Small Business Today Magazine NOV 2014 EXHIBIT NETWORK | Page 36

EDITORIALFEATURE

Be a Visionary

to the Core
By Rick E. Norris, JD, CPA

W

hen I was 16, my girlfriend (and future wife) wanted an
artist’s drawing table for her birthday.  “Sure”, I said, “I’ll
build one for you”.  Despite her curious look, I sprang
into action with my jigsaw and hammer to build a plywood structure on heavy-duty castor wheels (for mobility of
course).

Two days later, her response to the rough draft was…well…
hysterical laughter.  After catching her breath, hands firmly holding
her aching sides, she apologized and thought it was cute that I
wanted to make her something.  Still, it looked like an unfinished
pulpit on wheels that had been made by a western missionary in
the deepest part of Africa during the 1800s who only had tree
sap as glue and sharp rocks as tools. 
The problem was that I had stepped out of my core competency and didn’t have a realistic vision of the end product.
As a CPA business consulting firm, we find that small to medium-sized businesses often lack vision.  They have not developed
a strategic vision and times are spread out so far from their core
competency that they end up doing many things poorly.
Most small businesses don’t understand that they need a strategic plan.   However, businesses of many sizes seem to misunderstand the nature of a strategic plan.  They often confuse it with a
business plan.  But these are very different things.  Oh sure, there
could be components of a strategic plan in a business plan but the
goals of each are not the same.
A business plan is a management document.  It usually is a five
year projection of building a business.  For example, let’s say a
company creates a business plan to build a car.  In this case, the
business developer would secure the financing, set out a plan to
procure all auto parts, and hire the labor to build the vehicle.  The
end result is an automobile. 
We now have an automobile but we still don’t know the car’s
destination.  Where are we going to drive the car?  For that we
need a map or a strategy.  The strategy will guide us like a road
map to prevent us from turning down dead end streets.  Most
businesses, however, just drive the car out of the garage and hope
it doesn’t run into a ditch.  They never strategically plan where to
drive.
34 SMALL BUSINESS TODAY MAGAZINE [ NOVEMBER 2014 ]

Strategic plans have a number of steps, but what I want to
emphasize here is only one step - the vision.  Think of your vision
as a human circulatory system.  Using Walt Disney’s 1957 vision,
his “heart” was the creative talent in the studio producing theatrical films.  Now this was Walt Disney Studios’ core competency. 
Anything that his company did focused first on his “heart”.  The
second aspect of Walt Disney’s vision was his profit centers or
“organs”.  These profit centers were TV, merchandising, publications, comic strips, music, and, of course, theme parks.  Mind you,
these were not additional competencies but instead profit centers that operated with the “blood” provided from the motion
picture division. 
But what connected these items?  It was the “circulatory system” - Disney’s characters.  Yes, Mickey, Donald, Pluto, and Goofy
were among those joining not only the “heart” to the “organs”
but the “organs” to the “circulatory system”.  The “heart” created
the movies that pumped the “blood” of the characters to the
different “organs” like the theme parks, the music, the television
shows, the merchandise, and the publications.  If Disney were to
focus on any one of the “organs”, his core competency would
change and throw off the entire “circulatory system”.
Small to medium-sized businesses can learn from this model when conducting and implementing their strategic plan.  The
stakeholders must accept their core competency and leverage it
to breathe life into other profit centers that are not as central to
what the company does. 
However, this is just one step in a strategic planning process
that small businesses should undertake.  I can imagine that
Walt Disney did not build his own drawing table but he used
one to draw the characters that became the life-blood of his
company.

Rick Norris became a CPA in 1982 and in 1985 earned a JD from Southwestern
University School of Law.  In 1992, Rick founded the Rick E. Norris Accountancy
Corpo