the strategy circle

Author: Mignon Keyser

Trust as a strategic lever and cultural imperative makes economic sense

One of the most important strategic and cultural levers that exists in an organisation is trust. It is often neglected, misunderstood and badly handled. This costs companies and organisations a surprising amount of time, energy and money.

Strategy

I define strategy as making the best possible use of your resources and capabilities. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt. Trust has a massive impact on the way that resources are managed, the most precious of which are time, energy and money, and the people that make your organisation possible. One of the most fascinating resources I have encountered as I have learned and grappled with trust in organisations is the Edelman Trust Barometer which shows graphically, through clear research what trust provides in an economy. This is a global measure, but it plays out in smaller organisations too. Trust is a strategic lever.

Cultural

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Peter Drucker, emphasises that a company’s culture, its shared values, beliefs and employee behaviors, has a greater impact on success than its strategic plan. Trust is at the heart of how people in an organisation behave, which impacts the bottom line and impact that organization is able to have. Edelman believes that trust is the ultimate currency in the relationship that all institutions – business, governments, NGOs and media – build with their stakeholders. As an Organisational Development facilitator and coach, I most commonly work with the internal stakeholders (employees) of organisations. And as is the nature of these things, if internal trust in an organisation is low, it will reflect out into relationships with clients and beneficiaries. This costs money and can sometimes even threaten an organisation. When people don’t trust you, they don’t want to deal with you. Trust is a cultural lever.

Economic sense

Steven MR Covey wrote a book called The Speed of Trust, which unpacks the economic and financial cost of low trust environments. He calculated the cost of fraud, bureaucracy, waste, dishonesty, disengagement, time theft, office politics, unproductive meetings, interdepartmental conflict, policies and procedures and churn of both employees and customers, and found that trust puts a huge frictional cost onto organisational life of billions of lost dollars a year.

When people are wasting time, demotivated or dishonest, the financial consequences for a business become very tangible. Employee churn costs such as hiring, training and firing people are more than people think. It costs far more to engage a new client than to keep clients, so low trust is very expensive. Low trust environments breed dishonesty and time theft. Trust is an economic lever.

How to build trust

Most people relate to trust as something that is given and earned, and once broken cannot be repaired. This is not a useful way to think about it. Trust is generated between people all the time, through many small and big experiences and moments.

Trust is something that can be built, constructed, and maintained. There are some very clear frameworks that can be used to talk about trust as an organisation, or between people in the organisation. Fundamentally it comes down to developing practices and processes that generate trust. This will occur across a number of aspects of an organisation.

There are structural issues that support or destroy trust, such as the contracts, agreements and policies in a business, and there are communication practices necessary to build, maintain and restore trust. It requires careful setup and good maintenance, and it’s an excellent investment in any business.

The advantages of building trust are that you increase productivity and innovation, as well as improving employee engagement and morale. The superpower that trust offers is making better, faster decisions. It also solves some serious problems, like preventing micro-management, solving conflict more effectively and reducing employee and client turnover. It’s an all-round organisational multivitamin!

There are amazing resources available to understand trust better. Brene Brown’s team developed a wonderful tool called BRAVING, which breaks down the behaviours in a useful way.

If you are a leader or manager who suspects that some of your organisational issues might be trust related, contact me for an exploration session to see how I could support you to think about it either on your own in a coaching session, or with your team.

Mignon@thestrategycircle.co.za

6 March 2026
Making sure you are working on what matters most – the power of priority

You are struggling to work out what to focus on, what is important and how you can move forward. You are stuck and frustrated and possibly overwhelmed…

Many organisations get stuck in a time trap, not having enough time to work ON the business, because you are stuck working IN the business.

I often meet leaders and organisations that work incredibly hard, who are deeply committed to the results they are trying to achieve, and are frustrated because they feel that they are not getting there. What often happens is that they are so stuck in operational day-to-day thinking, that they get overwhelmed and are not always getting to what is important. This is far more common that most people realise. Taking the time to ensure that you are working on what matters makes a material difference to your results, stress levels and sustainability.

First, you have to clarify what matters and why it matters. Priorities are not always obvious and can often be counterintuitive. For example, sometimes in order to create capacity, you have to make time for your team, rather than just get a new team member. Identifying what is most important is the first step. The second step is to figure out how to make sure that what is important is done first, supported and the scaffolding is created to ensure its success. This helps with the overwhelming feeling of being too busy.

Step 1 – Identifying what is important.

