1/ In growing a business, we often sacrifice the strategic for the tactical.
The day to day reactions can stop an owner from being proactive.
What happens is you move, but not a consistent direction.
It takes longer to get ahead.
Here is how I combat that...
2/ I give a theme to each weekday.
These themes are the major strategic areas I need to focus on given my overall strategy at the time.
These change every few quarters depending on where the company is at and where we are headed.
As of last look, these were my themes...
3/
Monday -> Company Direction and Update
Tuesday -> Brand & Business Development
Wednesday -> Strategy, Vision
Thursday -> People
Friday -> Metrics
Here are the things I would look at:
4/ Company Direction & Update
Prepare for board meeting
Review our current state and all main KPIs
Prepare Operational and Sales Major Updates / Issues
Identify potential weaknesses, opportunities, threats
5/ Brand & Business Development
Who could we partner with to give us more national/global exposure?
Industries we should be focusing on but arent?
Are we holding true to our values & strategic differentiation? (ie are operational systems delivering on our customer promises?)
6/ Strategy Vision
Where do we want to be in 5 years?
Are we headed there?
If we continue this every day, will we end up there?
Does our market positioning make sense give our size, capabilities, and unique strengths?
Why do customers do business with us?
7/ People
Check in for 15-30 min with all direct reports, and some 2 and 3 level reports.
How are they? What are they worried about? What ideas do they have?
Are they properly placed in the organization? Are we using their strengths?
Who wants and needs to be developed more?
8/ Metrics
Review all KPIs we set up based on current quarterly sprint targets and overall 5 year targets.
Review sales / GM trends by customer
Whats working well? Whats not?
9/ By reviewing some key areas that heavily impact strategy, and touching them once a week, you'll keep charging forward in the right direction.
Most of these (other than people) take 20 - 30 min daily.
10/ This keeps strategy top of mind.
You will also keep the team aligned, find issues, exploit opportunities, and iterate on your strategy must faster, giving you faster returns with less risk and bumps along the way.
Last, you'll have a much better grip on the operations side.
If you find this type of writeup helpful, I am launching a newsletter soon with deep dives on specific small business operations topics along with case studies on how small businesses have used them.
Process improvement means
- it costs less to run your operation
- there are few mistakes
- it takes less time to run your business each day
- you can take on more customers without investing in more resources
For the business owner this means:
- more cash
- less stress and fires
- less time in the business
So how do you do it?
While there are countless complex and innovative ways to carry out process improvement, many small business owners can start to see significant improvement with just a little work.
4 things you MUST get right to really scale a business.
There are more, these 4 are extremely important.
1 People
You need to get the right people, working on the right things, with the right tools, incentivized in the right way.
2. Strategy
You must have the correct strategy, one that you can execute and which utilizes your strengths and capabilities while protecting your weakness. You have to develop and play a strategy that is unique to you.
Sounds like you want to go through a 3
Part step to get ready for the next steps.
Process is not only systems and standards, but about reducing risk and isssues. In other words, you don’t want it feeling like it’s duct taped together and might fall apart in 🚀
@StrongpointRich@jasoncoxnc@girdley@WilsonCompanies 1. Is called process mapping. This writing down what you do now, who does it, how they do it, how long it takes, and what needs to be o be done first (dependencies).
This is a pain because no progress is made, but you have to start somewhere.
Based on dependencies, possible parallel work, cost structures and capabilities, and a few you other things, you combine steps, eliminate, outsource, and re order them.
“What’s the best way to do this with 100x more volume, without making a mistake?”