Here is a little exercise most of you are afraid to do that could help keep your brand thriving and your business in good health.
Write an Obituary for your Business
This work is not a complex activity. You can complete it in a few hours or so. To start, assemble your senior team together and assign each of them to bring one lethal threat that concerns them about your business. They might bring concerns about a competitor, a weakness in your company model, a threat from the lagging morale in your associates, or it could be recognition that you are creating products your customers don’t need. They don’t need to know the purpose of the exercise, but they most come prepared to talk about what keeps them up at night regarding your business.
Bring in a freelance writer to listen and take notes. Task her with writing the obituary that might appear in the paper or online if all of these issues aren’t addressed. What you will get is an honest bone-dry summary of the risks your business faces today. Together you write an obituary for your business.
Here an example.
Mourning the Death of Acme Enterprises 1922-2015
Customers & Employees Stopped Caring
Founded in 1922, Acme Enterprises succumb to a long, lingering illness of apathy and indifference from its customers and its employees. Founded by Joseph and Julia Acme before the depression, this once thriving business endured the difficulties of tough economic times, relentless competition, and even three product recalls in the late 1960’s.
But we bury Acme Enterprises today because no one cared about our products anymore.
The last ten years had been one failure after another when they thought if they used the word innovation enough, they could compete with a shifting landscape. But, they continued making the same primary product that was failing for years because they thought they understood their customer’s needs. They created me-too products that were just like everybody else’s in their industry. Their new products team was unclear who the target audience was, and they aimlessly tried to market products that had no real point of difference or that mattered to customers. Worst of all, they stopped talking to customers to understand what problems they needed to solve. Acme never understood the story of their customer’s problems.
A second illness also brought down Acme, and it was like a silent killer. Their employees and colleagues stopped caring about the business. They no longer brought any enthusiasm to their jobs because they felt as if they were no longer being respected or treated with dignity. Joseph and Julia, their founders, would be embarrassed how associated are now being dealt with in the workplace. The life force was drained from the company even though money was poured in from new investors to try to revitalize our business model. They stopped investing in employees. They cut the training budget every year before they got to June. They leaned out departments to be more efficient but had the opposite effect. They paid lip service alone to help their employees.
Sadly, in the last decade of her life, Acme also was drowning in complexity. The company tried to do so many things in so many businesses, that no one understood the priorities. They lost focus and instead attempted to spread themselves into lots of market areas that left their efforts diluted. They had to cut back on investments in areas like training for employees, upgrading their machines and investing in marketing efforts to raise awareness for their products.
Acme leaves behind over 125 associated with two plants in the United States. These folks will all be out looking for new jobs because they couldn’t adapt to the new, fast-moving industry that they work in today. And with a void in compassionate and dynamic leadership for years, the company has been on a steep decline that they were unwilling to admit. When the fall was so serious that they had to eliminate twenty percent of the workforce, everyone, new that the disease running the business would be fatal. It was just a matter of time.
Services will be held in the company lunchroom. Instead of flowers, please send whatever you can to help the Fund for Former Employees of Acme Enterprises.
Death Defying
What can you learn from reading your companies obituary? It is a glimpse into a future that no one wants to see and can help be a wake-up call to change direction. Writing an obituary for a company is an exercise that can also help a business come face-to-face with some real threats that don’t often get discussed by the management team.
Like an original obituary, this make-believe activity can help refocus a business to realizing that the enterprise may need to see a specialist, take its medicine and seek out some form of therapy and rehabilitation. The obit is an exaggerated way to say to your senior team; somethings got to change, or we may find our business losing its struggle.
Is your business on life support? Are you struggling with real issues that everyone ignores? Maybe I can help. Let’s talk.
