It’s important to note that some degree of drift is always going to be there. You’re never going to have 100 percent of your best energies focused only on your best stuff. It never works that way. Life is not that clean. But our goal is, as much as we can, to have our best talent’s attention focused on the end goal.
If you find your business is experiencing drift, there is a solution. It’s called coherence. It’s basically a fancy way of saying that you and your team are unified toward a common goal. And the most common reason that a business will fall into drift is because it has lost sight of its goals, or maybe even stopped setting goals all together. Once you are past the startup phase and are consistently bringing in revenue, it’s easy to get comfortable. It’s easy to go through the motions every day helping your customers and keeping the status quo. But if you stop setting goals for yourself, then drift is inevitable. You have to have a path. Something to work toward as a team. And once you have a path, you must create a strategy or plan to get there.
For my business and the thousands of business owners I coach every year, we do this through quarterly action plans. We create a written one page document that lays out what our goals are for a company, and what steps we plan to take to get there. And once we create that action plan, we share it with the rest of the team to get buy-in from the group. Every team meeting we review our action plan and align ourselves to the goals within, and every quarter we repeat the process. So at most, even if we failed to stay aligned to our intended goals you only have a month or two of drift to recover from. Which is much easier to bounce back from then years of drift.