I have identified six things that businesses must do if they are to be successful businesses.
Not all businesses manage to be good at all six things, but all successful businesses – no matter how small – are good at all six things.
These Six Business Success Factors are providing Leadership, good Planning, effective Marketing, Customer Fulfillment, management of Operational Efficiency, and the mastery of its Finance.
This week I’ll discuss the Practice of Planning and how it helps any size business to succeed.
I’ll then set you a challenge that you can undertake over the next 5 days.
It will be fun and more importantly, it will help your business become focused on success.
When you start a new year, often you feel excitement tinged with a scent of anxiety.
We are brought up to anticipate something new and exciting every new year. It doesn’t matter if it’s the new calendar year, or a new financial year, or an anniversary, or a new school year. We remember our childhood when each new season held something new for us to look forward to, something hoped for but perhaps unpredictable. That’s why we often spend the new year making up resolutions and goals or making up new plans. The new year unfolds ahead of us and it represents a new start so anything seems possible.
Yet we also sometimes feel anxiety, a little concern about how the year will actually unfold. This is a trained response because as we grow older and more experienced, we remember things that have not gone so well before; we remember resolutions and goals that fell by the wayside: “Can I really do it this year?”
Every business, no matter how small, can only improve with the addition of clear, documented systems.
You may already have some systems in your business – perhaps how to file documents, or what paperwork to fill in, or how to use the computer system. Yet most small businesses grow their systems informally as they themselves grow and unfortunately many such systems are verbally passed on, remain in the mind of the founder, or variations are made by people as time passes.
What this or even worse, no systems end up as is a mess.
Whether you have or don’t have systems does this sound familiar?
Someone leaves and you have to spend a lot of time training a replacement
Employees do their jobs, but there’s always a holdup somewhere that has to wait for you to tell them what to do
Outcomes of work processes are unpredictable or inconsistent, depending on who is working on it
You can’t really leave your business for a vacation without being tied to email
Here is a good measure of how your business is doing – as a business – and as your life’s achievement: can you take four weeks off and have a real holiday where you are not checking in?
Ultimately, that is the business we all started – the business that is successful and profitable and provides you with a lifestyle. But most of us work in businesses that are quite the opposite! Most small business owners are tied to their businesses and even if successful and profitable, certainly does not provide that lifestyle we all dreamt about. Most small business owners will be worried about taking too long a holiday from their businesses in case something goes wrong.
This fear can take the form of an angry customer that nobody else knows how to handle or what to say to him. It can take the form of an error in the day to day processes that only you know how to fix, or a new employee requiring training that only you can give her, or a decision about some outcome that nobody else can make.
The question is really about how you take the business that depends entirely on your knowledge and your ability to make decisions, to a business that runs like an automatic ticking clock? Read More
Do you find that time gets away from you? Of course you do, we all do.
It’s funny that the only one thing in our lives that you can neither lose nor get more of seems so scarce for some and so plentiful for others. Everyone has a 24 hour day, yet some people seem to get things done while others “run out of time”!
One of the causes is the infamous to-do list. If yours is as long as mine, you know you need a system to get it in order.
But seriously, if you look at your to-do list closely, I wonder how many items there are actually expectations on your time by others? On the flip side, I wonder how many of the hundreds of items on your list are things that will truly make you happy, really move you closer to your goals in life and business?
Well, it’s time to get your to-do list in order.
The system is to look at each item and ask how important it really is? How urgent is it? This video provides you with the training to apply a system to get the time that you have in line with where you want to go.
So what do you think? Get over to my website teikoh.com and comment on the training.
No matter how overwhelmed you are, taking a few minutes each day to ask if something is important or urgent gives you control back over your own life.
For more tips, traps, ideas and downloadable free content, go to teikoh.com. While you are there subscribe, or subscribe here, to get these valuable ideas delivered directly to your inbox for free.
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