For The Owner Who Has Everything
Here's the scenario: you're a business owner, your business strategy is working and your marketing plan is performing above expectation. What more can you want?
In my experience, the most successful people, the ones I most admire, always look for an edge, an advantage - in a person, a new idea, or a service. They don't necessarily need it now, but they like to gather these advantages and file them away to be used sometime in the future. For them it's money in the bank or possibly a get out of jail (problems) card.
Here are some examples.
- Discover what you don't know. It's the information that your workers and even your management team don't tell you. No owner hears everything, because everyone always has a reason to hold something back. It may be an opportunity or a problem. Either way, you would be better off knowing it.
- Focus. See more or less depending on your need. Photographers call this "depth of field." It's the area in a photograph that is in clear focus. By changing camera settings, you can increase depth of field to see more, or reduce it to be even more focused. Either way you get a different picture of your business environment.
- Identify, acquire, and manage the tools and skills you need to stay on top. The most successful business men and women I know are uncomfortable with the status quo. If they are number two, they want to be number one. If they are number one, they want to increase the distance between them and number two. And if something ain't broke they tweak it anyway, because someone else is already working at it. So being at the top of your game is a good place to be, but it demands constant attention.
- Identify trends and put them into a business context. Many owners owe their success to a style of management that stays relatively consistent over the years. For example, sales-oriented companies may not actively consider marketing techniques including social media. The business environment is changing dramatically, and small trends will grow into groundswells that cannot be ignored.
- Organize new activities, focus them on business objectives, manage and report on them. The last thing most small business owners want to do is increase their management time (many want to decrease work and create a better work-life balance), yet they need to stay in control. Consolidate this effort.
- Reduce complexity. Running a business of any size is complex. Dealing with a recession or planning for recovery just adds to the problem. Small businesses are especially vulnerable to complexity because they typically have limited resources. It's important, then, to manage all the added demands upon management time and resources. Having a detailed business strategy, using frameworks, templates, and dashboards are just a few of the ways that a business owner can manage complexity.
- Remove Decision Bias. Everyone is biased in one way or another. Business owners are not immune from biases, which are largely subconscious. By helping the business owner identify and manage his or her biases, decision-making can be made more effective. According to a current McKinsey Quarterly article, doing so can significantly improve business performance.
- Question Assumptions. Assumptions permeate every aspect of every business. The ones on which major decisions are made need to be questioned regularly. For example, if a business focuses on developing small business accounts into larger accounts- to the neglect of servicing large accounts- then that assumption should be justified with analysis. Similarly, assumptions based upon small issues also require questioning when the small issues are multiplied many times. For example, it is frequently assumed in businesses of all sizes that employees have a clear understanding of their objectives, roles, and how they contribute to the value chain, and that they have adequate training and supervision. This is often not true, and adequate questioning will help surface a reality that needs attention.
Excellent companies - the best performing ones - are always trying to grow faster and compete stronger. These are ways the business owner "who has everything" can have an even bigger and better piece of the future.
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Mission: To help small and mid-size businesses capture the power of big-picture marketing.