How to Do Better in Your Business
As a business coach for more than 25 years, I have helped thousands of business owners build their businesses. And while there are many different ways to go about scaling your business, it almost never involves what the business owner thinks it should, which is more work. In fact, for the majority of business owners out there the only way to grow their business sustainability is to do less work, but do it better. So today, I want to share with you some tips on how to do better in your business.
Better Defined
Building a business shouldn’t mean more. More means more hours, more effort, more work, more stress, more anxiety, more struggle and more strain. Better means better sales numbers, better profits, a better life for you and your staff. It means a better quality product for your customers. We don’t want more; we want better. Better inherently gets the more without all the junk and extra work.
Your Top 5
The first step to doing better in your business is to sit down and think of five areas in which you would like to do better in your business. If you are like most business owners, you could probably come up with a dozen or more things that you would like to be better at. But I want you to stick to your top five. Why five? Because if you go to your staff and say, oh, we’ve got 9 things that we want to work on, then you’ll be tempted to have 12. If you’ve got 12, you’ll be tempted to aim for 16. If you’ve got 16 things you want to do better, it might as well be 22. And then you have yourself a huge mess and won’t be able to focus on anything. So stick to five only for this exercise. And focus on the items that will have the biggest impact on your business and your bottom line. We call these things your leverage points.
Finding the Opportunity
Once you have your list of five, you want to come up with your top opportunity. The one thing that if done better could be a game changer for your business. Let’s say your biggest constraint to growth is marketing. You want to start trying a few experiments and seeing what resonates with your client base. Once you find something that works, it would allow you to put more resources, money, time, and talent behind it and scale your business. So that is your biggest opportunity to do better. Once you have that narrowed down, you want to create a plan for how you are going to seize that opportunity and find the growth within.
Focus Your Time and Attention
The last step to this exercise has to do with your time and attention. Over the course of the next month or quarter, dedicate time each and every day to working on your top opportunity and the top five places you want to be better at as a business. Encourage your leadership to do the same, chipping away at it every day until you start to see progress.
