In this presentation Negar Riazati (Speaker A) explains a pragmatic approach to crafting and executing a business strategy, emphasizing simplicity, documentation, and alignment with a company’s overarching dream. She recounts her own early experience with an overly complex strategy tool, concluding that a concise, few‑paragraph statement that outlines the desired direction (e.g., market expansion, margin improvement, new product lines) is sufficient. Riazati then walks through a real client case – an eight‑year‑old energy‑saving product company – and shows how their “Mission Calculator” distilled the owners’ vague growth desire into three concrete financial objectives (increase sales, improve gross margin, lower overhead). The client hired a General Manager (GM) who executed the plan, hitting the targets almost exactly, demonstrating the power of a clear, documented mission. The talk shifts to hiring strategy. Riazati contrasts the typical growth path of a small trade business (founder does all work, then adds production staff, sales, admin, etc.) with an alternative early‑stage hire of a General Manager. By bringing in a GM who specializes in building organizations, the founder can stay focused on core trade work while the GM designs systems, improves margins, and scales staff rapidly – potentially reaching 50‑100 employees within three years instead of a handful. She outlines how to recognize a true specialist: proven past results, not just credentials, and warns against hires who look impressive on paper but lack execution track records (illustrated by a case where a high‑paid GM drove the company from profit to loss). The overall message is that a simple, documented strategy combined with the right senior talent (a proven GM) creates a “Mission Hiring” framework that aligns new hires with the company’s mission and accelerates growth.
Chapters
Alright, so let's start at the beginning with strategy. Of course, what I know from talking to lots and lots of business owners, and lots of those business owners are our clients and become my friends, is every group, every individual really needs to have some sort of strategy on how they're going to improve themselves. You know, without this desire to improve, it's sort of— that's at the point. you could say an organization or an individual starts to die. So every person that runs an organization, it's like, you know, they started off minimally with some dream. How big or small it is, they start off with a dream. And that dream needs to have some sort of strategy attached to it. It needs to have some little plan, but minimally it just needs to have a direction on where we're going to go. And now with strategy, you know, I remember when I started in business, I bought this CD and it cost me like $400. And you put it in and you answer all these questions. And I got halfway through the process, which took me about like 2 days, and it started printing out like a couple of hundred pages of my responses. And I realized after I sort of put it down and picked it up and put it down and picked it up that like this is too complicated. And strategy, I've found from experience, and with working with others is actually quite simple. It's firstly, you know, it's something that's created. It's sort of a bit of a dream. It's a desire from the board or the founder for something to occur on a broad scale in the organization. It gets documented, preferably. It doesn't have to be. It can be something that can be talked about every day, but, you know, document the strategy, and then, you know, the more others know it and understand it, The more likely it is to come true. The strategy is part of your dream. You have a dream of where you want to take your business. You have a dream of how you want your staff to be. You have all these different dreams, different goals. The strategy is the step-by-step how you'll get there over a longer period of time. It needs to be simple. It needs to be documented, and it really doesn't need to be long. It only needs to be a couple of paragraphs that if anyone reads it, They go, okay, I see where you're going. They should read it and they know, do you want to expand a lot? Do you want to get into new countries? Do you want to improve your margin? It's like it's the overriding statement that everything else will align behind. And I find that whenever I talk to someone, like I said, they already have— a business owner already has some strategy in their mind. They know they need to improve margin, or they know they want to open more stores, or they know they want to hire more productive staff. You know, they know they want to put a quality system in. They know like a list, a little list of major things they want to achieve. And you know, a lot of businesses don't have this documented. And so part of our process is actually to very quite quickly and succinctly document your strategy. And we need to do that because that strategy is what actually makes up the mission. And that's why we call it Mission Hiring, because whoever comes in, you could say, is taking on the mission impossible because they're going to pick up your strategy and run and execute it. They may also come in and improve your strategy with their experience in the marketplace or their experiences at growing businesses or pushing products out to market or improving margins is they may actually like make that strategy even better. So here's an example strategy that we did for a client. This client had been in business for 8 years. You know, they'd reached a small business with a few staff, a few subcontractors, and, you know, was doing okay. The owners were making a comfortable living out of it. They didn't have to work so hard. But the owners decided that they wanted to grow this business. They were getting a little bit bored and they wanted to have a larger business. They wanted to, you know, affect their market more. They had ideas and dreams. And so we sat with them and, you know, they weren't really sure. All they knew is they wanted to grow the business. So we sat with them, we put them through what we call our Mission Calculator, and we came up with this simple strategy. And basically their objective for the financial— this financial year we're sitting in, 2016, was to increase sales, improve the gross margin, and of course they want to lower overheads. So if you do these numbers, it's like quite a profit improvement if you put this together. Okay, they have a little idea on how to do that, or their purpose, because they want to build an organization to a certain size that they could deliver their energy-saving products. You know, these guys care about the environment and they wanted to be able to have an effect more on the industry they're in. And then they have an idea on how to do this. You know, they'll basically, you know, the simple thing is they had to increase their tenders, um, which would obviously help improve their margin. So if you want to grow sales, you need more tenders. If you want to improve your margin, you need to put more tenders out there so you can say no to the lower margin, but you can actually pick up the higher margin tenders. And of course, they had to be able to purchase better as well. Also, you know, they looked at ideas on how to purchase better, which was, you know, using their fulfillment center in China to see if that could help them out. And these were their ideas. So a year later, it's like, you know, they get a general manager, comes in, and this person can actually deliver this result. It's actually— we checked up today and they delivered the result nearly exactly What's interesting is these percentages came in nearly exactly, but their actual strategic plan changed slightly along the way on different ways to do it. But focusing on the numbers and