Make Your Business Grow, Take a Strategic Approach

Citation

Logan, D. (1999), "Make Your Business Grow, Take a Strategic Approach", International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, Vol. 5 No. 6, pp. 318-319. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijebr.1999.5.6.318.2

Any book with the title Make Your Business Grow deserves a great deal of attention. The problem of encouraging indigenous small companies to grow and prosper is one that has confounded and perplexed governments and their agencies from Bolton to the present and will do so into the future.

How do you encourage strong self‐reliant SMEs to develop? Is it better financial systems, support systems? In addition how do we get companies to think long term when short‐term survival occupies 110 per cent of their time? This book obviously addresses the latter issue of longer term planning for companies by their management, their mind set and the organisational culture required.

The author comes from a practitioner background, not an academic one, so it is on the book’s ability to guide an existing small business manager or proprietor to encourage his or her business to grow that the text must be judged. This must also be set in the context of the contribution this book makes to Thomson’s Smart Strategies Series of short guides.

The feeling I have with this book is that it raised more questions than it answered. The key to this type of short strategic book is what you leave out and perhaps this selection has been faulty, particularly the omission of financial strategy and risk which, from my experience as a business adviser, is one of the real and perceived strategy deficiencies of books advising SMEs.

There is a lot of good material in this text, the usual models and the New England School strategists are all there: Porter, Moss Kanter and co.; balanced scorecards, PEST, SWOT all the normal alphabet soup of a starter course in strategy.

The contents follow a logical structure, starting with the justification for the text, the importance of strategy to business, internal and external analysis, the selection of a strategy or “direction”, the evaluation of performance and strategy, organisation, a “checklist” for helping your business to grow and there is case study material in the text in the form of short anecdotes

The problem is in the selection of material targeted at a growing company audience. This is a small audience in itself if you assume that less than 5 per cent of businesses are capable of growing. The managers in these enterprises are the best of the business community, they will need “smart strategies”, and the material needs a logical flow and must be comprehensive enough to cover the basics and finish with a steer to action. The author, by attempting to simplify his message and widen his target readership and his customer profile, is in some part lost.

A major deficiency, however, is the lack of financial material apart from performance data even in summary form, and there is no guide to create a structure for a strategic plan/business plan which is essential to the growing business and the calculation of risk. It seems common sense to assert that:

The smaller the pocket the greater has to be the caution.

The larger the company the more proactive can be its strategy. Reactive strategies need risk assessment, competitive analysis, competitive advantage and value chain analysis.

It is the credibility of the material in such a text to its reader that counts and whether he or she can put the theory in to practice and how to do it. Strategy in a lot of smaller businesses is easy (and indeed in a lot of sizeable companies), it is the tactics that are difficult.

The book’s topic is an ambitious one ‐ all you need to know about strategy thinking in 168 pages ‐ and there is lots of good, well explained material which would give the business reader food for thought. The material it contains is well expressed and well presented. However, the feeling I have is that in conforming to the publisher’s formula for these books, for an area as large as strategy something of value is lost. The text cannot be too theoretical which would turn off the target audience, it is constrained in size and coverage (after all, you could have three or four books on the topic) and it should not be a workbook or checklist. Perhaps this type of text will always fall “twixt a few stools”. The test must be whether such a book, marketed as part of a series, will set the manager reader’s mind working on the issues of a strategic approach for the company. The answer to that question is a resounding “it might”, so the conclusion is to wish Mr Irwin’s efforts well.