1.
Managers. Leaders. Directors. Founders. Executives. Read this — it
might save your business.
It’s often reported that 80% of new businesses fail within the first
18 months. I don’t have evidence for that statistic, but I have no
reason to suspect it’s incorrect.
But what about existing businesses? The ones that are failing, but
instead of crashing and burning overnight, they’re slowly dying.

2.
Bad leaders kill businesses. Stop running away and take
responsibility for your organisation.
I’ve seen, worked alongside and worked for
some terrible managers. I’ll name no names here, but you
probably know who you are.
In my experience, these are some of the best ways of utterly
decimating your business, often without even noticing. But you
will notice eventually.
Failing to trust your staff.
Steve Jobs famously said: “It doesn't make sense to hire smart
people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so
that they can tell us what to do.”
So many founders acknowledge the need to delegate work and
bring in outside talent, but they then struggle to let go of aspects of
their business. As a result, micromanagement it rife, creativity is
stifled, relationships are strained and job satisfaction minimised.
That being said, my former CEO at QinetiQ (Leo Quinn) once told
me that“empowerment without measurement is abandonment”.
In many ways I think he’s absolutely correct; it’s the leaders job to
set the goal and put a structure in place for regularly assessing
progress but allowing the employees to determine how to execute.
More than 50% of people who leave a job do so because of their
relationship (or lack of!) with their boss. If you have a great team
and lots of them are leaving, you need to start asking yourself
some very serious questions.
People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers.

3.
Looking at the wrong numbers.
Please, what happened to running a business from a good P+L and
a balance sheet?
Sure, we have many more tools and measurements available to us
than ever before. That’s both a blessing and a curse.
It’s a blessing because, in the right hands, we have so much more
potential for assessing and optimising specific aspects of our
businesses, all of which seem to be increasing in complexity.
It’s a curse because we now that have so many other metrics to
fascinate us, we lose sight of the fundamentals of running a
successful business.
Remember: revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is king. I
don’t see any mention of social reach or insight there, do you?
Put the Twitter Analytics away and start looking at how much cash
you have, where it’s coming from, where it’s going and when.
Putting shareholders ahead of customers and staff.
Sounds like I am contradicting the point above, right? Wrong.
Unless you consistently try to do what’s best for your employees
and clients, you soon might not have too many shareholders to
worry about. Businesses are obsessed with delivering to
shareholder expectations in very short periods of time, and nearly
always losing key customers and staff in the process.
Look past the next quarter, folk.

4.
Look after both your customers and your staff, and the
shareholders will ultimately benefit. It’s a longer game. Stop living
from board meeting to board meeting, trying to impress with
short-term results and ambitious figures.
No focus.
This one applies to me as much as anyone else; I'm a sucker for
getting tied-up in the next idea or project, to the detriment of
existing work. I guess it’s like being a magpie; always chasing
whatever shines brightest. There’s a degree of value in that, but it’s
something to watch out for.
Be clear on who you are as a business, who your customers are,
what you’re offering and how you’ll reach them. Focus on
executing on this, assessing success and adjusting course
accordingly.
Chasing everything at once means it’s unlikely that you’ll succeed
at anything you’re doing.
Set clear goals and targets for good reasons. Put in place a solid
plan of strategies and tactics for execution. Track your progress.
Learn. Repeat. Don’t be distracted.
Head on over to www.dunwiley.co.uk for more info. We love to
chat.