The road to a flourishing business runs through a lot of different points in your life, from dealing with mundane things like where to file your taxes and when to make a major purchase to designing and marketing your business to finding the financial resources to make it happen. All the while you are also focused on ways to grow your business.
But what happens when your market becomes less responsive to your every marketing effort? If you haven’t already you may be tempted to focus all of your attention on one task because you believe you can’t do them all at once. When this decision is made it is easy to be flighty with your efforts.
Many businesses take on the pace of their “greater world” and never get around to dealing with all of the tedious tasks that must be done in the regular course.
And then they are faced with a bigger and bigger problem: you have to do all of these tasks, inefficiently, so you have enough time to operate your business and grow. You are comfortable with doing 15 minutes of all the other things on your list right now, what will you do with all of that time?
Read on…
The problem with this situation is that you, as the business owner, may be so used to focusing on one task that you never get around to evaluating to see whether or not you need to manage the activity in other new ways. It is totally OK, to dedicate only 15 minutes of your day to generating ideas for new products, but what about other issues or opportunities that do not fit on the list? I know top business coaches and business owners who will dedicate time each week to making decisions about new products and services, new ways of positioning themselves and their company, and new marketing concepts. Yet these same professionals will manage to find time for training and coaching their customers, doing their own marketing and even have to deal with minor interruptions from their staff.
The simple principle of focusing on only one thing at a time reduces the effectiveness of what you are doing in your business. The question is whether or not you can do this when it comes to marketing and product development. Could you not separate the tasks and make the best use of those 15 minutes you could be spending with your customers or looking to develop new products? Of course you can, because marketing is marketing. There is not aculationabout it. It’s a facts-based decision-making process that has been working since the beginning of business. There is no fanfare or secret newsletters or sales techniques involved. Just some good old-fashioned elbow grease.
What’s a good balance to aim for? Two hours a day? Two minutes a day? infinite, Java awesomeness that a PC just can’t beat? This may be a stretch that many of you might not be able to stick with, but there is some truth to the saying, “Chickens change their dung every morning, as well as their habits.” But, it is better than slaving over a magnetic business card for a few minutes each day and leaving it for a day prior to handing it out.
I love that the entire BNI US Chapter uses an A4 sized white board in chambers of commerce and community centres to remind us what our numbers and web site measurements are. These are usually displayed on an easel and titled “Calendars”. To get a full range of input from your staff to help align the efforts of your company against the goals you want to achieve the BNI Business Improvement Program is a good way to begin. Don’t be scared to ask your staff to help because you might get a surprise.
