What’s in your toolkit? Having the right tools makes lighter work of tough tasks.
Same with carpentry, running a business requires takes more than mere knowledge in the field. An effective business leader would have access to the proper tools and experience in maximising their use.
We may not put a lot of thought into what it takes to build a house, but rest assured, the carpenters have got the right tools on their belts. With thousands of nails needed to build a home, the humble hammer has long been discarded in favour of pneumatic nail guns. One pull of the trigger, and the nail is driven home. The efficiency, accuracy, and safety gains are immense.
Much like our nail gun vs hammer analogy, having the right business tools at your disposal makes light work of tough jobs. However, whilst the carpenter metaphor makes common sense, we often don’t consider the parallels for where we can use better tools to deal with the inefficiencies in our businesses. This is partly due to focus as people get distracted by all manner of things, including the mundane like fixing IT issues, but also lost time as business owners devote too much time to working in the business rather than on it. (see our article on this here)
However, one of the more substantial reasons that we don’t consider the tools that we need is because we haven’t developed the business capability that helps us recognise what tools are required, or we don’t have the proper training in how to use those tools well.
Back to our construction analogy, carpenters carry around a range of tools they anticipate they’ll need. They don’t show up to a job empty-handed. As a business owner, looking at the blueprint of what you want to build, speculating how you’ll finish the job can be quite a daunting prospect. How do you anticipate the tools you’ll need (and know how to use them)?
Knowing where you are
The first step is understanding the current state of your “toolkit”. What are your current capabilities? Establishing a benchmark is the first step when thinking about the next growth phase for your business. This benchmark will clarify what you need to focus on to build depth across various business skills within your team.
Assessing the business’s capability helps you identify the different skills needed to achieve growth and determine if you can implement the strategies as required. Once clear, you can assess the development priorities needed across the business.
Measure twice, cut once
There are two dimensions needed to measure the level of capability in a business. They are the width, the list of skills and requirements needed by most businesses in most industries, and depth, how capable the business is in that skill or requirement. A business’s capability for growth or change is a combination of these two dimensions.
Stellar has identified 20 business skills and requirements required to run most businesses successfully. They include elements like clear communication and a good culture, the right infrastructure to support the business, a method for sourcing and converting clients, and effective decision-making methods to ensure alignment across the team.
Each business skill or requirement then has five steps that need to be taken to build the capability within that area. These steps demonstrate how established each skill is within the business and provide a basic methodology that identifies capability gaps to be developed. These steps start with having a basic idea of why that requirement is essential in the business, then clarifying a strategy for what it means to you, implementing said strategy, and then developing the requirement to the point where it becomes a return on investment.
What’s your business capability? Our tool for you.
To measure your business capability, we’re offering a mini version of our Capability Assessment to enable you to do your scores. This is the perfect time of year to assess yourself, so head to this page to get started.
Each requirement, for example, sourcing clients, is marked at each step with either a tick or a cross depending on whether you have that specific requirement for that step. If you have a cross for one of the steps, then all the boxes beneath it will also be a cross. I.e., You cannot have fully implemented a strategy without having documented the strategy in the first place.
A business that wants to reach maturity needs a score of at least 60%. This is a big goal, but not impossible. Remember, it’s about getting the right tools to help you get there. Hopefully, they’re quicker than using a hammer!