This is different for every organisation, but critical to the sustainability of all. Understanding your values, and how you create value in the world by what you produce or offer, is critical to long-term success and sustainable outcomes. We don’t often think about these things because we are too busy doing, but that can be counterproductive. Taking time to think about how to organise resources in sustainable ways is essential to success (profitability or impactability).

This is basically the reason for strategy. Strategy and strategic questions assist you and your team to identify the crucial work for your organisation to grow and sustain. What are the most important things for you and your team to get right in the next 6, 12, 18 months for your organization to thrive and produce the results/impact you want?

Steven Covey writes about “First things First” in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, an oldie, but a goodie! Another great resource is Eisenhower’s quadrant. It’s a fantastic way to work with day to day priorities, and it is still useful to do strategic thinking because it looks at your context and asks questions you don’t often ask yourself.

When you are very busy with the operational realities of your work, it can be very challenging to make time and space for working on what really matters. Operational emergencies and firefighting will often crowd out important work that is not urgent (see quadrant above). The real engine room of growth and sustainability is working in the second quadrant, this is often where process, structure, team development and culture live.

Take a moment to answer the question below.

What are the most important RESULTS you would like to create in your business in the next 12 months?

Think about the 5 or 6 things you really need to get right in the next 6-12 months for your organisation to thrive. Write it in the present tense as a clear tangible outcome. Example: We are profitable and have reduced expenses. We have an effective website that generates leads.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Step 2 – How do we make sure what matters is done first?

Once you have identified your priorities, it is then absolutely critical to ensure that they are translated into time and space in your schedule and in your team’s schedule. This next part of the work is to allocate the time you have to ensure that the important things get done first. This is trickier than it seems and takes practice. I have seen many beautiful strategy processes gather dust and never really materialise because people couldn’t figure out how to fit it into an already demanding work schedule.

One of my favourite tools for doing this is the Glass Jar exercise.

Glass Jar: Time available in a day – 24 hours

Rocks: Big important tasks or high level goals for your business and life – These go into your schedule first, make sure you and your team focus on them every day.

Pebbles: Tasks with average importance – try and delegate as many as you can.

Sand: Small, unimportant tasks – this is where the most time gets wasted, try and get rid of them.

Don’t start with easy, unimportant stuff! If you think about what you answered in the previous question, they would be the rocks here. They require focus and often are difficult and challenging tasks. For this reason, we often do the easier, less challenging tasks first and then end up not having time for the REALLY important things. This affects our profitability, our results and our stress levels.

What do you need to delegate or get rid of urgently to make the best use of your time?

Identify the low value activities that take up too much time and could be delegated to someone else.

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

Making the time to identify what your priorities are and how to focus on them is a very powerful way to create capacity in your life and organisation, as well as achieving the results you want, as opposed to being on autopilot and not being able to see the wood for the trees. It’s not easy, it takes considerable time and effort to make this work in an organisation.

Make the time, it’s worth it!

If you are thinking “yes, this sounds great!”, but don’t know where to start, consider contacting me for an exploration session to see how I could support you and your team to untangle priorities.

Mignon@thestrategycircle.co.za

13 February 2026
The value of good process as a source of capacity

When appropriate process and structure are applied in emergent and thoughtful ways in an organisation, it can increase the capacity and longevity of the organisation in astonishing ways. Good process and structure can leverage people’s time and abilities, information, assets, products and services in meaningful and measurable ways. As you grow, what is appropriate keeps changing, as the world changes faster and faster, organisations need to take time to think about how they organise themselves.

I often describe myself as a process junkie. I have a deep and abiding love for good processes. When I am not sure how to approach something, or I am dealing with a challenging situation, my first impulse is always to find a process that will help me.

Process can sound like such a dry word and can feel restrictive and prescriptive when done in the wrong way. People can resist process and make staying on track very difficult. When process meets a real need, is co-created as much as possible and is implemented as a living thing, it can be deeply transformative in a team and organisation.

Many people think you don’t really need process in smaller organisations, but a well designed process can make a HUGE difference in smaller organisations. Anywhere from 10 to 200 people, process is the gamechanger.

Process as flow

Process is the ability of an organisation to flow in an aligned way, reducing friction, misunderstanding, duplication and focusing on what is most important.

Imagine the flow of work being unencumbered by unnecessary steps, paperwork, conflict or management approval, it can reduce the time it takes to do something in surprising ways.

Good process is one of the most powerful ways to create new capacity in your organisation. It’s much cheaper than throwing people at the problem. Often who you need to hire next can be clearly identified when the process is clear. If the process is clear, roles are clearer, expectations are explicit instead of implicit and everyone has a better understanding of what the business/organisation needs from them. This buys time and sharpens focus.

