Member Article

Keeping business simple is the key to success

As a coach helping small businesses, I have found that the one recurring issue is that business owners often over-complicate things that should be quite straightforward. It’s totally understandable – small business owners often work on their business and in their business, and are left to stew over the big decisions. However this can be crippling and leads to indecisiveness, stress, and sometimes poor decision making.

If this sounds like you, rest assured that it needn’t be that way. Quite often, even the most seemingly complicated business conundrums can be simplified when you allow yourself the time to think. And the best way to carve out time is to take a step back and take stock of your business.

So here are my key tips to help you do this:

Have a purpose

Whether you’re in the early stages of your business, or you’ve been going for a while, it’s crucial to check in with yourself to ensure that what you’re doing is important to you. Your business is constantly evolving, as are you. So it’s important to ensure that you know why you do what you do, and that your business is serving its purpose. Sometimes personal factors, such as life changes may alter your priorities. This in turn will affect the purpose of your business. So it’s important to give yourself time to evaluate and re-evaluate as time goes on.

Have a vision

Once you have established your purpose, it’s time to think about your vision. What do you want to achieve? Do you want to build a large business with a team of ten that you eventually sell? Or do you want a business that fits around your lifestyle and requires less of your time? Know what you want to achieve, and be clear and honest with yourself about how ambitions you are.

Have a strategy

So now it’s time to identify how you will make your purpose and vision a reality. What is your strategy? It’s important to know how you will fulfil your purpose and make your vision a reality. This includes recognising what your strengths are and where you need help. No matter how big or small your business is, bear in mind that you will need support to succeed, whether that is through employing staff or contractors, enlisting the services of a mentor or coach, or finding a network of like-minded business owners.

Have a plan

Know what your priority actions are. Commit to when you are going to do them. Also, be clear about short term and medium-term goals. What do you want to achieve by this time next year? To reach this goal, decide what it is you need to achieve in six months’ time, and also in three months’ time. This will help you determine what actions to take in the next three, six and 12 months. Write these down to create a plan.

Within your plan, it’s also important to note who will be fulfilling your priority actions. As mentioned previously, you cannot do it all by yourself, and continue to work on your business.

Take action!

Tackle your priority actions by doing them yourself or delegating to others. It’s also important to hold yourself and others accountable for respective tasks. A sense of ownership and accountability will help ensure that tasks don’t get neglected and fall into the dreaded ‘to do later’ pile.

By following this structure, and ensuring that you access support and delegate where necessary, running your business can be much simpler.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Amanda Cullen .