From Panic to Profit (eBook)

Uncover Value, Boost Revenue, and Grow Your Business with the 80/20 Principle

Bill Canady (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
282 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-394-33159-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Structured corporate strategy to launch ambitious and consistent growth in just 100 days

Armed with the hands-on guidance in From Panic to Profit: Uncover Value, Boost Revenue, and Grow Your Business with the 80/20 Principle, companies of any size and in any industry can pivot from panic to profit in a 100-day turnaround using just four steps: set the goal, develop the strategy, build the structure, and launch the action plan. To set the stage for the four steps, this book first empowers leaders to replace their fear, uncertainty, and doubt with confidence from segment-by-segment insights into their business, its customers, its products, and its markets.

Written by Bill Canady, seasoned CEO with more than 30 years of experience as a global business executive, this book explores key concepts including:

• Unlocking the power of the 80/20 principle to boost company revenue, reduce costs, and accelerate profits
• Creating a business plan designed for continuous monitoring and improvement over a three- to five-year growth program
• Growing both organically and through strategic acquisition, developing the talent, expertise, and innovation needed to win in today's increasingly dynamic markets

From Panic to Profit: Increase Revenue, Uncover Value, Boost Revenue, and Grow Your Business with the 80/20 Principle lays out an essential blueprint for all entrepreneurs, executives, managers, and business leaders seeking the confidence and tools they need to help their organizations reach great heights.

BILL CANADY has worked for over thirty years as a global business executive across a variety of industries and markets focused on industrial and consumer products and services. He is CEO of two companies, with a combined revenue of $2.5 billion.

Textauszug

Introduction: The Keys to theGrowth Kingdom

Please don't skip this section. This book lays out a set of processes and practices that will grow your business. More precisely, it lays out a set of processes and practices that will earn you the right to grow and accelerate that growth.

So don't turn the page. Not yet.

Because if your business is failing, faltering, or successfully treading water, you need to earn the right to grow before you can grow. And even if your business is already growing, but you want to make it grow more and faster, you still need to earn the right to grow.

I promise that I am going to tell you how to earn this right. But converting that how to action requires that you and your entire organization commit to and align on the processes and practices of a Profitable Growth Operating System® (PGOS) driven by the 80/20 Pareto principle. If you are not familiar with 80/20, don't skip ahead. All you need to know at the moment is that 80/20 is a natural law of input and output that tells us roughly 80 percent of consequences come from just 20 percent of causes. Put another way, just 20 percent of your effort is critical in its effect while 80 percent is trivial.

For now, you need to know that commitment to the 80/20 PGOS is everything and that this is not an opinion. It is a fact founded on experience, and I have the receipts to prove it, which I'll soon show you. Just don't skip this section. Okay?

***

There is a rule so important that somebody a long time ago wrote it out in Latin: Omne trium perfectum—“Everything that comes in threes is perfect.” If you are Christian, the rule of three brings to mind the Holy Trinity. If you are a Wiccan, you know that whatever energy a person puts into the world comes back to them times three. Aviators use a rule of three to calculate the rate of descent in terms of altitude versus travel distance. C++ programmers have their own rule of three concerning class method definitions. Hematologists exercise a rule of three to check the accuracy of blood counts. Medical chemists observe a rule of three in dealing with lead‐like compounds. Statisticians employ a rule for three to calculate a confidence limit in the absence of observable events. Survivalists prioritize survival steps using their own rule of three. Storytellers have always loved the rule of three. It's the Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and The Three Musketeers. Sloganeers of every stripe revel in the rule of three: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; stop, look, and listen; stop, drop, and roll; turn on, tune in, drop out; Snap, Crackle, and Pop; government of the people, by the people, for the people.

I could go on. But I won't—except to point out that the United States national government is conspicuously founded on the rule of three, with power divided among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, which work together yet are opposed.

Without doubt, there is a special mojo in the rule of three. So, here is the rule of three any business that needs or wants to earn the right to grow must not only apply but commit to across the entire organization. Fail to do this, and the processes and practices that you find in this book will produce results at best suboptimal and, at worst, useless.

***

Most of this book is about processes, practices, and the tools required to apply and deploy them. I must state the obvious: all the processes, practices, and tools described in the pages that follow need people to use them. All you really must know about people in general is that there is no business without them. But about one category of people—leaders—you need to know something more: to lead a business to profitable growth requires not a single standout leader but a triumvirate. They are a visionary, one prophet (sometimes more), and multiple operators.

The Visionary

The visionary is the first as well as the final decision‐maker within the organization, which almost always means the CEO. Within the triumvirate and the entire organization, the visionary is the highest authority in the business. They make decisions and issues directives to other executives and managers, who are held accountable for acting on them. The visionary sets the strategic goal for the team as part of a three‐ or five‐year business plan. The goal is almost always a target number. The visionary holds the team members accountable for making progress toward the goal and ultimately achieving it. The visionary ensures alignment of all team members by making commitment to and alignment on the goal and all aspects of the PGOS a condition of employment. To ensure alignment, commitment, and continuous improvement, the visionary conducts regular reviews, always holding team members accountable for the results.

The Four Commandments

The visionary holds team members accountable for obeying The Four Commandments:

1. Be on pace.
2. Produce no surprises.
3. Be data‐driven.
4. Believe that results matter.

Although the decisions of the visionary must be firm and unambiguous, they are, like everything else in any organization, dedicated to continuous improvement and subject to further decisions that might modify some or all the CEO's preceding decisions.

One entity limits the power of the CEO. In corporations that have a board of directors, the board might operate as a check on CEO authority. More significant for this book, however, the visionary—the CEO—like every other leader and manager in the organization, must be committed to the entire program of the PGOS, including all its practices and processes. This commitment is so critical to the success of the PGOS deployment that it must be clearly laid down as a condition of employment.

Why don't we just call the visionary by the corporate title, CEO? Because visionary embodies the essential idea of vision. In a company earning its right to grow, the visionary understands the present state of the enterprise and, with imagination and wisdom, leads the planning for a desired future state.

For starters, think Henry Ford or Steve Jobs, but get more specific. I see the visionary role not as that of some soothsaying fortune teller but as a person quite literally with vision. Set aside Henry Ford and Steve Jobs and think instead of air traffic controllers. They have an incredibly demanding job, coordinating takeoffs, approaches, and landings at busy airports, continuously monitoring highly dynamic situations with many moving parts, calmly and concisely communicating with pilots, telling them what actions to take and when to take them.

How do they manage this? How do they keep the planes from crashing into each other?

Ask an air traffic controller, and you will get a straightforward answer. They learn to “get the picture.” That's what they call it. In fact, they cultivate what the French call coup d'oeil, which can be translated as the “glance that takes in a comprehensive view.” The phrase is usually applied to military leaders. For instance, Napoleon had coup d'oeil, General Ulysses S. Grant had it, and General George S. Patton had it: an ability to take in, at a glance, a vast dynamic battlefield. It is a moving picture, and every successful air traffic controller has this get‐the‐picture coup d'oeil ability to comprehend the situation and act on it in real time. Aided by sophisticated radar, they create in their mind's eyes real‐time visions revealing each aircraft in relation to every other aircraft within a certain space. Every decision made and every instruction given to each pilot is formulated and communicated within the frame of the picture. The required visionary faculty of a PGOS‐driven CEO is vividly analogous to that of an air traffic controller.

Now, because all the parts of the business picture are, like the planes approaching and departing the airport, always in motion, the visionary must be super agile and ultra‐focused. Deploying a strategic business plan within the guardrails of the processes and practices we call PGOS transforms static strategy into dynamic deployment. The relentlessly running clock certainly creates pressure on the visionary, but it also means that the visionary's outlook cannot be of some imagined static state of perfection but must be a real‐life process of progress toward a goal, which, like everything else, is subject to revision in the face of reality.

The Prophet

The first company I was hired to run (by the private equity firm that had purchased it) was a conglomerate of decentralized businesses sprawled out over diverse markets—medical, technical, and industrial.

In theory, 80/20 guided the entire conglomerate. In practice, unit presidents generally went their own way. At first, I brought in outside consultant trainers to drill 80/20 and related processes and practices into our bundle of businesses. They were good consultants and competent trainers. But they were making painfully slow progress, during which the conglomerate limped along, the ongoing victim of suboptimization. That is when I realized that we needed to internalize 80/20 and our other aligned processes. The only way to do this efficiently and on pace was to bring it all, the whole program, totally...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.4.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• Schlagworte: 80 20 rule • Business Development • Business environment • Business Growth • Business Strategy • Business Value • corporate business model • Corporate Growth • Corporate mission • corporate pivot • Corporate Planning • Corporate Strategy
• ISBN-10: 1-394-33159-2 / 1394331592
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-33159-8 / 9781394331598