focusing on what they needed to do and having someone that could focus on it then and now that really wasn't in the business before made all the difference. And they're well on track to reaching their longer-term strategy. And but if we look at this, it's simple. It's like this can be squashed down even further and you know you could say the mission really is this part up here. And this is a pretty conservative mission because I think they actually pretty much exceeded this, this they met exactly, and overheads moving in the right direction. But for the general manager when he comes in or she comes in, it's like they really, this top line is what they've got to achieve. or exceed. The rest of it is actually up for grabs and can be altered to suit the situation and also suit the skill set of that particular person that comes in. Alright, so if we look at how strategy is executed, so if we look in the usual way that I've seen people build their businesses from the ground up is they'll start off is obviously someone has to start the business, or a group of people if there's partnerships or shareholders involved. They'll start the business, and then normally the first people they hire is some people to actually do the work. So let's just use a very simple example. It's a plumbing company, and a plumber usually starts the business, and he works very hard, and he picks up some jobs, and because his jobs are so good, he gets more jobs. And then, you know, at night he does his bookkeeping or he gets his wife to do his bookkeeping or a friend. But they're just hanging in there and like just building revenue. And as that revenue builds and more projects or services are won for the company, then they start to take on production personnel. And so the founder moves from actually doing the production and moves to now running others to do the production, usually while they're doing it themselves as well. And then the business grows more and so they feel, well, maybe I should take on a salesperson because normally the founder, he started as a salesperson and delivering, but now he's also going to sell. So now he wants to stop selling and now he gets a salesperson. And then now, you know, as the business grows more and there's more paperwork, he decides I need someone to take care of the paperwork. And then it keeps growing and so, you know, perhaps now There's a founder, there's 4 or 5 production staff, there's a salesperson, and now there's an admin person. But now he's not running these production guys so well because he's so busy. So now he gets one of these guys and promotes them to become production manager or hires them, and now can hire more plumbers. And this would be a pretty standard way that organizations grow. And from my experience, and depending a bit on the industry, it's like when you get to this sort of structure, it's normally about the 3-year mark. But there's another way to do it. So from my experience, normally an organization gets to this, they go through their first 3 years and they get to the point where they've pretty much got someone working on sales, someone working in admin, they've got a collection of delivery staff and a production manager and the owner. And but there's another way it can be done. Instead of the first hiring which is usually another production person, you could actually, as a first hiring, hire a General Manager. This is how early an organization could hire a General Manager. Because now the plumber, the founder, the guy that started this business, he's actually gone out and he's got himself so busy, usually quite quickly, usually within a few months, a plumber can get very busy and deliver Great work. And now the usual plumber, when he starts to employ other plumbers, he just sells them out at the same rate that he's been working at. And then it doesn't leave much profit because he's got to pay them now to do the work that he was used to collect all the money for. But now if he hires a general manager, he could actually stay on the tools, stay down there and doing the work, which sounds a bit odd. But now the general manager can come in and go, now let's look at the strategy. You want to make your plumbing company— you want to do major construction work, you want to have a big service department that's going to be 150 staff, that's where you want to get to? Great. My specialty is in building businesses, and I can build the margin for you. I can build the systems, and we can work together with what you know about plumbing and how you service customers, and I can build the— all the business around that. Because, you know, when you go to trade school as a plumber, you're not really taught so much about business. You don't have a lot of experience with business. Usually you work inside a company that was run by another plumber that, you know, is, you know, maybe very professionally the way it's run, but it's still not run by someone that's actually built businesses in the past and this is what they're good at. So this general manager He can come in now, allow the founder to do what he does best. He knows about plumbing. He knows what is needed to make plumbing efficient. This general manager knows what's needed to make an organization efficient. He knows what's needed to grow an organization fast. And so now, you know, production personnel and the other roles can come on board under this general manager. He can do that. Well, this plumber makes sure that perhaps the quality of the work is right, the clients like their work. Meanwhile, the organization could be growing within 3 years, could reach 50 or 100 staff rather than reach, you know, 10 or 15 staff in the first 3 years. Also too, the margin and the cost of doing business could be much different because this person is a specialist in building organizations. How do we know he's a specialist? Any ideas how you know this person is a specialist?
Past experience.
He's done it before. So, you know, it doesn't matter really if he has an MBA, that's nice. It doesn't matter if he's worked at large companies with big brands, that might be nice. But what is— what we're looking for, why we know he's a specialist, because we look back at his past and see the value he's been able to create by building organisations or rolling products out at such a speed that the organisations had to build around it. And that's how we know this person is a specialist. We had one client, we had one client who hired a general manager and they didn't tell us about it. They just decided one day they're going to hire a general manager and this general manager was someone That actually was like their university professor in the past. It was someone that like they looked up to because, you know, this guy was the guru of business. And actually when they hired him, they put this guy on a salary of nearly half a million dollars a year. And after 2 and a half years of knowing this guy is the right guy and trusting his decisions, they had to let him go because the company had not only no more money but it was now Gone from 10% net profit to 20% net loss. And they let this guy go and the only way they could save their business was to actually find investors to give them the cash flow they needed to basically get back in the way and build, rebuild their business. So the fact that someone has nice credentials, if those credentials aren't actually like the person building a business, it's not going to be the right person. And this is what makes our system so special because we know how to find these people and we know which ones can do the jobs and which ones can't, or which ones can do the jobs and which ones we can't be so sure if they can do them. And we can even be very sure of the ones that are gonna come in and actually destroy or head your business towards destruction.
