So you have a great business and you have a great leader (aka you). Yet 2016 was not the successful year you thought it was going to be. What happened?
You might have the best team in place, and all of the tools available to you to grow a successful business, and yet you’re not sure if you saw much growth. Without clarity, your business moves from one place to another like a rudderless ship. The first thing you need to do is get clear on what your business does, and then have a clear form of measurement established.
To get clear on what your business does, fill in this statement:
“My business ___________ for __________ so they can __________.”
An example would be: “My business provides diversified business solutions for a variety of businesses across different industries so they can work more efficiently and effectively.”
Wish Group is a holding company and it has a broad statement; yours for a single business should be much more focused. Each business within Wish Group has a different statement and it’s my job to keep all of these statements clearly defined. Wish Group’s power comes from each business having a clear identity and the ability to leverage each other within the Wish Group network.
Until you get clear on what your business does, you won’t be able to focus on goals that provide the most value to you or your clients. I receive a lot of questions and offers for different project ideas from within my team and other business owners. While a lot of these catch my attention, I cannot move forward on all of them at once. Being clear on what my businesses do and the goals I have for each business allows me to focus on projects that need to be addressed first.
Once you’re clear about what your business does, you need to establish a clear form of measurement. This is an important step because you need to be measuring your goals in the same way each time to get a true reflection of progress. This step will also allow you to identify goals that may be competing with each other. At Wish Group we are continuing to work towards gaining awareness in our niche, however, we also want to grow our blog subscription list. These two goals are competing with each other since we want to give complete access to all of our blogs and other information that provides value to our audience in order to gain awareness, but giving complete access means we don’t hold anything back that would entice someone to subscribe. As we approach 2017, I will need to get clear on all of the goals for Wish Group and the companies within so that we can move forward as a cohesive team.
There are many things that can go wrong in business, but as a leader you don’t want to be one of them! A lack of clarity for your business can derail all of your best efforts because your business goals and objectives need to be clear in your mind, in the minds of your employees and in the minds of your stakeholders. The challenge with clarity is that it takes work to achieve and then it takes more work to get everyone on your team on the same page. Once you’re clear on what your business does, write it into your business plan. Meet with your employees to make sure they understand and are able to support the business goals, and meet with your stakeholders to be transparent with your business objectives.
The New Year is fast approaching. This is often a signal to regroup, assess how your business has grown and review what projects were actually completed. Getting clear on what your business does allows you to set goals that match up with where your business should be heading. If you had goals written down already, you can use those to benchmark your success. If you didn’t have clear goals defined this year, make it a priority to do this before we ring in 2017. Even if you reassess halfway through the next year and change your goals, at least you will have a clear path that you see your business following. You cannot measure how far you’ve come unless you know where you started.
Let’s set clear business goals for 2017 so we can crush them!
Frank