Episode Transcript:

Are you worried that your business is becoming a commodity? That's where it's very similar to the competitors and you end up feeling like you need to compete on price because there's nothing unique about you. Well, if so, in today's episode, we're going to talk about how you can strategise to not commoditise.

So I'm recording this episode towards the end of the year. And this is a really important time to think about how we can strategize to make sure that our businesses continue to grow and stay unique and don't become commodities. You've really got two choices in business. You can be a unique growth business that does something different.

That is an army of one that can charge what it needs to charge to be successful and is a win win for everybody from the employees to the business owner, to the customer, or You can fall into becoming a commodity business, which is where we stop growing. We stop focusing on what makes us unique. We become like all the other businesses and we just end up competing on price.

And that's a lose, lose situation because your services drop. It becomes an uninspiring place to work that you can't pay your, your staff, great wages, and you as the owner tend to get stuck in that business. And the reality is, is that most businesses fall into the second camp. Most businesses will fall into becoming a commodity based business.

They don't, they're not clear on what makes them unique. Uh, they're not inspired and they are competing with competitors on price. And it's just, it's, it's, it's a race to the bottom. So. What we need to do is make sure that we're not falling into that camp that most people are in. And the reason that most businesses fall into that camp isn't because people are lazy or they can't be bothered.

It's all to do with human nature, right? And it takes confidence and consistency and drive and good teamwork to become this, uh, unique business. This, this, this business that can be an army of one. But what happens in most businesses is that doesn't happen right for human nature. And what we'll go through in today's episode is how, why that happens and how you can make sure that doesn't happen in your business so that you can create a business.

That's a win, win, a win for you, a win for your customers and win for your employees and a win for the taxman because it's making more money. So. Why the most businesses fall into the commodity camp and the way that I think about this visually is the commodity based business is a business where the team on board of the boat are every day solving problems.

So we've got buckets and we're trying to get the water off the boat to stop it from sinking. So that's how the business feels. It feels like we're just constantly solving problems to keep this thing afloat and to make sure that people can get paid. The. Unique business. The businesses that we all want is not like that.

That's where everybody's focused on the same direction. We're all focused on getting the same goal and we're all rowing in the same direction. We're actually putting the work in to to make to make the thing what we want it to be. So ones are creative. We're moving towards Our vision of success in the future, and the other one is reactive.

We're just constantly dealing with issues. So, like I said, most businesses fall into the issues camp. They fall into the reactive nature, and this isn't just businesses. It's teams within big businesses as well, and it's worth going into very quickly right now. Well, why does that happen? What? It doesn't make sense.

You know, why would we not want to create businesses that are unique, that are great places to work, that create a unique solution to customers that can charge more money. Why don't we all do that? And what it comes down to is human nature. And what we have to understand is that to grow and to move towards goals requires us to be uncomfortable, and it requires confidence and it requires teamwork, and that's got to be coordinated most of the time.

Sometimes we can get away with it without systems because we have a very uniquely driven owner at the front of the front of the ship, and they've got a naturally very good leadership team in place. But most of the time it won't happen without a structure. What will happen is the owner lacks confidence in the vision and stops pushing.

Um, they don't want to stress the team. So they're not sure how to keep pushing the business to keep the team on track. The owner doesn't put the systems in place that enable this to happen. So that even if they're tired or on holiday, it continues to happen and eventually. The business just falls into being a commodity.

So what we're going to go through today is how you can not be in that camp, how you can be in the camp where you're on a ship that everybody's focused on the same direction. We're all rowing in the same direction and we're all excited about the future and your business stands out as being unique, has its own unique features, which means you can attract.

The right clients and charge what you need to charge for everybody to be in a win. That sounds good to me. So, um, what do we need to do? How can we systemize so that these things happen so that we are, um, a unique business? How can we strategize to avoid becoming commodities? So the first thing that you've got to do, and this is really good time of the year.

