Why you should be playing a grown-up game of business

If you’ve ever watched young kids starting out in sport, you’ve no doubt spent an incredibly amusing 30 minutes on a sideline. That’s because (and there’s no way of sugar-coating this) six-year-olds are generally terrible at sport. They either follow the ball like a swarming beehive or stop to dance, practise cartwheels or literally sit down and smell the flowers. Plus, there are no winners or losers at that age. The parents might be keeping score but the kids are just playing the game.

Our expectation is that, as the years pass, they’ll progress and become more skilful. That’s because what is cute in kids is not always quite so endearing in adults.

If we turned up to watch, say, Manchester City, we wouldn’t expect to see a player pick up the ball with his hands or start doing handstands because he’s bored. Instead, we want to see players who know the game, are highly skilled, understand their roles and focus on winning.

In the game of business, too often we’re either playing a very childish game or the wrong type of game for the field we’re in. Sure, there’s lots of activity and we feel worn out by the end of the day, but it’s potentially the wrong type of activity because it’s not leading to the results we want.

A little like a six-year-old child’s sporting match.

So if you suspect you need to grow up in business, here are 5 ways to do just that:

1. Move from being results-based to being activity-based.

   Too often we exhort our teams towards more sales, more profit or more cash in the bank but these are simply the final result or the final score. Instead, we need to understand the activities that feed into these results and work out the best strategies for our business based on the desired result. If the goal is more sales, the activities may include those involved with retention rates, numbers of leads, conversion rates, average sale value and sales per customer per year. Yes, I realise this is Business 101 but I think some of us have forgotten the basics; fancy footwork doesn’t help if we’ve forgotten how to kick and pass.

2. Know your numbers.

   If you don’t know your retention rates, leads per day/month, gross profit, net profit or other critical numbers, then you need to go and find them. With so many amazing cloud-based accounting solutions available, there is simply no excuse any more. To play a grown-up game of business, you have to keep an eye on the scoreboard and understand your critical stats. That way, you can understand if your team members are playing well and whether your business is winning.

3. Control your cash flow.

   A business cannot succeed without cash, just as a team cannot win without oxygen. If you understand your customer pain points, your cash cycle and your supplier constraints, then you may be able to work with all three to ensure everyone is satisfied. And you can pay your bills at the end of the day. Cash is the oxygen your business needs to play well and survive.

4. Improve your capacity.

   This may seem strange, but doubling your sales isn’t doubling your business. Some businesses are playing with way too many players on the bench, which means wastage with their people or machinery. By creating efficiencies and redistributing work, you improve your capacity, which means more is done with less.

5. Monitor and alter your activity.

   Knowing which activity you should be doing and then doing it is only part of the story. The rest is monitoring and altering the activity to suit the conditions or because something you’ve tried isn’t quite working. It’s very easy to try something once, decide it isn’t for you and then never try again. But great teams and great businesses are always trying to read the play, work out what is coming next and respond accordingly.

What about you? If you suspect you’ve been making daisy chains in the backfield, then decide today to play a grown-up game of business. After all, someone is keeping score.