Getting the basics right

When I was at university I chose to do a unit in “basic maths”. I’d been pretty good at maths at school so I picked this subject as an easy option – I wasn’t so focused on hard work when I was 18.

My first class in basic maths came as a complete shock. I had to triple check the timetable thinking I had mistakenly turned up to a Masters class. There was nothing basic about the learning going on in this classroom.

It was years later that I finally understood that ‘basic’ really meant the fundamentals, the principles, or, if you will, the essential ingredients. Important stuff, not simple stuff.

Yet because “Basics” sounds so easy and, let’s be honest, a little bit boring, we tend not to dwell on it (unless we are looking for a no-brainer uni course), seeking out what we perceive as the more sophisticated stuff instead. And this is particularly true in business.

The basics of a profitable business are the simple, focused unambiguous answers to questions such as:

• What is your business striving to be the best in your world at?
• What is the purpose of your business?
• What is truly different (not marketing spin) about what your business is doing compared to the competition?
• Who, exactly, is your customer?
• What is the Big Hairy Audacious Goal of your business?
• What is your business’s core competence?
• How does the business make money?

But most businesses spend remarkably little time on getting to grips with the basic questions above. And even those that do are woeful at educating their employees in the substance of the answers. Instead, the majority of businesses spend a mass of time and money doing fun stuff like building great looking websites, exploiting social networking, hiring new sales people and creating new product ranges.

Yet the answers to these questions are the fundamental building blocks of the business, the principles on which it was founded, and the basics that everyone should know. Coming to grips with the basics enables you to better focus on the fun stuff (building great looking websites, exploiting social networking, hiring new sales people and creating new product ranges…) making it more relevant, and in turn making the business more profitable.

So my question to you this week is: “what shape are your basics in?”

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).