If you're watching this at the end of the year, you might not be, but if you are watching this at the end of the year, it's a really good time to think about this. The first thing you need to do is you need to have a plan for the year. But even before that, so I shouldn't say the first thing, because the actual first thing you need to do is to make sure that you've actually got a strategy and overarching business strategy.

And I don't mean a 10 page document that talks about who you are and why you exist. I'm talking about a one page plan that says what your vision is. So why you exist to, to what you exist to achieve, what your mission is, so how you're going to go about it differently. And what your values are now you might that there's no right or wrong way to do this.

You might want to have your big hairy audacious goal or your unique purpose, but you just need to have something that encaptures the purpose of the business and the soul of the business on a one page. That's easy for everybody to remember. When you do this, what you're doing is you're taking. The business strategy out of your head as the owner and putting it onto a page and this serves a lot of benefits The first one is there's now a document in place that helps the whole business make decisions if you are or aren't around The second one is you're a human being and you're emotional like any other human being and sometimes you're going to feel on it and motivate And driven sometimes you're not if you're If it's in your head and we're all relying on it being in the owner's head to address the strategy, then the only time we can, when you're, basically when you're not on the ball, the team aren't going to drive towards it.

Things are going to start to drop because you're not feeling as motivated anymore. Whereas when it's written down, it's always there, it's black and white and we can hold ourselves accountable to it. The other thing as well is it helps the whole team make big decisions, right? Strategic decisions. So even if you have left the business or sold the business, you're on holiday, strategic decisions that grow the business can still be made in line with.

The vision and mission so that you're not going to be coming back after holiday or turning in your grave because the business has been taken in a direction that's just not aligned to who you are and what, what you had vision for it. So we've got to have a one page strategy. If you think you'd like that, but you don't even know where to start, you can head over to be happy.

co. uk free resources and find our strategy pack, which tells you how to do that essentially word for word. The next thing then that you need is objectives, key results. Okay. So this is vitally important, especially at this time of the year. And what objectives key result is, is a goal setting framework, much like smart goals and other goal setting frameworks you would have heard of.

Um, but it adds in some unique components that I think give a business. Truly a competitive edge. So with objectives, key results, one of the elements that's added in that other goal setting frameworks don't have is prioritization. So with objectives, key results before the end of the year, you should spend a day with your leadership team, or if you're a small business, just yourself, and you need to plan what's the three to five objectives I'd like to achieve next year without OKR, you could just set as many goals as you like.

And what tends to happen is businesses set loads of goals, get completely overwhelmed and. Get the end of the year and don't achieve them. And I say that in business, it's the same in our personal lives as well. If you think about it, end of the year, loads of new year's resolutions. We're feeling motivated.

We honestly believe we're going to achieve all these new year's resolutions. And then six months down the line, they've been completely forgotten because life got in the way. So. We're going to start to eradicate that issue by first of all, limiting how many objectives we set. So we're going to say to our team and to us, what's the three to five things that we're going to commit to that could be really transformative in the business next year.

And there's going to be loads of good ideas that we aren't going to commit to. And that's a, that's a really good discipline for you to learn and for your team to learn. Being able to say, no, that's a good idea, but not right now. We're thinking about here at this point, whilst I'm talking about this, why teams revert to not.

Doing objectives, not, not pushing forward on goals and just getting stuck into the day to day routine. And the reason for this is human nature. I've kind of already mentioned this, but we, we fear setting goals. We fear prioritizing. We fear doing the new things because they all bring with them risk. And what we want to revert to is what we already know.

And if you look into most businesses and most teams, you'll just see that the businesses, everyone's frustrated because it's not growing. Anywhere near as efficiently as it should be, but also nobody's doing new things because everybody within the different departments is just doing what they already know, because that feels safer and people resist change because, or that might bring with it risk, or we might make the wrong decision.

So it's easier to just carry on doing what we're doing, but complain about it, the fact that nothing's changing. So that's what normally happens. So it's, it's uncomfortable, right? To grow. It's uncomfortable to do new things. It's uncomfortable to push ourselves. So what you've got to do in your business is create an environment that.