Structure and scaffolding

Scaffolding is what you use to build something, before it can stand on its own.

I think of structure in an organisation as the scaffolding that allows people to be structured and clear as they are building, making or creating something. It might look like role descriptions and regular check-ins with your team to understand how they are doing, or it might look like a communication framework that allows everyone to know what’s going on so they can make decisions. It may be a formalised financial performance meeting. All these are ways of organising people, work and resources within a clear design, helping everyone understand and make sense of what can often be chaotic, unclear and subsequently exhausting. Fundamentally this is about capacity and sustainability.

The importance of emergence

It is critical to understand that at different times in an organisation’s lifecycle it’s going to need different processes and structures. Processes need to be developmentally appropriate. What is useful to 10 or 15 people no longer works for 30. What worked for 30 is not going to work for 120. This means that you have to get comfortable with the fact that process and structure will be emergent and will need to be adaptable as the business/organisation grows or shrinks. I noticed during COVID that a number of organisations shrank their numbers, and counterintuitively became more productive and efficient. No one saw that coming! Growing is not always a function of the team getting bigger.

Leveraging time and ability

The time it takes to map out the process flow, especially in a smaller organisation is worth every minute spent on it. The return on investment can be hundreds of hours of wasted time identified, reduced and eliminated. It creates awareness in team members about where things can fall into gaps and get lost. It can assist team members to realise how important their ‘small’ piece is to another department, and how critical it is to the overall success of the organisation. It identifies blocks in the system that devour time. It identifies gaps in the team, where there may be a need for a very specific skill set, or a general skill set. Mostly it gives people time back, a lot of it.

One of the unexpected outcomes of a process like this, is that the team develops an understanding of what happens across the business. This means they can identify problems that might affect other parts of the business and can be proactive in solving or communicating. There is a beautiful alignment that happens and people often express gratitude for understanding what everyone else does and how they fit into the larger picture.

If you are interested in finding out more about how to create useful process in your organisation contact Mignon at Mignon@thestrategycircle.co.za

12 January 2026
Managing your mental and emotional resilience is your number one leadership priority
Many people who are drawn to leadership roles, or who are entrepreneurial in nature, tend to be very responsible. This is a wonderful trait and creates a great deal of value in all aspects of one’s life.

However, there can be a dark side to being responsible for ‘everything’. I often see this with leaders, they feel they have to take care of EVERYTHING. This is not humanly possible and can cause real stress and discomfort as your business or organization grows and there is more and more to take care of. It is often when we are overwhelmed and stressed that our personal issues tend to bleed into our work and we become less productive and can actually cause problems in our teams.

The personal and the professional

There is a very misleading illusion that our personal and professional lives are not connected. The more responsibility you take on as a leader, the less true that assumption is. Stress and overwhelm will tend to take us to our least useful behaviours. I have noticed that very stressed leaders can either become chaotic or over-controlling (any number of behaviors can play out here) none of which are useful in a team or organisation that wants to perform well. The leader of an organisation can often discharge stress into the team in unconscious ways. It’s 100% human and most people do it until they learn not to do it, because it’s really not useful or helpful. The cost of stressed leadership behaviour can be legion. Losing good team members, creating a toxic environment where people don’t feel safe, reducing trust (I wrote at length about that here) and impacting many different aspects of a business. Mostly culture and morale. Becoming uncontained as a leader due to exhaustion and stress is very dangerous to the health of an organisation and the health of the leader.

Responsibility and Pushing yourself

I have noticed that sometimes leaders can get into a mode where due to their own responsibility bias, they can push themselves too hard. Yes, this is part of the drive and success right? And it has a shadow, because it can push you into the red and beyond your SUSTAINABLE capacity. I have witnessed leaders burn themselves out, and then take years to recover. This is very expensive! And exhausting!

Pushing others

Yes, but pushing others is part of being a leader. Yes and no. When the pushing is unconscious, fear based and born from overwhelm it really does not create anything of value in a team. Pushing that is created with good process, checks and balances and the healthy oversight of a resourced leader can produce amazing results. And the main difference? The mental health and emotional resilience of the leader (or leadership team) as well as the quality of the processes and the shared maps of understanding that have been created in an organisation. I have seen teams burnt out and many years of building and value creation lost to unconscious pushing.

The cost and damage of burnout

Let’s be clear, everyone, and all teams at some stages in an organisation’s life need to go into the red for a while.

