You should have a clear idea when you wake up every morning about the three things you need to focus on to get your business to where you want it to be.
These three things should dictate where you spend your time until you’ve put the right strategies in place to resolve them and then you move on to the next three things.
What are the three things you need to work on in your business today that’s actually going to make a difference, that’s going to drive growth, that’s going to drive culture, that’s going to drive behaviours?
You can spend a lot of time fiddling around with peripheral issues. You end up with a scatter gun approach to how you run your business. Step away from the temptation to fix every little detail yourself.
Learn the difference between operational and strategic thinking.
Free yourself up from those day-to-day menial tasks and focus on the strategic things in your business every day.
This might be very hard to do early on. When you’re in startup mode, you tend to do everything out of sheer necessity. That’s understandable.
Your to-do list might look like this:
- Deal with building lease arrangements: check.
- Hire new developer: check.
- Buy more coffee: check.
But at some point, if you want to grow your business, you have to stop being the point person on every single little thing in your business. There are three really important reasons for this:
- You need to be crafting your company’s vision and strategy.
- If you keep doing everything, you will burn out.
- Believe it or not, some people can do some things better than you. Hire them.
Pick three things you really need to focus on today. Take the first thing on your list and think strategically (long-term solutions) not operationally (short-term) about how you can tackle the problem.
You probably know the short-term operational fix for the problem already. Great. But now think about how you’re going to fix the problem strategically, long-term.
Repeat for the next thing on your list. Start the process of strategic thinking today and you’ll soon have removed yourself from the day to day grind of operational thinking. You’ll be ready to start the process of growth.
This article was originally published on Business2Community.