Number one holds people accountable to actually doing it and then number two Support people to do it so that it's a positive experience, not a negative one. If you can do those two things, you will outperform 90 percent of other businesses. So we've got to have our yearly objectives in place. So first of all, we're prioritized and we're choosing three to five objectives.

The next thing that we're going to then do is another really important part of OKR objectives, key results is underneath each objective. We're going to set, ask the question as measured by, so for example, we might say. Next year, it will be transformative to us if we had a record sales year. Okay. Normally for most businesses, more sales is going to be a win, right?

As measured by, so then we have to get specific, right? And this is the really powerful part of an objectives and objectives. Key results. How are we going to measure that? How do we know we've been successful? And this forces you and your team to then get very specific, right? So obviously you're going to have a number, let's say it's a hundred K and extra sales or a million and extra sales, depending on the size and type of your business.

So that's one thing. And then we probably put a counter key result in there as well, which means, you know, let's say we've said a million extra sales. But we might put a counter in there of at a certain percent profit because we might make a million extra sales by spending two million on marketing. So we put a counter key result in there as well.

So, uh, we'd have one to five key results for each objective. Normally it's about three, but everything needs to be measurable. You might set some objectives that you don't measure and you might end up scratching your heads going, well, how, how would we measure that? So. Um, a common one is being a great place to work.

We want to become a really great place to work for the reasons of we want to hold on staff for longer and attract better people. So how could we measure that? Well, if we're not measuring it already, we might need to put an employee survey in place. We might need to use something like Friday Pulse or a measuring employee happiness.

We might want to measure employee retention. We might want to try and find ways to measure employee productivity. So you've got to, if you haven't got the measures already, you need to think about putting them in place, not putting a measure in place and just saying, Oh, you know, we'll just make it better is a massive mistake because a woolly goal gets woolly results.

So, uh, you get really clear on your top five, three to five objectives. And then each one of those, you get super clear on key results below. Let me. Again, to show you the power of this. So if you think about it in a personal life, not in a business setting, let's say in personal life, I say at the beginning of the year, well, I want to get really healthy in 2024 what most people would then do when we said, we'll get specific is they say, okay, well, I'm going to go to the gym three times a week.

And the problem with that is, is although you could have a tally chart at the end of the year of how many times you went to the gym, nobody's actually excited at the concept of going to the gym three times a week. That's the thing you need to do. You don't want to have a list of things you need to do because it's uninspiring.

What you want to have is the outcome of the things that you're going to do. So, for example, with health, instead of me saying I want to get into great shape and I'm going to do that by going to the gym three times a week, I would say I want to get into great shape as measured by I weigh 10 stone instead of 11 stone.

I can fit in a 32 inch pair of trousers and I can, I don't know, run a mile and under. So many minutes, all of a sudden, that's very specific and very measurable and very easy for me to track progress on. So that's completely different to just having a list of things to do. So that's the thing you need to implement with your business and your team.

You need to go yearly objectives. What are we going to try and achieve? How do we know if those things have been successful? Not what are the things we're going to do? For example, another one, and then I'll move on. Social media. We want to increase our social media following. Okay, so that's our objective.

And then a key result would not be we're going to post five times a week. That's that's I mean, it could be, but it's pretty uninspiring. Why would you post five times a week? Well, we want to improve engagement from from A to B. We want to it. Have so many more followers and we want to generate so many new sales through social media Followers then that's very specific and very motivating as opposed to just posting five times a week cool So that's objectives and key results The great thing about those is they're in place Even if you're not there if you're on holiday if um, you've left the business or you sold the business It's still got this framework in place.

So we need to make that a system within the business the next piece then So we've got our yearly strategy as in, uh, well, we've got our vision and our mission. So we've got a top level strategy. We've got our yearly strategy, which is the objectives we're going to focus on for the year. The next thing that we need in place is our meeting port.