And most people can sustain a couple of weeks, and maybe even a couple of months of pushing hard. And then they have to rest, and if they dont…

One of the casualties of exhaustion and overwhelm that goes on for too long, is that people start making really poor decisions. Shortcuts are taken, communication is compromised. Client relationships can start to show cracks, internal relationships can become brittle and testy. People start getting sick more often, things get more and more behind and tempers flare. All of these are warning signs to slow down, take some perspective and regroup. But what tired leaders tend to do, is just push harder, themselves and everyone else. Again, what makes the most difference in this situation is when a leader is resourced and emotionally resilient and can support their team to make the best of the situation, as opposed to actively making the situation worse.

Your number one leadership priority

If you are the leader in your space, then you have to make sure that you are well, resilient and can make good decisions on behalf of your team and organisation.

This looks like:
1. Get enough rest – figure out what real, rejuvenating rest looks like for you. Daily, weekly, monthly, annually. This could be a run, a swim, enough sleep, quarterly long weekends away in the mountains with your family or friends. A decent holiday at least once a year. There are many ways that you can achieve this, but put it in your schedule like your life depends on it.
1. Do your personal work – As a leader, doing your personal work is critical, know yourself, be aware of your triggers and patterns. Understand how you operate. There are tools, books, courses, so many ways to learn about yourself, and by doing so, learning about others. This is a key leadership skill. Make sure you are dealing with yourself so that you do not play out unconscious destructive patterns in your organization. “If you don’t heal what hurt you you will bleed on people who didn’t cut you” – Unknown
1. Get support – support looks different for different people, what I will say is that you need someone, or a number of people in different roles who are listening to you,soundboarding your thinking, assisting you to manage your stress, and taking care of your wellbeing. Create structures of support. This could look like a monthly therapy session, a coaching relationship, a group of peers who have your back, a friend you can really talk to or a personal trainer who keeps you in shape. Pick your medicine, but make sure that you are keeping your mind clear and untangled, and when it gets tangled, you have a way to deal with it.
1. Make time in your schedule – to do what you know nourishes or feeds you, whatever it is that keeps you sane. Sane keeps you and your team from burning out. Take the time, no one is going to hand it to you, you have to be very proactive about this.
If you do this, if you make this investment, it will pay you back in time saved, relationships retained, drama avoided, conflict side stepped, energy managed and health preserved. Totally worth it.

If this resonated with you and you would like to find out more, or be supported with this, you are welcome to contact me on mignon@thestrategycircle.co.za
13 December 2025
How to grow your business with innovative CEO thinking
I have worked with over 600 businesses in the last 18 years and one of the refrains I hear the most from businesses of between 5 and 50 employees is, “I’m stuck! I’m so busy and overwhelmed, I can’t see the wood for the trees and I’m just surviving, I don’t know how much longer I can do this!”

I hear this from passionate people who are dedicated to their business and their staff. People who have been in business for 10 years and more (which makes them business superheroes) but are not where they thought they would be, questioning whether this business has been a good choice for them.

It always makes me sad to hear this. I know how hard it is to get past year two, never mind get to year ten with staff! Nobody really understands how hard it is, except others who are also in it.

Most small business owners (in my mind that means 5 to 50 employees) are so involved in the daily operations of their business that they do not have the time or energy to work ON the business – doing strategy, business development and thinking about the money beyond sending out invoices and chasing payments.

A small business owner has an astounding number of things to think about, do and organise. This is not for sissies. Only the toughest and most determined people are able to get to this point in a business and it is massively challenging.

In my experience, small businesses only grow sustainably when the owner has extracted themselves from the day-to-day operations and made time for the CEO role. CEO in a small business? Yes, absolutely.

People confuse the role with the person. Just because the business does not have a full-time CEO, does not mean that the ROLE is not important. I would like to suggest that if business owners made the time to look at the role of a CEO and to allocate even 20% of their time to those activities, that the business would grow and flourish in a whole new way.

What does this actually look like?

The ROLE of CEO in a small business

For obvious reasons the role of a CEO in a corporate is quite distinct from the role of a CEO in a small company, but the importance of the role is the same.

The CEO is responsible for leading the overall success of the organisation. They have to develop business strategy and plans that articulate strategic goals that are measurable and implementable, outlining the ways in which the business will grow and become more sustainable over time. The CEO ensures that the business is profitable, not just busy and that the business is properly managed in all the key areas. The focus here is growth.
- Marketing and business development – ensuring that they understand the market, opportunities and industry developments.
- Finance – making high-level investment decisions and managing the fiscal well-being of the company.
- Human resources – understanding what the business needs from its employees and ensuring that the right people are in the right job.
- Systems and processes – ensuring that the business takes the time to create the systems and processes that create efficiencies and keep the business relevant, especially regarding technology.
  Managing key stakeholder / client relationships to ensure that communication is appropriate and strategic alliances are maintained.
- Creating and managing the culture of the organisation in order to retain good people and create an environment that promotes performance.
This role is different to an operations manager and this distinction is CRITICAL to the overall success of the business. Most people get trapped in the Operations Manager role. Many entrepreneurs will argue that this is their most valuable role. Yes and no.

