Over the past 20 years I have worked in, or for over, 400 businesses. Every single one of these businesses has been focused, in their own specific ways, on generating more revenue and/or more profit; a disappointingly small percentage of these businesses have achieved that aim.

After much reflection, review of the data, and assessment of the defining factors between those businesses who do and those businesses who don’t achieve success, I have come to a few powerful conclusions.

Businesses that really drive transformation or change have a few very specific things in common and it’s these three things that you should be focusing on if you are serious about changing the results in your business:

1. They don’t obsess about the idea!

Most truly great business leaders and entrepreneurs have no challenge coming up with great ideas around how to drive the business forward, but the idea alone has very little impact on business success.  It is how well the idea is implemented that really dictates how much benefit it brings to the business.  Implementing new things requires being very good at delivering change. Businesses who never turn ideas into reality have poor expectation setting and poor communication and they don’t focus on supporting their team through behavioural change.  They rarely have a healthy culture of accountability.  Businesses who really see significant growth in short periods of time know that the idea is just the starting point; from there they invest a significant amount of time creating a means of implementing those ideas in the organisation. If you really want to grow with ease, use your idea at the starting point.

Don’t obsess about your idea – focus on mastering the change you need to implement it.

2. They invest in the drivers of the engine!

In really high growth businesses, the executive team are responsible for innovating really powerful ideas. They are rarely willing or able to get stuck into the detail that is required to drive these ideas forward, so they make sure that they recruit and develop a team of people who are able to follow through on the innovation.  They drive from the top, they set clear objectives and ownerships, and they provide a structure of support and accountability that allows the senior leadership team to deliver real results.  The senior leadership team behave as the engine that drives the frontline team members to the change.  Without a really strong engine in your business you have no forum for accountability, you have no one managing expectations, and effectively your change never moves from idea to reality. The people who are responsible for making the new idea happen need time and investment to ensure they are driving the right behaviours.

Don’t under estimate the investment in people that is required to really embed great practice.

3. They make customer centric decisions!

Running a really powerful business is about quality decision making. We need to make decisions about software and systems, we need to make decisions about services products, we have to make decisions about hiring and firing, we have to analyse the successes and relative failures of the business, and we have to determine whether our business is shaped in an effective way to deliver the desired outcomes.  If we have no framework for making these decisions we run the risk of making them in an inconsistent and low quality way.  Organisations who align all of their decision making and business planning around what best serves the customer and how they help meet the customer’s needs, are businesses that make cost effective decisions.  Businesses that fail to achieve their goals make internalised decisions based on what best serves the business or the individuals working in the business – these decisions do not lead to profit.

Don’t make any key decisions without an acute idea of how they will impact on customer experience.

To overcome these potential profit fails we have created the Proficient-ly Profit Triangle: