Hi there, Matts Rehnstrom here, Shaper of Business excellence and welcome to this first video or 2019 and then first of all to you and to your business, a Happy New Year. This time of year there’s some magic in the air. And that is that we’re all thinking about what’s going to happen during the upcoming year. It’s like turning a page in a book. There’s a new page to read. The old one is behind us and both in private and in our business we’re sitting and planning for the year to come.
We’re sitting down and doing some planning for our lives and our businesses and some do New Year’s Resolutions. And most of those that do resolutions don’t really keep them.
Business by Design, not by Default
But when we come to our businesses then it’s important that we take a moment and sit down and design our business. So we improve. So we are going to be better this year than we were the previous year. And here I want to emphasize the importance of having things in your life, having things happening by design and not by default. Studies show that most people don’t do any planning at all, which means that they live by the random, by default, they walk through life without any real meaning of life. They don’t really know where they’re heading. The wind is taking them wherever the wind is blowing.
It’s like what I wanted to show here with dice. You roll the dice and if it’s 10, it’s 10. If it’s four, it’s four, the chance is going to play into your life or into your business. And as I’m a business coach, I’m talking about businesses more here. So it’s important then for you in your business to design your business, to make sure that you are in control of your business.
Design Clarity in Your Business
And if you recall an earlier video, and if you haven’t seen my earlier videos because I will refer to a couple of them, you will find them on my YouTube channel or on my blog so you can just look at, look them up. They’re ordered in number so you can find them, but in an earlier video, I talked about the clarity matrix and the importance of having clarity in your business.
So you’re articulated and clear in your business. Your meetings are clear and articulated. There are short to the point and you cover what you’re supposed to cover in the meeting. And the emails that go out, they’re the same. It’s very clear what they’re supposed to say. And everyone understands them. They understand the meetings and the emails. They’re the websites that you have, both the internal website and the external ones.
They’re very clear. So clarity is important in order to have a well-functioning business. And in that world where we are both articulated and clear, we have this happiness because here we have room to be happy. Here we have room to be fulfilled. So that is why I show this image a lot when I’m talking about or when I talking to organizations about what they should do because this is the picture for me.
This is a wonderful picture showing all the energy that we can have in our business because I think that businesses should be fun.
Four Questions to Ask to Improve Your Business
I want to send a couple of questions along so you can in a group or by yourself, answer them because those questions well answered with give you that clarity.
1. WHY?
The first question is why? Why do you exist in your workplace? What’s the purpose of you being there and what’s the purpose of the business?
Are you your purpose at work and your business purpose? Are those two aligned so you’re working towards the same purpose, the same why or I don’t know, answer the question, why are you there and why are you as a business?
2. WHAT?
Why do you exist at all and when you know the why, you can go over to the what.
What is it that we’re going to do in order to fulfill the why? Because now when we’re worthy, what we know, what, why we have, then we can start about, okay, what are we going to do then.
And when you know the what, which you describe in your business idea and that you’re talking about and in detail in your business model and that you describe all the products that you have within your product portfolio, then you have control because now you’re clear and you’re articulated because everything is out there.
Everyone can read about the what, so now when you know then the why and the what. Then you can go on to talk about for whom are you doing this?
What are you delivering to whom and that you describe in your business ideas as well and you think about the question. When you do your market analysis, identify the market and the market segments and that you’re looking into what are their needs and their wants or vice versa. Because often you start with wants and then you go deeper and you find their true needs.
3. HOW?
But all of that leads them to how?
Because now you know why you exist. Now you know what you’re doing and for whom you are doing it. Then how are you going to do that and that is the answers you get when you talk about the strategies in your business, when you talk about the process flows that you have and the structure of different processes that you have in your business.
Because if you don’t align your processes, there will be processes all over the place and some will work towards each other. Some will take the same objects and tear them apart, so you need to align your work, your flow in your business, and that is answered in the how.
4. WHO
From there, we can move over to the who.
You can’t answer the question about who is going to do it before you know the what and the how. What are you going to do and how are you going to do it? First, when you have the answers to these two questions, then you can go on a second. What skills do I need? What competence is needed in order to do this?
And when you know the competence, then you can start to look at all the Whos that you have in your business. So who here we talk about the competence that you both that both needed and that you have in your business and you can then take that and group it into different competence organizations within your organization and you can organize everything then in a much better way if you look into the competence organization in one hand and the processes and projects on another hand because the projects and processes, that’s the require of skill of competence or resources and the competence organization is the one who provides that skill and that resources. So then you have the answer of the who.
My Business as an Example
So just to take an example, I go to my own business. First of all then what’s my why? Why do I do all of this? I do this because I think that businesses should be fun. I think that we should be fulfilled at business. I think that we shouldn’t drag our butts to work at Monday morning and then we go home during week, but on Friday we go home and we’re so tired. We’re so drained of energy.
That is not the way I want businesses to be like. Not my own business, not your business, not any business.
We are worth much more so that’s why I’m doing this, so I have a big WHY and that is I want to improve 10,000 organizations out there. I want them to have a happy work life doing, delivering a fabulous value for satisfied customers and they doing it by having a happy staff.
There’s no sweatshops out there because we’re working with happy people because we have that clarity.
That is why I’m doing this, so that’s my why.
What am I doing? I’m teaching and do training, speaking, consulting, coaching about all these different important components. Like processes or project planning or business idea or business model and all those things that this poster shows and that’s what I’ve been talking about during the fall and that is what I will talk about in the upcoming videos as well.
But I train and coach in this, that’s what I do, but then who’s the receiver of all this and that is that is you, because I find you as my business improvement expert or your business improvement expert, so I talked to all you business improvement experts, you and everyone else out there that are important to improve their business and are interested in improving their business.
They’re so important, so vital for the businesses in order to achieve that goal that I know that a lot of people have that it should be more happy, more fulfillment, more freedom at work. So that’s to whom I’m doing all this.
Then we have the question of how do I do this? I do this by, as I said before I do training, I do coaching, I do speaking, I do some consultant. So I go out and help business experts. I go out and help you. I do that by this video for example, or my other videos. I do it by my books. I do it by doing visits in organization, training them, coaching them, consulting with them.
So that’s just an example of the why, what to whom I’m doing it and how and for my in my business, the who is going to do it, mostly me or my colleagues, my team that is going to provide the service for you.
So with that said, if you have them, the answers in your business in the same way, then you start to design your business. It’s not by chance, not by default. It is by design. So you build your business so you can accomplish whatever it is that you want to accomplish within the business. You have the plans, you have the structure, you have the clarity with that, you will fade away the chances, the randoms, the default.
Those will exist because things happen around us. But the more we can take control, the more we can design our own businesses, the better we are within our businesses. The more efficient we are, the more productive we are, the happier we will be. The more satisfied our clients customers will be. So my message for you then is to go out in your business and start designing it, improving it, make it much better, 2019 than it was 2018.
And even if you had a high level of quality and efficiency and productivity, you can always become better. Like Kaizen says, continuous improvement. So you can always become better.
So these questions that I gave you, you can take them and you can answer them in your management team or in your business analysis team or whatever team you have. Start talking about them.
And even though you think, “Matts, we already have the answers,” take them anyway, discuss answers then that you have because you will find that new things have come up. So it’s always good to keep this on top of the mind and to discuss them. And with that said, I want you have this team of satisfied, happy, fulfilled individuals in your team, in your business as well.
And I want you to be one of these as I want to be one of these guys and girls here. With that said, um, once again, Happy New Year and for you and your team a fulfilling 2019, and then let’s go and shape our business for excellence.