Yes, an Operations Manager role is essential to the business. This role is important because it delivers on the sales promise of the business. This is about delivery and the focus here is efficiencies. Even in this role, too many entrepreneurs are doing too much and not managing enough.
- Management of tasks and efficiencies – ensures that proper management activities are taking place across the areas of delivery. Operational meetings, reporting and performance tracking.
- Planning – ensuring that the work of the business is going according to plan and that schedules, logistics and calendars are working in an aligned way.
- Resource planning – ensuring that everyone has what they need to do their work properly, that the team knows what is expected of them and what their standard of delivery is.
- Delivery of the service or product – ensuring that the client gets what they expect, when they expect it.
- Budgeting – managing expenses and ensuring that money is well tracked and allocated.
- Systems and administration – ensuring that all administrative tasks that support the successful delivery of product or service to the client takes place.
What happens in many businesses is that neither of these roles is properly understood or implemented. This results in lost opportunities, sluggish growth and lots of stress.

To give an example:

Angela’s story

Angela* runs a successful Food Delivery business and was feeling stuck. She felt that her ability to get to the activity that allows the business to grow was constantly being overwhelmed by her natural default to operations. She had previously been a very capable operations manager when she took over the business from her husband (who is a serial entrepreneur and already on to the next venture). She was running the business from her comfort zone – operations. She did not even realise that the distinction between the two roles was important. When we brought this to her attention she felt that she did not know how to be a CEO, the label frightened her as she assumed that it meant behaving like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson. These are not useful comparisons for a small company.

With encouragement from us she did some research into what CEOs do and looked to see if she could transfer any of her significant operational abilities to doing the tasks of a CEO. She reported back that understanding the role made a huge difference to how she prioritised what needed to be done for the business to grow. Within two weeks she had reorganised her team and set up a competent Operations Manager, whom she would manage to deal with most of the day-to-day that she had previously spent too much time on. This freed her up to become much more focused on marketing and sales and building a really good team. She is not completely out of the operations; the business is not big enough for that. But she has someone making sure that it’s moving along most of the time so that she can focus on growing the business by working ON the business and not IN the business.

Can a small business afford to have both a CEO and an Operations Manager? Mostly they can’t; but they can organise themselves to ensure that all the key activities of each role are happening. This is the secret, to ensure that time gets made for Growth (CEO) and Efficiencies (Ops Manager) and the entrepreneur can hold these two roles until the business is able to afford another person to hold either role depending on the natural inclination of the business owner. Often business owners love what they do and would much rather hold the operations role than that of CEO, BUT they have to understand the importance of the CEO role for growth and sustainability.

What to do?
1. Make time to understand what CEOs do and what operations managers do.
2. Make time, ANY time, to think with a CEO hat on…..even two hours a week will make a huge difference over time. It’s important to carve out time for each role. It’s important to understand the success strategies for each role and to implement them. This process can be slow, but if it is steady and you keep ensuring that the right activities are taking place, your business will be more successful in the long run. As the CEO you will have to think about things that may not be easy or comfortable for you (which explains the default to operations where you know what you are doing). Find out about strategy and how to do it. Learn about business finances and improving them step by step. Develop your business mindset, read, understand your industry better and adapt what you do to stay relevant. Image result for CEO hat
3. Reorganise the people/resources in your business to give you more time to work ON the business. Examples: get an au pair to fetch your kids and spend that time on marketing and opportunities. Outsource your invoicing/bookkeeping and use that time to create a growth strategy for your business. Take a long hard look at the resources in your business and see who could possibly take some of the operations load off you. If there is no one to do that, you need to reconsider your team. Without this process you are unlikely to grow your business. Even having a decent PA or admin person will free up enough time to put your CEO hat on. You don’t have to pay for a hugely expensive “Operations Manager” you have to buy yourself time to do the two roles properly. It is often helpful to spend an hour or two with an HR consultant who works with small businesses (your HR friend at a big corporate is not going to be any use to you). Let them help you map out a number of scenarios depending on what the business needs. We often get stuck thinking about the people we have instead of the roles we need. Just this small shift in thinking can change your life.
4. Talk to other business owners and find out how they are doing it – it’s always useful to talk to people who are also doing it or have done it. Don’t take business advice from people who are not running their own business – you don’t take parenting advice from people who don’t have kids, do you?
5. Set up simple management structures that will support you to run the business more efficiently and with greater clarity. This may sound daunting, but simple clear processes could really make a difference in your business. It’s important to distinguish between management processes (ON the business) and operational processes (IN the business).
Below is a list of critical ON the business priorities
- Understand that what the BUSINESS needs is most important, this is Strategy 101.
- Define clear roles and responsibilities (mapped out and agreed with staff).
- Ensure processes and procedures are clear and understood (mapped out and agreed with staff).
- Prioritise that management activity takes place – in regular meetings with set agendas, working on clearly defined goals that inform everyone’s work.
- Develop a clear plan that is systematically implemented over time.
In conclusion, I would like to emphasise that if you want your business to grow and run smoothly without you being in a constant state of overwhelm, you have to make a distinction between these two important roles and make sure they are understood and implemented thoughtfully. The results will make it worthwhile, I promise.
12 February 2021
Can business peer groups make you more successful?
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As a growing entrepreneur you will know how hard it is to run a business. There is so much to do and not enough hours in the day or people in the team.

