Kwai Yu, who, through his work with Leaders Cafe 2020, is quite an inspiration to me personally, has told the story of how he settled upon a vision of helping twenty million people to raise their leadership aspirations by 2020.

Now, not only is that quite a catchy line, Kwai's point is that the psychological effect of a stretching vision is like the effect of gravity on a large mass - the larger the mass, the bigger the thump it makes when it falls to Earth.

So, as a Business Doctor who is constantly banging on to SME owners about the importance of having a vision for their business, I'm thinking I should be taking some of my own medicine by developing my own vision a little further.

In my case, my vision will be to help 15,000 Yorkshire businesses by 2015.

So I'd like to know whether you think this is achievable or perhaps not ambitious enough.  So I'd love to hear from you - do contact me or let me know your thoughts via my LinkedIn poll.

And good luck with developing your own vision - I'd be really interested to hear about it; sometimes it throws up some fasincating insights like the undertaker I was speaking to recently who told me that his vision was to help people think outside of the box!

As reported by The Business Desk today, there are tough times ahead, especially in regions of the UK outside of the south east of England.  One of the few business minds to spot the riskiness of the now infamous 'slice and dice' financial instruments such as credit default swaps before the credit crunch took hold is a voice worth listening to. Moulton suggests that one of the last things we should be doing is relying on public sector bail-outs and issues a call to deal with the recessionary problem now rather than later.

Relying on funding is indeed a risky strategy, especially since much of it is drying up (see Yorkshire Forward Suffers funding cuts).  But as I see very frequently indeed, this leaves business owners who are trying to grow their business whilst cash isn't forthcoming in a real dilemma... how do they afford to grow?

Well, it often has to be a gradual process to put the business back into a shape where investors will consider it as an attractive proposition, but there is still some help available to kick-start SME growth by helping owners and senior managers develop their business strategy - a crucial prerequisite fopr growth - and leadership skills.

If your business has between 5 and 249 employees and you haven't benefited from such funding before, then you can claim from £500 to £1000 worth of funding to help you develop and get a head start.  Business Doctors are happy to sign post you in the right direction if you get in touch.

What with looming spending cutbacks as a result of the public sector borrowing requirements, plus the current political uncertainty around the future of business support agencies - in particular the regional development agencies - following the change in government, it would be fair to say that the current picture relating to business funding is also 'uncertain' (just goes to show you the benefit of doing your STEP analysis - see our free top ten tips for growing your business).

Connected with this, I've just fielded one of the most jaw-droppingly naive questions of my Business Doctors career so far from a member of the Bradford business support community that's compelled me to blog this entry.  Now, admittedly, Bradford has its own issues relating to poverty and regeneration, but I think we need to try a little harder to pull ourselves up by the boot straps.

Names have been witheld to spare any blushes, but the conversation was along the lines of:

Questioner: "Business Doctors - now that sounds interesting."

Me: "Yes, it is, it's keeping me extremely busy."

Questioner: "So what do you do, do you basically dish out loads of free funding to businesses"

Me: "Er, nooooo....! We help businesses to achieve their vision by helping develop a unique strategy that matches their own unique internal capabilities with the most attractive external opportunities."

Now to me, this highlights that whilst publicly funded agencies are working really hard to make the changes cities like Bradford need to see, potential clients need to look very carefully at any service they are being offered in order to check it meets their own needs.  If the wrong service is matched with the wrong client, then the business support community as a whole can be tarnished by the project failing to meet its objectives.

What are the benefits to business owners of getting professional outside help?

• As owners of SMEs have often undergone organic growth ‘from the tools’ themselves, they may not have the skills and experience to make the changes they need to make;
• There is usually value in taking independent advice because it challenges your own thinking; as humans we are poor at thinking through the downside of our bright ideas;
• Bringing in an extra pair of hands can help free up time to help prioritise what really needs doing – enabling the business owner to start to see the ‘wood for the trees’ and take a long term view of where he or she is going.

So I would say, let’s get away from this something-for-nothing trap that we can fall into and get real about the value that professionals deliver.  Business support is just that – it’s not free money to burn, it’s support to help entrepreneurs achieve their vision.

What do you think?  Leave a comment or contact me with your view.

At Business Doctors we really try and strip out the corporate claptrap, but some of what might be considered management mumbo jumbo it resolutely remains resistant to being purged as we can find no better way to describe it. So for those of you who consider the word ‘strategy’ just another group of letters that belongs on the bull**** bingo card, let’s consider for a second why this might be.

It’s true that people I’ve worked with in the past, including directors in well known firms, have sometimes considered ‘having a strategy’ to being a substitute for needing to do any actual work whatsoever – the thinking apparently goes that if you can show your boss a strategy paper then he’ll get off your back.  Well this works, right?

Wrong! OK, so strategy may be a word that’s over-used by consultants and the like, but I reckon it’s also much under-used by business people like you and me. 

