We asked the President of The Great Game of Business, Darin Bridges if he thinks business owners should be raising their prices right now. His response, "hell, yes."   Protecting Margins Now, So You Can Fund Growth Tomorrow We've always had a saying at SRC. When the economy goes down — it's not the time to be asking for price increases. You've got to do it while the economy is going up. Everybody knows costs are going up right now — they're creeping up everywhere. We've heard the horror stories of the price of lumber, and surcharges keep emerging. It can be a scary thing, but within an inflationary environment, price increases are regular, and they're a crucial part of protecting margins. So how do you protect margins? This is where the whole idea of engaging your employees in the business and the finances comes together. Educating employees on how they make an impact and getting them to take ownership in what they do is so important. When they're aware of inflation and how that impacts the company, they're able to monitor expenses in their area of the business to help stay on top of costs. One man, one owner, one business leader can't do it all. You have to get your people to constantly and proactively find ways to reduce costs. Getting your costs under control and then going for the price increase will help maintain margins. You've got to be able to protect your margins to continue to fund growth, fund your people, fund the retention, and all the things necessary to see success for your business.

It's been two years since Covid shut the economy down. And nothing has been the same since. What's crazy is how things continue to change on what seems like a daily basis. Variances are the name of the game. We were already dealing with supply chain delays and the constant upward pressure of inflation caused by the shortages of parts and people in the marketplace. The price of freight is skyrocketing—and that was all before the war in Ukraine erupted. Suddenly, we need to add in the additional upward pressure on the price of oil and commodities like wheat—did you know Russia is the world's largest producer of wheat and Ukraine is fifth? There are also precious metals like nickel, which is a big Russian export. Nickel is used to make everything from stainless steel to appliances and batteries, which are rising in price because of the shortages. Now mix in the fact that interest rates will be rising for the first time since 2018, and every business is faced with solving a dynamic puzzle with lots of moving pieces.

When many business owners and executives hear the words "Strategic Planning," their minds jump to another topic. Any other subject will do. In their hearts, they know that planning is important to the organization. But knowing where to start is the issue. They have heard the stories from their peers who created a plan, and it sat on the shelf for a year or forever. As a result, planning happened once and then stopped. It amounted to a waste of time and money. The question then becomes: why bother planning at all?

For nearly four decades, SRC has been perfecting its approach to strategic planning, and every year it keeps getting better. Here’s the proven step-by-step approach to building good, accurate plans employees love to execute. People Support what they help to create. That is why at SRC and The Great Game of Business®, building a strategic plan is about involving ALL employees in the planning process. That means planning is a year-round event, and it begins with what’s happening in the real world. Twice a year, in June and October, SRC brings the marketplace to its people so they can accomplish two goals: Develop business-growth plans they can own. Help employees answer the questions: Are we confident and energized about the direction of the company? Having a strategic plan is more than putting on paper what you plan on doing over the next year. It is about setting a strategy, building a plan, dealing with market changes, and most importantly, enabling everybody to contribute. This is what we at The Great Game of Business call High-Involvement Planning™. Big picture — High-Involvement Planning can be broke down into clarifying your strategy and building your plan. If you zoom in, you will see that there are really ten steps to having a successful strategic plan.

One Sentence Engagement? Is it truly possible to condense the science of employee engagement into a single sentence? It is and I’m about to convince you of that. But first I need to explain why I’m taking this extreme exercise in reductionism. Studying leadership and employee engagement has been a passion of mine for the last couple of decades. As an entrepreneur, I used engagement to chase and eventually catch a Best Place to Work award. As an author, one book on engagement somehow turned into three. One speech turned into a global tour. And this article on engagement is number one hundred and something.   <> I know of no topic that is more important to the long-term success of a business than engagement.

If you’re an owner, president, or leader in your company, anticipating setbacks or failures isn’t an easy task. Even if you can foresee these unfortunate circumstances, developing a strategic plan may not be on the top of your to-do list. What’s your “Plan B” if you lose a big client or a client needs you to increase your support significantly? What happens during difficult times when the economy takes a downturn? Do you know what you would do if a critical team member were to leave during a busy season? If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that your business can’t wait until that moment occurs to find out.

For many today, it would be unthinkable— if not sheer torture—to run a company supported by data arriving by pony express and steamship. Yet, in the 1800s, that’s what American industrialists regularly did to huge success. How could Carnegie and Rockefeller have made significant, informed decisions with material gathered by mere telegraph, letters, and only later, telephone? Weren’t they alarmed that their milk was fresher than their business intelligence?  

  Every company should have a vision for itself. Jack Stack, CEO of SRC Holdings and the founder of The Great Game of Business, says, "Having a 10-year plan can help overcome unexpected surprises."  Recently, Rich Armstrong, President of The Great Game of Business, and Steve Baker, Vice President, "sat down" (via zoom) with Jack to learn about the 10-year vision for SRC Holdings in a post-covid world.

  How one entrepreneur uses The Great Game of Business to help fulfill her childhood ambition Erika Cisneros first dreamed of studying the law back when she was in the fifth grade. Her class conducted a mock trial of Goldilocks—who was charged with breaking-and-entering the home of the three bears—and she presided over the case as the judge. “That’s when I fell in love with the courtroom,” says Cisneros.

  Right from their rocky start in 1983 (who else starts a business with an 89-to-1 debt-to-equity ratio in the middle of a recession?), Jack Stack and the team at SRC started planning ahead. Not just for the next day, week, or month. Or even for the next year. For their entire history as a business—which has grown from a single factory into a collection of ten businesses and 1,800 associates—SRC has been planning ahead for a decade at a time.