Being a successful entrepreneur means understanding that you don’t have all the answers. Working with other entrepreneurs in a business peer group to ask and answer the real questions sets you up to win.

Business peer groups are a very valuable resource to a growing entrepreneur. They provide a soundboard, help in making important decisions and a problem solving forum.

Here are some key areas that a business peer group can assist with.

Taking time out for strategic input

Strategy is an essential ingredient to ongoing success as a business and yet not enough entrepreneurs make time for it. We all know that it is important to take time out to think and figure out your next steps. It’s important to get strategic input, but how to make the time and who to consult? Tricky questions, there are so many options at the moment, everyone and their aunty is currently advising entrepreneurs and it can be difficult to figure out what the best use of your time and money are.

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Theodore Roosevelt.

I have found that this is at the heart of good strategy and entrepreneurship.

It’s all about resources: time, money, people.

Most entrepreneurs are really busy. More often than not, they are the manager, leader and head implementer all rolled into one. It helps to take time out to separate the roles and think about what you are doing. Most of us get stuck in the how thinking, which can be incredibly narrow as a focus. Then there is why as Simon Sinek explains in this great clip.

Taking the time out of the operations of your business to think more about what needs to be done is incredibly valuable. Steven Covey has a lovely analogy “Imagine a crew clearing a path through the jungle. The workers are hacking away with their machetes, while the managers are making schedules and encouraging the machete wielders. The leader climbs the tallest tree, looks around and hollers down to the crew below, “Wrong jungle!” This article illustrates it further.

The problem with doing strategy on your own or just with your partners is that you often get stuck in your own world view, missing possible opportunities and blind spots. Having other smart, capable people to bounce your ideas off is a much more successful way of looking at your business.

Only other entrepreneurs really understand

Most people with jobs do not understand the stress and difficulty of running your own business. A question I often ask is “If you are a parent, do you take parenting advice from people who don’t have kids?” No, I thought not. Although there are a great deal of amazing advisors and coaches and well-meaning business accelerators out there, many of the advisors have desk jobs or are only responsible for themselves or some associates, they don’t know what it’s like to worry about getting all your people paid at the end of the month.

Other entrepreneurs GET IT! They know, because they have walked that mile and have solved problems that may still be in your future. This is why business peer groups are such valuable resources. You have uninterrupted face to face time, in a safe confidential environment to share what is REALLY going on in your business with people who understand, care and will help you work it out. This is valuable.

Time, one of your most valuable resources has to be leveraged

As a business owner there are so many demands on your time. Your clients take a lot of your bandwidth, then, you still need to deal with your team and ensure that everyone is on track, and we have not yet considered planning, financial management, marketing and sales. Oh, and don’t forget eating healthy, getting some exercise and being an awesome parent/partner…

I know, right?

This is where business peer groups really give you bang for your buck. In a short period of time you have access to other likeminded business people who are able to advise you, ask great questions, help you make decisions and you are developing deep, trust based relationships that encourage referrals.

One of the most important things to do is to prioritize your time. This means that you have to be really clear on what results you are trying to achieve so that you can focus on those activities. Staying focused can be hard when you are the leader.

It helps to have a group of people who know what you are trying to achieve and can focus you when you get too operational. It’s like having a board of directors, but less scary.

