting and steering to the compass whilst innovation is all the processes that aim to improve things.

These are not departments, they’re functions, and whilst every person spends most of their time in one kind of role, they probably undertake processes in others, if not all. For example, a production worker is mainly employed to keep promises, but they probably also try to innovate to improve things, keep an eye on production rates and quality, put their arm around colleagues when they need it, and continually make commitments within and for their department.

Ok. So what? Is this anything other than yet another way of thinking about organisational structure?

If every process is about making, keeping, ensuring and supporting promises, or improving the way the whole thing gets done, then every job is about the customer.

So what do all those people do? Let’s hope they’re not wasting any time discussing, deciding or doing anything that doesn’t draw a straight line to improving the life of the customer.

Neatly filed under Innovating,Keeping Promises,Leading,Making Promises,Managing on June 3, 2009

When I went to see Jack Welch speak on management, I knew what I’d be getting – candour, leadership, persistence, values – no need to explain, no sales pitch required. You had me at the name.

When I’m looking for a coffee and comfort in an unfamiliar town, finding a Starbucks makes me smile.

A brand that I know, like and trust is a short cut to the top of my short list – very often, it’s a shortlist of one. Nothing new there, brands are important, let’s move on.

If brands are important, how do I get one? How to build a reputation people trust?

Make a promise people care about – or, put another way, build a fantastic product that people want. I know that sounds so obvious that it’s hardly worth the pixels it’s displayed upon but a) there’s loads of rubbish out there, and b) there’s plenty of products, particularly technology products, that nobody wants or cares about.

Tell them you exist, in a language they understand – or, put another way, talk like you care about the customer rather than about yourself. The language you use to talk about your thing internally may be the same language that your customer uses externally, but it’s probably not. Use customer language, not marketing/management/leading/essential speak.

Deliver, deliver, deliver – or, put another way, fulfil your promises. We buy from people we trust, prove you deserve it and we’ll buy again and tell our friends.

Reputations are built around happy customers. Customers are happy when we do what we say we’re going to do, and we do it brilliantly.

Neatly filed under Keeping Promises,Making Promises,Skippiness on May 25, 2009

Image copyright: David Smith

Bringing a new product to market is an act of will. Just getting to the start line takes a heap of effort, sacrifice, and dedication to the cause. Maybe it should be an Olympic sport. An endurance challenge that requires entrants to master three disciplines:

1. Get the product ready for the market

2. Get the company ready for the product

3. Get the market ready for the product

Less new product development, more new product triathlon.

This site isn’t concerned with number three (that’s more the domain of the marketing communications industry and specialists in launch codes) so let’s look at the first two.

1. Get the product ready for the market.

This is most often filed under new product development, strategic marketing, or sometimes business development. Whatever the job title, sorting out market and product is a pretty good use of time – most of which is spent answering questions and making choices.

Some market questions
What market is the product for?
What problems do they have?
How big is that market?
What do they need our product or service to do for them?
How much pain are they in at the moment?
What would their life be like with our product?
How much is that worth to them?
What are their alternatives?

Which all helps when thinking about product questions
What is our proposition?
What features are in, and which are out?
What services must be part of the package?
What else do they need to get the value out of this product?
Who can help?
What colour should it be?
What about the name, the design, the price, the launch?
What about the price?
Did I mention the price?

Whether you’re a product or service business, questions like these fall into the “what’s in the box and who is it for” category and they form the foundation to the day-to-day work that follows, including actually building the product itself. With good reason too, a miss here can damage the product, restrict the market, or push your new baby to early retirement.

Now build the thing
If it’s a version change, a new edition, or any other kind of thing that’s almost exactly like all the other things you sell then it’s possible that this is enough. Just drop the new product into one of the product shaped holes that are normal for your company and, after a short recovery, you’re ready for the next event.

But, and just for emphasis, it’s a big BUT, some products are game changers. Not just in the market (which is nice), but in the company too (which you should expect and plan for), which brings us to the second discipline of the new product triathlon.

2. Get the company ready for the product

If you’re entering a new market, have a completely new new product, or have been missing a few targets recently, it’s worth looking at stage two. Questions here tend to range from significant to fundamental and some of them are likely to throw “the way we do things around here” into the air.

Some questions about what we do around here
Does this fit with our existing business model?
How can each department contribute to the success of this product?
Do we have the manpower to fully support this thing?
Do we have the expertise?

Some questions about how we do things around here
How does this change the way we sell and how we incentivise our sales team?
Where is the best place, or most convenient place for them to buy this stuff?
Is our “usual” channel the right channel?
Can our internal support functions cope?
How does this impact the rest of our business?
Can we deal with the demand that we’re expecting?
Where can we find the right kind of staff to pull this thing off?

Dealing with the answers helps to make the back end bomb proof and can be the difference between skippiness and misery for customers, shareholders and staff.

How to get ready for market

Getting ready to market a product means making sure you have a product the market wants and the company to deliver it. Put the time in, deal with reality and then put all your effort and creativity into stage three, get the market ready for the product.

Neatly filed under Foundations,Keeping Promises,Skippiness on May 22, 2009

Working in the business to business world I always feel a little bit uncomfortable when people talk about brand. As I’ve said, brand is a (marketing whodoo) word for reputation. Most of us should forget all the clever nonsense of branding and commit to the steady work of building a great reputation.

How to do it? The way you’ve always done it. Everything you say and everything you do – especially, everything you do. Nobody can dispute the power of words, but there’s really no choice between conflicting words and actions. What you do is the give away for who you are.

To build a great reputation – do great things consistently, keep your promises and make sure your feet, wallet and mouth travel together.

Neatly filed under Keeping Promises on April 25, 2009