Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JAN B. KING was the president and CEO of Merritt Publishing from 1991 through 1998, transforming this small business into a recognized financial publishing brand and one of the fifty largest woman-owned and run businesses in Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. She is currently a writer and business consultant, who in 2002 received the award for "Outstanding Performance as a Small Business Woman’s Advocate" from the SBA/California Small Business Development Centers.

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"This book does something important: it takes abstract information and puts it in language and worksheets that make sense. This gives everyone including top managers a complete description of how a company s performing. And there s no better tool for improving performance than understanding."
Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business

"Know what is vital to the success of your business, enhance skills for confident prediction, and avert crisis management. This book offers all that for the price of lunch."
James C. Collins, Chairman Emeritus, Sizzler International, Inc.

"Most small business related books approach the implementation of business plans and strategic planning in a very traditional fashion. This one is different. It illustrates how to realistically turn a business plan into an action plan. But it does not stop there. The author discusses the most current methods of managing a business, e.g., total quality management techniques, not in textbook style but in practical, everyday language. Her style of instruction is nothing short of excellent. This readable, practical work is useful for all levels."
Fred Andrews, Springfield Community Technical College in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

"This how-to workbook for small businesses shows how to develop and communicate a vision and how to empower people so they can make the vision a reality."
Arizona Business Gazette

Transform your business plan into an action plan

This new revised edition elaborates on the six critical principles of running a small business that helped guide King to success:

• Set standards and give your employees the tools to meet your goals
• Lead by example
• Look to the long term the very long term
• Find the important details and focus on them
• Watch for variances from expected results
• Face reality when you look at your company and take action

King breaks down complex concepts into simple and effective action plans, helping you profit from her extensive experience and avoid common mistakes. With more than fifty worksheets and exercises to guide your implementation, Business Plans to Game Plans helps you turn your vision into a thriving business equipped to weather any market.

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"This book does something important: it takes abstract information and puts it in language and worksheets that make sense. This gives everyone–– including top managers–– a complete description of how a company’s performing. And there’s no better tool for improving performance than understanding."
–– Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business

"Know what is vital to the success of your business, enhance skills for confident prediction, and avert crisis management. This book offers all that for the price of lunch."
–– James C. Collins, Chairman Emeritus, Sizzler International, Inc.

"Most small business—related books approach the implementation of business plans and strategic planning in a very traditional fashion. This one is different. It illustrates how to realistically turn a business plan into an action plan. But it does not stop there. The author discusses the most current methods of managing a business, e.g., total quality management techniques, not in textbook style but in practical, everyday language. Her style of ‘instruction’ is nothing short of excellent. This readable, practical work is useful for all levels."
–– Fred Andrews, Springfield Community Technical College in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

"This ‘how-to’ workbook for small businesses shows how to develop and communicate a vision and how to empower people so they can make the vision a reality."
–– Arizona Business Gazette

Transform your business plan into an action plan

This new revised edition elaborates on the six critical principles of running a small business that helped guide King to success:

• Set standards and give your employees the tools to meet your goals
• Lead by example
• Look to the long term–the very long term
• Find the important details and focus on them
• Watch for variances from expected results
• Face reality when you look at your company and take action

King breaks down complex concepts into simple and effective action plans, helping you profit from her extensive experience and avoid common mistakes. With more than fifty worksheets and exercises to guide your implementation, Business Plans to Game Plans helps you turn your vision into a thriving business equipped to weather any market.

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Business Plans to Game Plans

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. -Buckminster Fuller

I call this book Business Plans to Game Plans because it takes you from your business plan, that is, what you share with those outside your business, like investors, to your game plan, which is how you really run the business, and what you share with your employees.

As a business-planning consultant, I have written countless business plans. While many of them received the funding they were hoping to attract, a number of these businesses failed in the first several years or never got out of the planning stage. In fact, a few of the entrepreneurs I worked with expected the business plan to be a blueprint for how to run the business. They couldn't be more wrong.

Here is one major difference between the business plan and the game plan: A business plan is written to impress others with how much you already know so that they can decide if they want to invest money in your venture. Entrepreneurs need to build their weaknesses into some sort of plan so that they don't neglect to take care of them. It's acceptable to admit you don't have all of the answers in the game plan, but you never see any such admissions in a successful business plan.

