As any business leader can tell you, plans can change at a moment’s notice. Sometimes you do not even have control over what is changing, and the resulting impact on you and your business can be a tough pill to swallow. Over the last few months, there have been some big changes happening in the US economy. Your company’s plans might be set, but businesses need to be willing to shift along with the various shifts in the economy. Of course, this is easier said than done. So where can you turn? The Great Game of Business can help revise and refocus your business strategy with the help of our proven processes.
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Common Challenges for Leadership Common challenges that leaders face across industries include: Technology Labor (recruiting, training, retention) Buying and selling businesses All three of these challenges become increasingly cumbersome as we continue to move through the 2020s. Many businesses have not yet come to terms with the fact that they need to invest in technology to stay competitive in today’s marketplace. Other businesses are too familiar with the labor issues that are haunting many companies around the world. Meanwhile, there are leaders nearing retirement age who are considering “getting out now" rather than in a few years, and there are leaders on the other side of that coin looking for businesses to scoop up as a growth strategy. And if these are just the common challenges, aren't there even more when you break it down further? Unfortunately, the answer is yes.
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You asked and we've answered! In this blog series, our experienced Great Game coaches answer questions directly from the open-book community. What is the best coaching tip you have for companies just starting to practice the Great Game of Business? Be sure the CEO is fully bought in, directly involved, is a main cheerleader, sets the example, and ensures that all involved (especially 100& of the leadership team) are enrolled and on board. Period! Create a solid communication and business literacy training process via a weekly Huddle rhythm.
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Start By Dispelling Three Common Management Myths: Lessons From The Great Game of Business People are quitting jobs at a rate like we’ve never seen before. In what’s become known as “The Great Quit” or “The Great Resignation,” millions of workers are leaving their jobs every month. When you combine that with the flood of retiring Baby Boomers, we’re witnessing a seismic reshuffling of the work force. Even Santa Claus is in short supply. What’s even more stunning is that this might be just the beginning. Research from Microsoft and Gallup finds that some 41% of the global workforce, and nearly 50% of employees in the U.S., are actively looking for a new job. As many (if not most) employers now scramble to keep their existing people—let alone recruit new employees—it’s created a new emphasis on answering the question: Why are so many workers quitting?
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As you know, there are a lot of “moving parts” in the day-to-day management of a business. Between dealing with people, improving profitability, tracking inbound and outbound flows and financial reporting, you may not have much time to think about your company’s ownership mix. Whether there is a single owner or multiple owners, made up of family members or not, sooner or later the topic of ownership transition may come up. When it does, it can be a stressful conversation. However, it is a conversation that is ultimately inevitable. There are any number of reasons why business owners decide it’s time to consider who the next owners of their business should be, whether the successors are family, managers, employees or a third party. All companies, however, ultimately go through an ownership transition process. The issue is whether it is planned for or an after-the-fact reaction to something. What our experience tells us is that proactive planning for ownership transition leads to outcomes that are almost always more satisfying. Time is the valuable commodity in transition planning. The more time you have the better things will be.
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Deciding what your company wants to be when it grows up should be a team effort. We continue to live in unprecedented times. Nothing seems predictable, and it's just about impossible to get anyone to agree to a consensus. Take inflation as an example. While plenty of economists continue to forecast that inflationary pressure is a temporary product of strong demand and snarled supply chains, others point to skyrocketing prices as evidence that an inflationary wrecking ball is already at work wreaking permanent economic damage. Tracking issues like these regularly makes it easy to get lost in the day-to-day weeds.
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Liquidity options are plentiful for business owners: strategic sale, private equity, management buyout, family transfer, and leveraged recapitalization. Which path should you take? We know that 42% of the 2021 Great Game™ All-Star companies and many others walked a different path—implementing an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Apart from the fact that ESOPs can be a great exit strategy for open-book companies, here are the top five reasons why open-book management companies should consider an ESOP.
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In 2018, the executives at banking giant Wells Fargo issued a new strategy for their business: the overall goal was to create long-term banking relationships with their customers. And to measure how well the company was executing on that strategy, they began tracking “cross-selling.” In other words, employees would be measured, and rewarded, based on the number of different accounts—from deposits and credit cards to auto loans and mortgages—a customer opened with the bank. The CEO at the time even coined a slogan: “eight is great” to illustrate the optimum number of accounts a customer might have with the bank. On paper, you could argue that the more accounts a customer had would likely equate with a longer-term relationship with the bank. But, if you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past few years, you know that things went spectacularly wrong.
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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.
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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.
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