So you might think that just because you pay people and they're good people. You're going to set objectives and they're going to go away and do them. Humans are humans. They won't. If they're not being held accountable and they're not being checked in on regularly, they're going to get busy with the day to day.

You're going to have problems arise. And these objectives that are really important aren't going to get done. This is the challenge in 90 percent of businesses. And I'm making that percentage up. It's probably more. This is the challenge because life is busy and there's a never ending list of problems and it feels safer to solve a problem than it does to pursue.

Pursue a new goal because you're getting something done. Then it gives you a short little hit of dopamine and you're solving a problem and it doesn't bring with it the risk of maybe you failing. So all of your human nature and all of the human nature of the people in your team is going to resist actually pursuing the goals.

They're going to want to revert to being busy, solving problems, dealing with the issues of life. That's not good for your business and it's not good for your culture because. Although that's what the human nature is making them want to do, it creates an uninspiring work environment and it turns your business into a commodity.

So you've got to not rely on human nature. You've got to put systems in place to enforce this stuff. So we, we've done the strategy that's keeping everybody aligned. We've done the top level kind of vision and mission, why we exist. We've done a yearly set of objectives to keep everybody focused and on the same page.

Now, the next thing we need to do is put the system in place to actually make sure that adherence to that happens. And what you need to do here is you need to have a meeting pulse. And what we recommend is you do a quarterly full planning day. So if you're a small team, that'll be everybody. If you're a bigger team, it'll be you and the leadership team, and they'll do the same with their teams.

So quarterly full planning day and then weekly. You have a meeting, um, with your leadership team or with your whole team where you check in on the objectives and you solve issues and that should be 90 minutes. So your minimum strategy is yearly. You have 1 2 days planning to do your, um, to review, to review your vision and mission and to set your objectives quarterly.

You have a full day to set new objectives and review the previous quarter. After that, you then do a weekly 90 minute meeting to hold people accountable. What do you do in your quarterly meeting? You set objectives for the quarter. So you look at what you've said for the year, break that down into quarters.

So you have three to five objectives, key results for the quarter, which are basically just a breakdown of that yearly one. But teams can come up with their own as well. You also review the previous quarter and just spend that time together as a leadership team. Weekly, we have that 90 minute meeting where we check in and we see how progress is going with those objectives, key results.

Is there anything that we need to do? Is there anything people need help with? And we go into issues holding as well. This is something that was made really clear this process in a book called traction by Gino Whitman. So I'd highly recommend reading that as well. So now you've got a overarching strategy, a vision and mission.

Written down for everybody to see you've got yearly objectives. So you've, you and your leadership team have decided what we're focusing on for the year. And everybody's focused on that. And we've got really specific key results that tell us if that's being achieved or not. Then you've got everybody together once a quarter, if you're a fast startup or more of a fast change of business, you might want to do this monthly, but most businesses, they need to do it quarterly.

So then you get together once a quarter full day. Review the last quarter. Okay. What do we need to do over the next call? And you break those yearly objectives, key results down into yearly objectives, key results. So who am I getting out of breath? So you've got all of this stuff in place, and then you've got a 90 minute me and every week for people to check in on these objectives, key results, as well as all the other stuff they're doing in the business and hold each other accountable and provide each other support throughout the year.

If you. Have this in place. You've systemized growth. You've systemized your business becoming unique and not becoming a commodity. If you don't have this in place. And this is what I would call a minimum viable product. So let's say you do everything but not the weekly meeting. I promise you you'll get to your quarterly meetings and people won't have done what you want them to do.

And they'll have plenty of legitimate viable excuses. And you probably won't either. So make sure that you do this is a minimum. You have all this stuff in place. And then my final tip for you is To do quarterly personal development plans with your team. So if you're the owner of a business and you've got a small team, do it with all of them.

If you're the owner of a business and it's a big team, you know, kind of over, over 15, then you should be doing it just with the, your leadership team and they should be doing it with their teams, but you need to do a quarterly personal development plan as opposed to a yearly performance review. The reason for this is you're creating a culture now.