Business plans do not include implementation instructions, because the writers of business plans focus on accomplishment. They write as if once you dream the dream, it magically becomes reality. They don't write about the hard part-that is, the work it takes to gain success.

Implementing a business plan and a game plan takes hard work. It takes wisdom, discipline, courage, an eye for detail, and, most of all, persistence. It also requires an outward focus and an inward focus. You must set goals, communicate them, review them, monitor their realization, and stick to them when other people might abandon them. Your hard work will pay off, and with the tools I offer in this book, you can make your company a success.

INVENTING YOUR COMPANY

I know how hard it can be to run a business. In 1990, I suddenly found myself running a publishing company where I'd worked for seven years. In a matter of weeks, I had to grapple with a wide range of management problems; with little relevant experience and no formal business education, I had to learn to take control.

My company had been in business since 1957. I came to it as a writer and editor, then as the company's editorial director-a solid middle management position. The company also had the good fortune to be so profitable and cash rich in its formative years that there had been little need to project or monitor sales or expenses, cash or profit. The downside of this was that very little had been done to set expectations or monitor performance. It was hard to tell how well we were doing at any given time-or how well we would do in the future.

By the time I began running the company, we were no longer cash rich and our markets were changing dramatically, primarily due to new technologies that both made entry into our markets much easier and changed traditional distribution methods dramatically. Without cash to invest in our own growth, I knew we would not survive over the long term.

We had no choice but to reinvent the company. In effect, we were a 40-year-old start-up. We needed a business plan and we needed a game plan. We had to translate a new vision into action.

In the months that followed, I realized that the key to our survival was to get a handle on where our cash was going and reduce our expenses. We needed to change the corporate culture from a happy family business to one where accountability played a significant role. Last, but maybe most importantly, we also had to have a better understanding of what our business was fundamentally, who we were selling products to and what they would want in the future, and which of our over 200 products were profitable.

Challenge #1: Finance

Although my background was not in finance (or in business), company invoices were much like the bills I paid at home: I knew we paid rent, utilities, insurance, and salaries. I also knew that we paid for the products we produced and their marketing. Then, there were many other items like the outside professionals, computers, and miscellaneous items like office supplies.

Over several weeks, we sorted these invoices from the just-ended fiscal year into categories that seemed to make sense and covered all the types of invoices we found. In questioning people about what each individual invoice pertained to, we found-to our amazement-that many bills had been paid for services we no longer received. This was particularly true for maintenance contracts on equipment we no longer owned. Once the accounting department had been told to expect a particular bill each month, they continued to pay it without question. Many bills are addressed to accounts payable, and paid without anyone else ever seeing them. We cut about $77,000 in expenses simply by questioning old invoices. That was the first step to taking control of the business and to the development of the worksheets in this book.

Challenge #2: Corporate Culture

My next challenge was in determining employee accountability on a larger scale. How could I hold the employees accountable if they did not know how the company was doing? Because my company was (at the time) partially employee owned, the answer was to share financial information with everyone. I've heard the arguments against this kind of openness, the most compelling of which was that competitors could use this information against you. However, I took employee ownership seriously and expected everyone at the company to help run our business. I couldn't expect others to do what I couldn't do myself-namely, to run a business without knowing those numbers by which we measure success or failure. Too, I shared financial documents with my employees in the hope that they would see how the numbers sprang from their own work. I wanted my employees to grasp the numbers as proof of the importance to the company of everything they did.

In short, I gave my employees access to the financial statements and other documents to help them make intelligent decisions about their work. I educated them about what the numbers meant in the expectation that they would use those numbers not just to gauge our success, but to guide their actions. I discovered the remarkable power you harness by doing this. I discuss in further detail how to empower your employees to understand their impact on the bottom line in Chapter 2.

Informing your employees can have a profound impact on all aspects of your business. Of all the memories I have of the early years, the one I value most came after I started circulating the financial and operational reports. At a rather ordinary operations meeting, an employee suggested that we reduce inventory, saying that this would increase our cash position going into the critical months of our year.

It was an extraordinary moment. Financial consultants talk to boards of directors for hours about inventory accountancy, but on his own, this employee figured out that a...