Why a business peer group can help you succeed
1. Make better decisions regarding those important issues that are difficult to think through all on your own – this results in a more successful business over time as others question your assumptions, point our your blind spots and share resources when you need them most. This is where the real return on investment occurs.
2. Get great advice from people who will ask questions you never dreamed of and have your best interests at heart, you are not paying them so they will give it to you straight. Many of them will have real experience of what you are going through. They will share their knowledge, resources and time if needed.
3. Save money and time – you have dedicated time in a month with other entrepreneurs who are all experts in their field, all in one place and for less than the cost of a coaching session you solve problems, get trust based contacts and opportunities.
4. Save yourself expensive mistakes by learning from others with real life situations and solutions. There is nothing quite like observing someone else deal with something and supporting them to deal with it to learn.
5. Grow your business mindset and understanding of business as you work ON your business and not in your business with people from diverse industries and world views. This means that you have an incredibly rich lens focused on your business once a month. You are also involved in solving business problems you may not have faced yet; this raises your awareness and develops your map of the territory.
6. Build trust based business relationships that over time result in more business and support that keeps you motivated and on track. As the group get to know each other the trust that naturally occurs as people face difficult things together creates strong bonds and referrals and references are a natural consequence. People like to do business with people they like and trust as Stephen Covey explains. This more than anything else will contribute to your success.
It’s important to understand that this is not networking. When you are networking you have to have your game face on. You are out in the world looking good and convincing people you are solid. A business peer group is real, real problems, real solutions, real connection, and real trust.

In conclusion, it has been my experience that having a business peer group that supports your development as an entrepreneur can be a game changer. Entrepreneurs who are supported are far more likely to succeed than those that are not.

If you are interested finding out more about such a group contact us on www.thestrategycircle.co.za

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12 February 2021
Why peer groups are a valuable use of precious time
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I work with entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs as a strategic facilitator and organizational development coach. Over the years I have been involved with over 500 entrepreneurs solving business problems and finding ways to thrive and be successful.

I have had plenty of time and opportunity to observe what they need and what they struggle with. There are a number of issues that often emerge across the board.
1. Being an entrepreneur is a lonely path. Mostly entrepreneurs are blazing their own trail and finding new ways of doing things in the world, disrupting and innovating. As amazing as this is – it means that nobody can give you a fool proof formula for success, because by its very nature its emerging.
2. The skills that got you started are not the skills that will help you grow and scale. The agile, disruptive quick thinking that got you going will frustrate and damage a growing team that needs clarity, process and support.
3. The transition from the person who gets it all done to the person who needs to delegate properly and manage resources, is really really HARD. I have seen this trip up too many entrepreneurs to mention. The only ones that go on to thrive, are the ones who are able to manage this transition well.
4. Taking good enough care of yourself so that you don’t end up selling the business or quitting for the lack of a decent holiday.
Having said all this, most people with jobs do not understand the stress and difficulty of running your own business. Most people romanticize it and think ‘If I ran my own business I would take time off with my kids” (insert your version of that – surf more, make more art etc.) Nobody, except other entrepreneurs really understand what you are dealing with. Definitely not someone with a job (bank managers, consultants – pretty much most of the people that put themselves out there as advisors to entrepreneurs).

But other entrepreneurs GET IT! They know, because they have walked that mile and have solved problems that may still be in your future. This is why business peer groups are such valuable resources. You have uninterrupted face to face time, in a safe confidential environment to share what is REALLY going on in your business with people who understand, care and will help you work it out. This is PRECIOUS beyond words.

Its important to understand that this is not networking .When you are networking you have to have your game face on. This is real, real problems, real solutions, not a sophisticated sales pitch.

What would you get from your peers?
1. Save money and time – you spend 2 hours a month with 8 experts all in one place and for less than the cost of a coaching session you get advice, trust based contacts and opportunities.
2. Save yourself expensive mistakes by learning from others with real life situations and solutions.
3. Grow your business mindset and understanding of business as you work ON your business and not in your business for 2 hours a month
4. Get great advice from people who see the world differently, and have your best interests at heart, but you are not paying them so they will give it to you straight.
5. Build trust based business relationships that over time result in more business and support that keeps you motivated and on track.
6. Make better decisions regarding those important issues that are difficult to think through all on your own – this results in a more successful business over time.
Being a successful entrepreneur means understanding that you don’t have all the answers. Working with other entrepreneurs to ask and answer the real questions sets you up to win.

www.thestrategycircle.co.za

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12 February 2021
Witnessing the grief of our greatest value creators

Over the last seven weeks I have been witnessing my clients and peers going through an impossible process. Most of the business owners I work with have taken years to develop teams and to grow their business with incredibly hard work. Building value in the world is not for sissies and it takes a great deal of courage. It is only for the lion hearted.

