Maximizing your potential requires more than hard work; it demands a strategic approach. To reach your business goals, you must understand the present and have a clear and inspiring vision for the future and a solid execution plan to bring that vision to life.
When problems arise, having a solution at hand is crucial. Whether you aim to revolutionize an industry, positively impact your community, or pursue any other entrepreneurial endeavor, a clear and focused purpose is your guiding light in navigating these challenges.
Know what is necessary.
To determine what is achievable, it’s important to understand what already exists. Whether you rely on intuition, emotions, or logic to process information, each approach has limitations. By understanding where you typically start when evaluating information, you can ask additional questions to uncover other perspectives that shape your perception of reality versus actual reality.
To gain a better understanding of yourself and your blind spots, consider these questions to complement your natural inclinations:
Bring in your heart — Emotional Intelligence: Understand what causes you to play small when to step forward regardless of what’s happening, and how to respond to your own (and another’s) big emotions. This understanding will make your decision-making process more empathetic and effective.
What causes you to play small? When do you step forward regardless of what’s happening? How do you respond to your own (and another’s) big emotions?
Bring in your head — Logical Experience:
Do you believe you can do this? What do you think or feel you need to make this happen? What experience may be insightful to your current journey?
Bring in your gut — Situational Reality:
What is going on here? Can you and your team get it done? What external factors will influence decisions along the way? What is the state of your business (cash flow health, pipeline, and capacity)?
This is true for your most trusted advisors, too. Everyone involved in making the highest-level business decisions must be ready to face themselves as much as the long-term vision and individual situations.
Strengthening your head, heart, and gut connection strengthens your innate talent. And because of that, you can trust your instincts even more.
To build your inner compass, a realistic view is necessary. You learn how to answer the question: How can we align this with our current strategy?
There are three techniques for making the right decision at the right time:
- Consider the consequences: Consider the potential outcomes of each option and the short—and long-term implications of your decision.
- Consult with others: Seek advice and feedback from others with experience or expertise in the area where you are making the decision. This can help you gain a new perspective and consider overlooked factors.
- Trust your instincts: Your intuition can be a valuable tool in decision-making. If something doesn’t feel right, take the time to understand why and consider an alternative.
Do everything possible.
Committing to time in your weekly schedule to do the necessary work is also the time to review and make priority changes … essentially doing everything possible to reach your biggest goals.
Growth is relative to your goal. Once you are clear about what growth looks like for your business, then you can build a strategy for impactful growth in one (or more) of these four categories:
- New Customers
- New Products
- Expand Products
- Expand Customers
Then, ruthlessly prioritize what will move you toward your growth goal. This means making tough decisions about what to focus on based on what will have the most significant impact on your business growth.
Referencing back to head, heart, and gut checks about the state of your company makes prioritizing simpler (not necessarily easier).
Follow these steps to find out what is possible and how your team can do as much as they can:
- For every open initiative, write about existing processes — or create a new system requiring recourses if one does not exist. (NOTE: this is NOT a task list)
- Rank the initiatives by the impact on growth as you’ve defined it.
- Now, rank initiatives by the ability of your team to act.
- Be ruthless. Cut the bottom half of the list and be OK with not doing those actions so you can focus on what matters to your growth.
This is where blindspots not only appear in every possible disguise but old (and sometimes wrong) assumptions and appear as unrecognized attachments.
What is necessary and what actions your team can take is unique to the strength of your company’s business model. So, take a close look at what makes the cut and use your protected time each week (I call this a Present Retreat) to review progress, make any prioritization adjustments, and decide how to clarify plans for every person.
A Present Retreat is a dedicated time to step back from the day-to-day operations and focus on the bigger picture of your business growth.
You may see change, or you may see more success than you ever imagined.
How much change or leaps of success depends on how well you:
- are accountable to what is necessary and what is possible.
- utilize an outside set of eyes to support and navigate with you.
- commit to the time required to do the right work.
- are honestly assessing what has happened so you can make realistic changes.
And then, the impossible happens.
Focus and discipline allow you to know yourself and the true uniqueness of the people working with you. The problem you solve will illuminate trends you see before anyone else. This becomes a competitive advantage:
- You sense and begin thinking about addressing a change before it becomes a problem.
- You know what is most important and what your team has the skill and capacity to do, and you adjust accordingly.
- Your plan is not set in stone, and the ability to change course becomes part of the journey.
This is the core of making the right decision at the right time. You integrate what you learn as you go, prioritize and adapt in the day-to-day, and raise the bar on what constitutes an opportunity for business growth.
In addition to participating in the Driving Solutions Intensive, which we offer twice a year, I leave you with these tips from serving thousands of businesses, business owners, and entrepreneurs.
The Driving Solutions Intensive is a comprehensive program designed to help business owners and entrepreneurs identify and address key business challenges and develop strategies for sustainable growth.
- Practice mindfulness: Take a step back and reflect on your thoughts and emotions. This can help you stay focused and make more thoughtful decisions.
- Learn from experience: Reflect on past decisions and their outcomes. Identify what worked well and didn’t, and use that knowledge to inform future decisions.
Remember that making the right decision at the right time is not always about achieving perfection every single day. Instead, it’s about learning and adapting to what is within and outside your control.
Your head, heart, and gut are powerful, existing tools you can tap into — reflecting on past knowledge and each new business growth experience you have.
Sometimes it is imperative that you make the right decision at the right time.
Don’t wait. Start using the information here to help shift your focus from tasks and dollars to priorities and how you define business growth for your company.
Only when working with a realistic overview that builds awareness, stamina, and deep knowledge, will you know which decisions you must make the first time? These include
- When M&A (mergers and acquisitions) conversations are the most beneficial.
- Choices that make sure you get what you want from the business.
- Opportunities to make a difference in your industry.
- How an unexpected situation impacts your team at and away from work.
- When to proceed with caution due to a legal or emergency.
It takes guts to own a business and be an entrepreneur.
With your trusted advisor — and if you don’t have one, reach out to us — begin working on these things:
- Commit to a weekly Present Retreat: This protected time gives you the space to think bigger, have a business reality check, and make adjustments to stay the course.
- Take calculated risks: Carefully evaluate a decision’s potential risks and benefits before taking action. A calculated risk has a reasonable chance of success, and you can afford to lose if things don’t go as planned.
- Learn from shortfalls: Failure is a natural part of taking risks but can also be a valuable learning experience. Instead of fearing failure, embrace it as an opportunity to learn and improve.
Believe in yourself.
Believe in your abilities and trust you have what it takes to succeed. Building self-confidence can help you overcome the fear of taking risks and provide the courage to pursue your goals. Your success can arrive regardless of your academic or business knowledge.
All the information here points to one strategy you use to lead your company.
None of the information says to work, play, or burn the candle at both ends. There is a reason for that. Growth requires guts and confidence. Taking risks and believing in yourself requires time and effort to build. There are no shortcuts. This vital work will reduce unnecessary problems and uncertainty, giving you more time and capacity to face the significant challenges that arise.
You read this because you seek something you don’t have yet. I am here to tell you it is already within you.
I am excited to work with you to develop the three-part foundation to achieve the growth you want for your business.
Learn more about Driving Solutions Strategic Intensive Framework here, and reserve your spot for November.
