Q – Are there common things that all good businesses do well?

A – The key element that I would point to is their ability to set and follow a vision. I come across lots of businesses – some that have such vision and others that don’t. Articulating your vision can be scary – because you are actually exposing to everybody what success looks like and hence everybody knows what ‘failure’ will look like. But those businesses that don’t have a vision can’t know whether they are succeeding or falling short.

If you don’t know whether or not you’re succeeding, you can’t make the appropriate and timely interventions that are sometimes needed. And this is where successful businesses tend to be sustainable; they intervene promptly because they understand their strategy and trajectory.

But a vision in itself is not sufficient. You need to have smaller goals along the way, know what to do to achieve those goals and how they contribute to the vision. Such goals help businesses to retain the trajectory that I referred to earlier and they also help business owners to deal with obstacles as they arrive.

Irrespective of how successful your business is obstacles will crop up. Where goals and vision are absent these obstacles can sometimes appear insurmountable. How many times in business do we allow the obstacles to become a much clearer focus than the goal? Of course, we need to recognise when we come up against obstacles, but we also need to recognise when we can plough through them or when we need to detour around them – but the overall focus should still be on the goal and hence the vision.