Make time to be strategic

October 22, 2008 OneCoach Team 3 comments

This post is the fifth in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with Rita Gunther McGrath, co-author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth. See the first post in this series here.

You must spend time on developing your business strategy. Otherwise, you’ll be blindly charging ahead. You need to think about all the “if, then,” “what about this,” and “what about that” scenarios. And once you’ve developed your plans and master goals, you need to continually tweak and optimize them.

The challenge for small-business owners is finding the time to simply think and strategize about their business – too much motion without actual forward progress. You absolutely must set aside some solid time on a regular basis to generate and finesse your strategy – turn your cell phone off, ignore your overflowing e-mail inbox, go into the office early before your client demands start flooding in.

And if you can, get some extra minds in on the brainstorm session – two minds are better than one. Spend time working on your business instead of in it.

Set realistic expectations. You can’t simply assume that because you’ve started a business, opened a door, that everyone will automatically come knocking, sharing in your excitement. The world is pretty indifferent, and unless you’ve got some particular reason to make them sit up and take notice, they’re going to continue to be indifferent.

Your realistic approach must be guided by a very clear step-by-step plan for generating revenues and profits. And as always, you’ve got to make sure you set aside enough for your marketing. When considering your marketing, you need to start with your customers – drive your business from your customers back.

The opposite of that would be starting from what you’re interested in and trying to drive it forward. If you treat your business like a hobby, it’ll cost you like a hobby. If you treat your business like a business, it’ll pay you like a business.

Next in this series: Revenue before cost.