In today's fast-paced world, it is very easy to fall into the trap of entrepreneurial ADD. There are so many opportunities out there it sometimes makes it difficult to know where to start and what to do. Whatever it is that got you thinking about changing jobs are changing businesses are starting a new business, it was probably one thing. When I ran the home theater business, vendors would come to me all kinds of great tools and toys to sell my clients. Everyone of them demanded more time and more attention.
Opportunity overload
It doesn't matter what business you are in, Internet blogging or fast food, someone always has great ideas to add to your business. In today's world there are so many opportunities it begs the question, how do you choose which opportunities pursue.
If you drive around the country you'll find that McDonald is starting to be slightly different in different areas. Some have playgrounds, some are built to mimic a coffeehouse. Even McDonald's is testing different opportunities. In marketing one of the most important tools is testing. We can test headlines can test ads and we can test websites. The purpose of all of this testing is to identify which opportunities have real value.
The how you decide what your opportunity is?
Information overload
Back when Ray Kroc started McDonald, most of the research was done door-to-door or in the library. Salesman and canvassers would knock on doors, ask questions and try to glean some information from the answers they received. If you went to the library, you might see a handful of books on a specific topic. After flipping through a few of the books you might pick one or two to take home and read.
Today we don't spend much time researching and libraries unless you're going to college, even then the Internet may have faster more precise results. That is if you know exactly for. The problem with the Internet is if you start searching for something you can very easily become sidetracked by things related or not related, depending on how you started the search. Microsoft has made some pretty funny commercials about the challenge of true search for the Bing website and search engine.
Strategy with focus
When building or growing a business, it is very important to know exactly where you want to go. The more clearly you can see your target the more likely you are to reach the target. When you have a strong strategy and want to be successful in your business, it makes it much easier to filter out the information that you don't need. If you know exactly what you're looking for when you are looking for it, you're much more likely to find it.
If you want to be the best in any business, the most important thing to do is figure out who is already there. Find out who the best people currently are. They become part of your target. The other big advantage of having a strategy understanding your target or your goal is your ability to filter opportunities. When I own the home theater business, we added security systems and crazy little things like gate controllers. Over time I realized they were very successful businesses that only installed gate controllers, while we were losing money every time we put one in.
As we went back and reviewed our strategy, we irritated a few clients by cutting several areas of work. Gate controllers were the first to go. The next major step was to pare down our line so that we had no more than three products in any category. We found that one point we were carrying nine brands of speakers. We eventually trim that down to two, we found that we could do everything we wanted to do with just two brands. We also found that the people coming in for the missing brands were pretty easy to convert. We eliminated seven brands of speakers and reducing our overall costs in that category by 53%. When we returned to our strategy and fine tuned our focus on our target, the business did far better than our competitors.
Get a Coach
One of the things that sidetracked me from the original business was the fact that I enjoyed coaching and analyzing other businesses. I was helping several other home theater business owners around the country grow their business at the same time that I was losing focus on my own. Most of the businesses that I worked with did significantly better than my own. It wasn't until one of the other owners pointed out how well his business was doing because he followed my advice, and how poorly my business is doing and I was ignoring my own advice.
Having a coach or mentor who understands business can help you find that strategy and focus. It doesn't matter if you want to be a blogger, home theater store owner or a wildly successful attorney. Everyone can benefit from having a coach or mentor. Hopefully at some point in life your success will allow you to become someone else's coach or mentor.
Even the best of professional athletes have coaches. Many of the best professional athletes have personal trainers and coaches beyond those provided by their team. The great basketball players have full indoor basketball courts attach to their house and never stop training. The great golfers have a driving range in their backyard, some like John Daly have built complete holes or golf courses in their backyard. It doesn't matter what sport you look at, when you look at the top performers in that field they have a coach. CEOs have coaches, several good franchise chains offer coaching to their owners. Some have even created complete university style programs to train their franchisees. If you don't think you can afford a dedicated coach, then you should enter a group coaching program like the Strategic Business Mastery course we offer at Rustic Creek.
Personal coaching is one of the fastest and best methods of developing your personal strategy. Your personal coach can offer feedback and suggestions to help you overcome obstacles in ways you would never see on your own. As you go out to find success, act like a pro and get a coach.
To your success….
No comments:
Post a Comment