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The Goal Approach to Strategy

In the latest installment of the Smart Strategy Insights series, Wayne Lynn takes an in-depth look at the critical success factors that must be done well for businesses to make a solid profit.

Wednesday, September 04, 2024

Backstory: Dr. Eli Goldratt’s book The Goal started a series of books that help solve real world business problems. He developed the Theory of Constraints and the Logical Thinking Processes (LTP) as tools to help business leaders look at their businesses as systems. There are five tools in the LTP. They are called Trees. The Goal Tree is the most important tool because of its usefulness in crafting strategy. It forces you to develop a clear and workable goal for the business. Following that, it calls for the identification of the critical success factors that drive the achievement of the goal. This is an ideal tool for strategy-building in small to mid-sized companies with one to three owners.

Need to know: Most graphic services providers are small businesses. They have 1–2 owners and generate, at the high end, $7–8 million in annual sales. When these businesses were started, most were for financial reasons. The new entrepreneurs wanted to make more money for themselves and provide their families with opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Most small start-up businesses fail within five years. Why? Some of the reasons include:


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About Wayne Lynn

Wayne Lynn is an advocate of the adage that "you can't manage what you can't measure".  Combining his considerable strengths in leadership, economics, and strategy with broad experience in both public and private companies, he brings focus and discipline to the task of creating and sustaining success in today's chaotic environment.

Wayne has managed businesses ranging in size from $5 million to $500million in annual sales.  He has guided those organizations through a number of diverse market sectors including magazines, catalogs, inserts, direct mail, and general commercial printing.

A student as well as a practitioner of the fine art of business, Wayne's latest focus is on helping business leaders make their companies more viable economically, more relevant in the market place, more adaptive to constant change, and more durable in the long haul.  It's about people, what they know, and how well they execute on what they know.

Wayne can be reached at 704-516-7787 or at [email protected].

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