I have been watching these brave, committed people struggling with the incredible responsibility of being employers in the current situation. They have had to pay people not knowing if or when the money from TERS or UIF would come. They have had sleepless nights and panic attacks worrying about their staff and how they were going to make it all work.

Many of these businesses survived the 2008 crash, built themselves and their teams up again, only to deal with the reality of having their businesses taken from them at this time. I have listened to people who in the past have been the first to talk about opportunity and how South Africa is the place to be. People who were loyal and committed to being here, creating jobs and making a life for themselves and others.

In the last two weeks I have watched a number of these brave people break down under the financial pressure of having to pay staff that are not working and retrench people they were committed to because they can no longer hold out. The runway is gone. I have seen their desperate attempts to hold it together fail in the face of decisions made that they have no control over. I have been witnessing this and I am sad beyond words for them, for the staff they had to let go and for the lives that get shattered in this way.

Acknowledge the grief and distress

I would like to acknowledge publicly how much we owe these people. How much of our economy is created and generated by people who want to make things, do things and build businesses. I have always been in awe of the possibility-thinking and creative production that these small business owners represent for me. They are my favourite people and I have dedicated myself to serving them. I am ashes. I am ashes witnessing what they are having to do. Having to decide who they can continue to pay and who they can’t, knowing that those people that they are putting on short time, or retrenching are unlikely to find jobs anytime soon. Sitting and crying with employees who understand and are broken anyway, sitting through the abuse of those who don’t understand and are angry with them, like it’s their fault. Sitting in the middle of the night trying to figure out how to change, pivot and re arrange the business so that it will survive and all the livelihoods with it.

These traumatised people are our economic engine room. These people who make things happen are demoralised in ways I have never seen before in twenty years of working with entrepreneurs. Some are questioning their commitment to a government that is throwing them under the bus. I have heard people say that they would never have thought that they would get to place of not wanting to build their businesses here, where there seems to be so little respect at the decision making level regarding what it takes to build value, products, incomes streams and jobs.

People are giving up

“…for this first time ever, I am seriously considering packing it all in and going to Canada/Spain/ anywhere else to build all over again. I want to take what is left after this train smash and put it somewhere safe, where it can’t be broken by other people’s dithering.”

Something else I am hearing a lot is “I don’t ever want to be responsible for employing people again. I don’t ever want to have the stress and responsibility again. I’m done. I’m closing my business and I’m going to freelance.” This from people who have worked and hustled and been astoundingly resourceful to keep their business going, do what it takes and keep trucking. They don’t want to anymore. Where does that leave our economy?

Those of us who are in the business of supporting entrepreneurs have been incredibly busy in the last 8 weeks helping people strategize, pivot, think through how they can best use their assets and abilities to survive this time, find a new market, re-organise their processes to be leaner etc. This has all happened and many of these businesses in many ways had time to reset, sort out legacy issues and find smarter ways of doing things. But going into the third month of lock down, with unclear reasoning and a government that seems to have stalled at a crucial juncture, and who possibly are not understanding that the patient may die from the medicine, many are unraveling, their last chances disappearing into the confusion. Loss, and the grief of that loss is what I am witnessing.

One client raged, saying “…how can a business with over a million rand in business on its books close down and I have to tell my 18 staff members that I cannot hold it together anymore, in spite of having work – which we are not allowed to do.”

The fabric of small business in South Africa is tearing, possibly irreparably and I think that this is a disaster for our country, when the most innovative, energetic and productive elements of our society are being dismembered. Our best problem solvers and value creators are too traumatised and angry to care.

Saving lives AND the economy

I know there are reasons, I know there are realities. I know that the government is also dealing with impossible choices. I just thought you should know how hard this is for business owners, who may not only lose their own livelihoods, but those of people they care for and feel responsible for – that is a double trauma that I don’t think is properly appreciated.

It is simple to hit the brakes, but vastly more complex to move forward in a way which balances or acknowledges lives and the economy that supports those lives. Over the last decade, in amongst all the corruption and lack of capability, it has been entrepreneurs and business that have made huge contributions to keep the country afloat – creating value and then being taxed on that value.

What I fear is that they will give up and leave. Give up and stop creating value beyond themselves. That will be a terrible outcome for the people of this country. Please can those in decision making places take a moment to think about how this is going to be avoided, please.

22 May 2020