Within your business. That is a high performance sculpture where we're growing, where people are innovative, where people work together collaboratively, where we do things better and to do this, you're going to need people that are committed to the cause. If you've got people that just want to do a job and just want to get paid, it's not going to work very well because they are not going to, that those people aren't going to, um, perform the way that you need them to, to, to make this a reality.

So. What most businesses see is performance as a thing that needs to be managed. And this is a massive mistake because performance isn't something that needs to be managed. It's something that needs to be unlocked. And the way that you unlock performance is by showing people that you genuinely care about them, because when people believe that you are genuinely interested in them and genuinely care about them, they'll go above and beyond to help your business succeed.

And even if they want to leave, they all feel a sense of loyalty to you. So there'll be very clear about that early on and it won't come as a surprise. So. Instead of doing yearly performance reviews, which is just terrible and awful. I remember doing mine in the military and thinking, God, this is crap.

And I also remember that we had statistics that every year after performance reviews, loads of people left a retention dropdown. So instead of doing a yearly performance review, do a quarterly personal development plan. We have a template for you to do this. If you're thinking, I don't even know where to start with that.

We've literally got a step by step three page template. The overview First of all, you check in on their health for a wheel of life, um, diagram. You've seen them before that any, any coach users, then you do a performance review, which is checked in on. The, the core values of the business and the key results assigned to that person.

If you haven't got those, they will be. And then finally it goes into objective setting for the person. So they do professional and personal objectives, and this completely transforms the relationship between the employee and the business. Because all of a sudden the employee feels like they are a person that's cared about and their personal development's cared about as well as their, um, as well as being an employee that gets paid money and it changes the whole kind of focus around performance because.

Most businesses, again, feel like they need to tell people what they need to do and then check in on them to make sure that they're doing it. Whereas a business that does things this way is saying, essentially, we want you to be able to perform this level. If you can't, we're going to do all we can to help you get there because if you do, you, when you get paid more, you, you, we, we achieve more as a business.

Everybody's a winner. So it's not used to. Kind of, um, hold you, hold you at ransom as such. We use this to help you become the best you can be. And if people don't aren't interested in that or don't want to do that, it also stands out very clearly as well. And then it makes it easy for them to decide this isn't the right place for them, and it's very easy for you to see that they're not the right fit for you.

So, um, those are the different that, I mean, that's a, that's a whirlwind tour, but it's, it's for, I'm recording this towards the end of the year. I think this is a really important message for business owners to. Let's sink into their mind towards the end of a year when they're thinking about the next year Maybe getting a bit tired because it's the end of the year and like especially if the business is still reliant on you You you can definitely you know The more of these years that you have where you're trying to grow this thing And it's all on your shoulders can feel more and more burdensome and It doesn't need to be that way.

You can put these systems in place and all of a sudden you'll start to realize that the weight of the world has lifted off your shoulders. The business can grow with or without you and your business isn't becoming a commodity. It's becoming the unique thing that you're proud of and everybody is a winner from all the templates for what I've talked about are available on that happy.

co. uk free resources. The only thing I think that isn't on there is the PDP. If you would like the PDP, please just comment PDP. In the comment section below this video or drop me a message on any of my social medias and I will send you one. This isn't a plug, but if you do want help doing this, we do these, we, we do this with businesses in partnership.

So we'll come in and do the strategize, strategize day with you. We'll come in and teach you how to do the meetings, how to do the post, how to do the PDPs, give you all the frameworks and, um, Just make it easier for you to do that. So, um, there's more than enough resources for you to do this without us, without having to spend any money.

It's all there on the website, but if you'd like to go faster and get it done to a better standard, um, then feel free to drop us a message and book in doing one of our days with us so that we can help you get all this stuff systemized so your business can continue to prosper and grow without you.


Remember that business and life are better. Happy. Thanks for tuning in.