Think of it this way, all that a strategy is, is simply a scheme to guide your actions towards a set goal in a reasoned and clear way.  Check this out on Wikipedia.  Now you can go about your business without having a strategy, but you’re much more at the mercy of events if you do.  You can have as many strategies as you see fit (a marketing strategy, an IT strategy, a quality management strategy) but as we've seen, you need to be aware of over-strategising and keep them at the level that's right for your business.  However, in all cases, your strategies need to fit into your overall business strategy.

You could also liken having a strategy to playing a board game with the family at Christmas.  Now, fuelled by too much wine and mince pies, who doesn’t want to thump the cocky brother-in-law at Monopoly?   Well, you’ll only do so by having a winning strategy and who would argue that having a strategy for playing a board game is a daft idea?

So, get in touch to let me know what you think – this could be an interesting debate.  Alternatively, Business Doctors tour the UK to tell SMEs about strategy, so if you’re open to ideas, come to one of our seminars or download our top ten tips to learn how getting a business strategy will help your firm.

In this guest blog, Kevin Parry of Cogenic Management Consulting provides a view from Hong Kong, where he is lucky enough to be engaged in project work at the moment.  Kevin's view provides an interesting counterpoint to the current economic and political malaise affecting the UK.

Hong Kong is essentially a trading city (these days a Special Administrative Region) in China which has not lost its long tradition of fast moving, adapting and risk-taking since the handover from British rule back to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The overall Chinese economy, if you believe the official statistics, is growing fast. 11.7% in the last quarter according to the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com) and the evidence is here of deal-making everywhere.

Hong Kong people are hard working (an average of 44.5 hours per week) and are famous gamblers, and one aspect of the hard work and willingness to take a risk for money is that people are very resilient in the face of losses, simply coming back to the table to bet again  The feeling about the future is positive; Hong Kong has some of the highest property prices in the world as a result of the rising levels of wealth and investment here. It is the main south China trading hub with the rest of the world and a knowledge centre for Chinese businesses, with a reputation for innovation and sophisticated tastes.

The warm weather (today is 26 degrees whereas London is 7 degrees) and excellent transportation systems make it easy to buy and sell services, goods and financial instruments. The ready availability of capital for investment; from Angel investors to corporate banks, also encourages new ventures expansion and growth. Income tax is 18% at the top rate here and most people only pay 15%. This means that far more of their salaries are disposable income than in the UK and translates into both personal investments and consumption of all kinds of products and services.

The business environment is also encouraged by the number of private clubs here, almost every business person belongs to one of more, which create a sense of a small and integrated community in which personal relationships count for more than contacts and purchasing portals. Here if you are trusted you can do business which is a contrast with the lack of trust sometimes evident in the UK business environment in which procurement is increasingly about price and little else. This must surely lead to a deflationary environment and will tend to make postponing investment the logical choice.

Hong Kong is a melting pot of cultures, ideas and influences. From Canada and the US to Japan, Singapore and Europe people, technology and ideas circulate freely, supported by advanced communications networks and fully integrated public transport systems. So is this a kind of Utopia? No, of course not. Hong Kong has its problems like everywhere else, but is striking when you arrive here is the “can-do” attitude; and if that’s not a competitive advantage, I don’t know what is.

Kevin Parry is a Programme Director and Consultant who has held programme director roles in global telecommunications businesses and healthcare and is interested in meeting fellow professionals and making presentations on the subject of project and programme management to suitable groups during his stay in Hong Kong.

Being creative is such an impressive quality, and I'm frequently left green with envy by the creativity and quality apparent in many of the business ideas that entrepreneurs young and old in our region have.  So if you've got a business idea - fantastic! You're one of the people that inspire me.

But a note of caution when you come to think about putting your business idea into practice.  You need to be very careful to build the business around the idea, not just launch into a series of activities driven by creative energy.

Spend time thinking about what your business will be that’s more than an idea.  Businesses consist of people, knowledge, processes and procedures, premises and equipment, vision and values.

In particular, I would encourage you to give careful thought to:

• What is your 'business model'? In other words, how do you do business? What is the logical sequence of activities in each area of operation (marketing, HR, sales, production etc.)?  A good example of solid application of this in the creative industry in The Design Mechanics – in particular check out, how they work.
• How do you generate leads and what moves potential customers from the 'Attention' stage to the 'Action' stage (see our blog post: Need more sales? Remember you need a sales process)?  Think of this like a sales 'funnel' where all the potential interest feeds in at the top (lead generation), your sales and marketing activity takes place inside the funnel and customers drip out of the bottom.
• Pay attention to the areas you don’t have expertise in and plug these gaps.  If it’s business planning, get someone to help you with this; if it’s accounts, find a book-keeper.  These services needn’t be expensive and you can get great value help from your local chamber of commerce or the Federation of Small Businesses.

I think the easiest way to think of this is that if you plan to build up your business to sell (your house), potential buyers will be more interested in an idea which has a solid business structure (foundations, bricks and mortar) underpinning it.

So get building - and don't be afraid to ask us for advice!

