As the leader of your business, most things start with you. You are working incredibly hard to keep the business performing at the highest possible level. It is likely you wear many hats and juggle a lot of balls–all at the same time. Leaders are making more decisions than ever with even less time available to do so.
See if this sounds about right; you are responsible for:
- Keeping operations running smoothly
- Trouble shooting when things go wrong
- Increasing company sales
- Building relationships with customers
- Managing cash flow
- Taking care of employees financially and emotionally
- Improving your financial prospects through the success of the business
Your list might be even longer. Undoubtedly, you are spending 110% of your time trying to keep all those balls in the air without dropping one. Yet, if you are working so hard on today’s business, who is thinking about where the business will be tomorrow? Most executives admit that they don’t spend enough time planning for the future. Is it possible you are one of them?
Let’s find out. Do you encounter any of these challenges while running the business?
- You aren’t sure which direction to take the business
- You are reluctant to invest in capital expenses in case business slides
- You aren’t consistently hitting the original forecast
- Growth has slowed or hit a plateau
- You have less and less time to make quality decisions
- You have an increasing number of projects on your radar
- Your projects don’t consistently hit the ROI goals
- Your staff needs constant direction, supervision or encouragement
- Your staff regularly complains about the work load
- You see competitors making inroads into your sale
- Your margins are shrinking
- You are losing customers or the average $/customer is declining
- The sales cycle has gotten longer
These problems are signs of an organization that is jumping from one issue to the next without a synchronized market-driven plan to drive them. You don’t have to have all of these concerns to signal a problem–a few of them at the same time speak volumes about the need to rethink the current approach to growing the business.
As a leader of the organization, you are uniquely suited to be the one to raise the flag, sound the bell or even pull the alarm if necessary an communicate that the time has come to stop spinning wheels and start getting traction, putting in play the breakthrough growth approach.
It starts by challenging the status quo, questioning what you really know about the market, and why operations are handled as they are. Is there a master game plan that beats the market? Or it it a collection of activities motivated by internal gain and cemented by habit, with little market-centered rationale? The time has come to find out.