Have you heard this before? I’m sure you have, but maybe in when it comes to your personal health, however not in business.
Having said that, would you believe the term is every bit as relevant in business to?
Let me explain
In your business you have a finite amount of resources, time and money, so wouldn’t you want to use them in the most effective way to get the best results at:
- Building your customer base
- Developing your reach
- Solving more problems and pains, for your business, customers, and believe it or not, also your suppliers (you will learn more about this later on).
When I’m talking to a potential new client, one of the first question they ask me is how I can help them, and they are surprised to hear me say, ‘I don’t know’. Yes I could tell them how amazing I am, charge them decent day rates and go from there.. However, for those of you who have read previous posts that I’ve shared will know that I like to only do business with businesses that I know I can help, and help well, AND, also help my business, thus creating the Win – Win, win for the client and win for my business.
And for me to understand how I can help them best, I need to conduct and initial assessment so I can discover when and where in their business I can serve them best, so they can get the best results and make the most gains. That is tackling their current BIGGEST PAIN!
And why am I telling you this?
The same theory applies to YOU when you are wondering what you need to do on your business to get the best out of your team, the systems and your clients.
When I do engage with clients, and conduct that assessment, more often than not that have done some level of self-diagnosis without using the right tools. And what happens with self-diagnosis? You get the wrong prescription and all of a sudden your business performance has not improved and in many cases, it actually reduces.
And what happens then? The snowballs spiral out of control. See every action in your business has a consequence, for good or bad.
And when you do something that reduces performance, you have tied up those precious resources that should be focusing on value adding activities, those activities that add value both to your client’s business and yours too.
How can you avoid this?
Enter Strategy
Strategy is a big word and can mean many different things, in fact everything you do in business, is all strategy and execution of, and on so many levels. Anything you do in business should have been strategized at some stage then executed in a ‘Systems Thinking’ approach, so when it’s implemented, you can measure results.
And what do you do when you measure your results?
You have 3 choices
- Discard completely (happens a lot, that’s not the problem, learn to fail quickly and move on)
- Leave as is as it’s performing as excepted (very rare)
- Continually assess, tweak & improve (most cases)
Whenever you are changing, solving issues, doing something new, the key is to get feedback and FAST!
This is your key to success and to deliver strong business performance
When you set sail on a boat there are many variables to factor in on how you are going to arrive at your destination. Things like wind speed, currents, weather, time, resources and so on which constantly need reviewing. If you don’t, sometimes you can make great progress, others going off track, sometimes just sitting still and in the worst scenario, going backwards! You will have no idea what’s going on and why, what worked when it went well and what when it didn’t.
Strategy and Systems Thinking are your Vision & Execution tools to deliver exceptional results in your business.
Yes you can be very efficient at doing things in your business, however efficiency will not cut it in this market place, you need to be effective. Your strategy will ensure your upstream activities (and now efficient ones) are centred around
DOING THE RIGHT THINGS WELL AND LEAVING NOTHING TO CHANCE!
What strategy is not, is having a brainstorming session coming up with some fancy figures, making everyone feel good about themselves, patting each other on the back, getting your PA to type up something nice & emailing it to everyone so they can never look at it again!
Strategy Is About:
- Having extensive knowledge of the marketplace, the Market Intelligence (you will learn about in the chapter on marketing)
- How you can use that information to gain a competitive advantage
- How you can continually measure and improve on using that information to continue to hold and strengthen your competitive advantage and thus, your market share.
Whether you are looking to grow your business, give your shareholders good dividends or both, the actions you need to take are the same.
- Know what to do
- Do it, as effectively as possible
- Tell your market you have solved their pains and problems or helping your teams solve their pains and problems
- Give them pain relief
- Learn how effective your service & operation, that is through market feedback and improve
If you don’t know what to do next, all the proceeding steps can actually be considered as a waste of time! Like everything you will read from me, it’s all about continually assessing, tweaking and improving.
Over To YOU
What can you start doing today to be more strategic in your business?
Where are you current business pains and have you measured them?
How can you develop strategies
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