Be Strategic
If you’re an entrepreneur, your typical To Do List probably includes, well, everything. From nurturing your relationships with your existing clients and gaining new ones to bookkeeping, invoicing, marketing, and maintaining your social media presence. And then there’s the actual work of fulfillment, and making sure you are delivering quality service on time for every client.
I’m willing to bet, though, that there’s one item that probably doesn’t make your list too often: Pausing. And that’s a problem, because if you don’t pause, you can’t plan.
The essential role of strategic planning
As a success coach for entrepreneurs, I’ve seen how failing to set aside dedicated time to plan for success can lead to a slew of problems. Sometimes it leads to businesses not getting the results or ROI they are capable of. Sometimes it leads to that feeling of burnout you get when you’re constantly busy but not getting where you want to go. Often, it leads to some degree of both.
That’s why when I work with clients in my mastermind, we make strategic planning a priority. Strategic planning is essential for ensuring that your road to the target you’ve established--that of your vision for your business--is on track.
While it might feel difficult at first to dedicate time to planning instead of all of the other tasks you have to accomplish, there are major payoffs. The best thing you can invest your resources in is solving your business’ problems and maintaining solutions. But the only way to do that is to get at the root cause of your problems. And that only happens when you take the time to stop, assess, and make a plan that will help you run your business strategically.
Starting with a pause
Strategic planning is about setting business priorities based on the input, or voice, of your customers, employees and suppliers. It’s about digging deep into the cause and effect by using a technique called the Five Whys to get to the root cause of problems in your business. We do this twice a year inside my mastermind, and it’s a game changer that leads to focus, direction, and, very often, breakthroughs.
The first step to strategic planning however - before looking at the present or the future - is an assessment of the prior six months where we analyze what worked, what didn’t, and why. This pause for reflection and evaluation gives us the foundation we need to make a sound strategic plan.
I love seeing this happen with my mastermind clients. One client, for example, was feeling completely overwhelmed and crushed by her business. She was burned out with the effort she was putting into her work, not making the income she desired, and not able to enjoy running the business she had dreamed of building. But when we stopped to assess the situation, we discovered three things she could do to ditch the overwhelm and make her business--and her life--run more smoothly:
Create better communication channels and boundaries with her clients.
Reorganize her work flow so her team was doing the daily tasks, freeing her up to focus on business development and strategy.
Implement and maintain systems and processes to add ease and efficiency to client delivery.
With breakthroughs like this, it’s easy to see how one afternoon of pausing to assess can yield an incredible return on investment.
If you’re ready to trade the reactive, fly by the seat of your pants approach for a more strategic path, learn more about how we can work together HERE.
Want to get started today? To jump off the never-ending loop of work for a pause that could make all the difference in your business, you can get a leg up on strategic planning by accessing your FREE 6-month Assessment below. This is the same exercise my mastermind members complete, and the perfect place to start if you’re looking for some guidance in assessing your year so far. Once you know where you’ve been, you’ll have a much clearer view of where you want to go, and how to get there.
