Succeeding at Business in Southeast Asia

CHAPTER 8Executing Your Strategy and Plan: The Implementation Phase

Execution is the name of the game. If you cannot execute, you cannot survive. In any situation, at home or abroad, manufacturing or services, internal or external, if you cannot get it done, there’ll be no tomorrow.

Once you’ve developed your strategy and the plans to execute it, it’s time to put on your boots and walk through the mud. It’s not going to be easy and it is what separates the winners from the losers. You’re going to need additional staff, but hopefully you’re transitioning from overhead to billable resources, maybe not right now, but soon.

If yours is like most companies who have come this far, here’s a bit of what you might expect:

1. As you begin to execute and set up your operations, you walk through your supply chain, find issues with it, develop better options, and adjust as necessary.
2. In addition, you build out your own internal competencies and improve your own operations.
3. You also begin to develop sales strategies and relationships. This is probably the first time in your process when the light bulb goes on and you realize why someone suggested one way of doing this and not another, where theory moves to action, and you start to see the product of your hard work. In some ways, this is the most fun; it can also be the most exhausting part of the process.

It’s important not to be shortsighted here. It’s easy to get caught up in one piece of the operation and let other opportunities slide. ...