I was reminded recently, when I attended the last event run by the Bradford branch of the Federation of Small Businesses, that sales don't just happen by magic.  There's a whole series of points at which you need to be in touch with potential customers before they actually buy from you.  At the FSB talk, this was put across in no uncertain terms by Chris Allcoat of Co-optimize Marketing.  You need to remember that what goes through your potential customers' heads when you communicate them is:

• Attention: how do you get them to listen to you?
• Interest: even if they listen, why should they listen to what you say when there's so much information and so little time?
• Desire: when you've got a potential customer interested in what you're saying, you need to get across what's in it for them. Put yourself in your customer's shoes.
• Action: finally, you need to make that call to action so you can actually close the sale. Don't forget this stage at any cost!

And you need to have a sales process that reflects these stages of the buying cycle: it's usually very unlikely that somebody will buy from you the first time they hear about you.  If they do - apart from being lucky - it means that your marketing message has meant that they've gone through the same mental process, but they've just done it really quickly.

I'd encourage you to think about your own sales process. How does it reflect these necessary stages in the buying process?  The two need to fit together for successful sales to be won.

Why not share with other readers how your sales process makes it easy for customers to buy?

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, can you name any others?

How many people do you know who've actually grasped a sensible use for the plethora of social media tools at the moment?  To me, it seems like most people who are thinking about how they can use social media tools to promote their business are swimming in a sea of confusion, looking for ideas about what works.

Here's a radical - but I think common-sense idea - that's totally in keeping with the current Zeitgeist, an era in which consumer confidence in large corporates has been eroded by the mis-management performance of our so-called economic 'powerhouses' (certain banks and insurance companies being cases in point).  Most excitingly for those who work in the 'real economy', small businesses will benefit from this proportionately greater than larger ones.

So the idea goes like this:

Social media tools are about promoting you as an individual, not your business.

Since trust in corporates that use broadcast media has been severely dented, the opportunity is with the smaller business to build up trust in the personalities that make up those companies. Smaller firms are more nimble, can react quicker to market trends and get their message out without the signoff of several tiers of management.  To me, it's really interesting to speculate to what extent social media marketing could replace more traditional forms of direct marketing, i.e. gathering data and pushing a commercial message out.  The idea is to build up trust in individuals, and business will follow when relationships have been built, in much the same way as we do with our face to face relationships; the only difference being we're using online tools.

And surely it's more cost-effective than traditional advertising and mailing.

It goes without saying that launching yourself willy-nilly into the information soup currently on offer could be a sure-fire route to disaster, so a strategy is needed.  My current advice would be to listen to the people (few, in my experience), that seem to have grasped the usefulness of the tools currently on offer; two I have met and provide inspiration to me are Kwai Yu of Leader's Cafe Foundation and Lesley Aveyard of One Plus One Marketing (whom I have largely to thank for making this stuff much clearer for me yesterday).  Or look at how Barack Obama won the US election with social media tools as a central plank in their strategy.

And the nice thing is that to succeed in this way, we need to concentrate on building up trust, sharing and giving.  What could be better for our society at present? The benefit to us of doing this is we get to position ourselves as leaders in our own field of knowledge, with the economic and social benefits following on naturally.

But above all, don't just launch in, know what you're trying to achieve before you try and achieve it.

Read a more in-depth insight on Penny Power's blog at at http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=147936.

Business Doctors' mantra to owners of small and medium sized businesses is, "Achieve your vision".  But this is not simply a marketing slogan, we really believe that understanding your own personal motivation is the key to successful business growth.  Indeed, it's why we, as experienced business people ourselves, become Business Doctors in the first place.  Business Doctors have gained a significant amount of experience in both corporate and SME environments and consistently pushed ourselves beyond our comfort zones to overcome challenges and become more effective and rounded people.  This is typically at the root of your Business Doctor's passionate approach to helping clients to leap over the hurdles they are currently experiencing in their own businesses.

The thinking behind this is simple and has at its heart how the subconscious mind works (see the recent post A powerful way to overcome the barriers to achieving your vision).  Basically, if you believe that something will happen, then your subconscious mind will guide your behaviours and actions towards the desired outcome.

So, my advice would be to give some thought as to why you're in business in the first place.  Think about what it is that you want to achieve.  It could be that you'd like to retire early to the Bahamas or the South of France, it may be that you want to play a significant role in building a better society, like the regeneration of the area you grew up in or making life better for children with cancer, like my friend Colin through his charity Little Heroes, or it may simply be that you want to earn enough to give your own children a better future.  If you hear people talking about 'life goals', that's all they're referring to.

Whatever your own personal vision, your actions will be much more effective if you understand what your vision is.  For a Business Doctor, this is an important part of the process whereby we help you put in place an achievable strategic plan for your business and when we work with our clients, this is very often the starting point.  So if you haven't thought along these lines before, give it a go; it could at the very least liven up your day with a fun and invigorating few minutes' day dreaming!

Now, don't be fooled by the photo - but which one of the above examples do you think best describes my vision?