SMART THINKING
How to Work on Your Business, Not in Your Business
Why should you work on your business instead of in it? Simply put, because you want your business working harder for you than you work for it. It’s amazing what a difference a little preposition can make.
The consequence of working in your business as opposed to working on your business is enormous. Working in the business means you’re just managing to accomplish the bare-minimum tasks that will get your rent paid and keep your company around to hopefully survive another month. Your time appears to be managing you, you’re answering e-mails, constantly searching for clients, and making sure your basic bills are being paid each month. It feels like a never-ending uphill battle for survival.
By comparison, working on your business, means that you’re focusing on the strategies, tactics and activities that not only maintain, but grow your business.
Creating such a strategy requires real smart thinking. Thinking which deserves more of your time, attention, and even respect than all other activities.
When you work on the business, you must break it down into its key success functions; strategy, marketing, innovation, management and communication which you then allocate as the highest and best use of your time, or the time of your staff. Your task is to work on the biggest moneymakers, not on the biggest time, energy and opportunity drainers.
To help you identify the biggest moneymakers, I’ve compiled a list of six strategic pillars that any business can grow from. These are the essential keys to working on your business:
1. Constantly identify and discover hidden assets in your business. Make “growth-thinking” a natural part of your everyday business philosophy.
2. Build your business on a foundation of multiple profit sources instead of depending on a single revenue source.
3. Find ways to be different, unique, and advantageous in the eyes of your clients.
4. Gain the maximum personal leverage from every action, investment and opportunity you create.
5. Network, connect and brainstorm with like-minded, success-driven people.
6. Become your industry’s trusted advisor. Turn yourself into an idea-generator and recognised innovator within your industry or market.
Article by John Lloyd, Brandstorm
