It’s the old analogy of the iceberg or the swan gliding majestically across the water. You don’t see what is underneath. Take an Olympic sprinter at face value and you miss what took them to success. A sprint lasting less than ten seconds does not tell the full story. ‘Winning at business’ is not a short sprint but rather a story of many strands.
Winning at business can appear effortless to many until you start looking at what lies beneath that success. We’re going to look at the different layers that lie underneath ‘winning at business.’
In this article:
Business goal setting
Resilience and discipline
Continuous improvement (Kaizen)
Support for learning and long-term success
Business Goal Setting
You’ll have started your company with a business plan and a marketing plan. These are to satisfy your bank and give you a structure to go about building a winning business. Circumstances like the market your business competes in and the competition will ruin carefully crafted plans. The most important element, the compass that gives you direction is your goals. Set them early and keep coming back to them.
You’ll benchmark where you are in business terms, for example, revenue/sales per month and we can apply this to other elements of business. If you need X amount of revenue (and you know your margins) how many visitors to your website and how many of them do you need to convert to a sale?
Focus on your main goal and set other goals to achieve.
SMART Goals
You can use SMART goals to make sure your aim is focused:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-disciplined
A smart overriding goal will drive your business into ‘winning mode.’ Just like that Olympic sprinter running under ten seconds, you will have laser focus.
Resilience and Discipline
How many times are you going to face setbacks? Quite a lot and like an athlete you’ll be forced to take stock, you’ll be forced to look deeply into your actions and understand which of your actions is contributing to winning and which is not.
That new market you were hoping to enter but you don’t have the advertising budget to make an impact. That partnership that fell through because they had a better offer.
An Olympian understands when to take stock when to rest, when to adjust their training and who in their team they will have to change.
As a business person, you’ll understand that and you’ll keep going because you know your idea will work. You have belief and you’re stubborn, that resilience will help you attain the goal you focus on but you will need discipline.
Imagine what an Olympian goes through in training. You get to sit down, drink coffee and have a chat now and then. But deep down you know that you must maintain the discipline of focus on the goal. You’ll also understand that you can’t do it all by yourself. For long-term success, you will need the best support team possible just like the Olympians.
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Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)
With the best possible support, you can focus on your goal AND commit to a continuous process of improvement.
In Japanese culture, this is known as Kaizen.
Kaizen is more than a thought. It is a way of building efficiency into your business so it becomes the winner you hope for every day.
Imagine you have a process eg a repetitive process that takes 45 seconds to complete.
You don’t accept that it has to take this long. Your goal is X, the process is important and is a regular use of staff and resources.
If you apply Kaizen to the process and reduce that process to 14 seconds you have a tripling of productivity and you are another step closer to your goal.
Take a moment to check out the Conversion Rate Experts* website and a video about using Kaizen.
Support for Learning and Long-Term Success
That sub-ten second wasn’t just the achievement of the athlete. They had a team supporting them, a physio, a sports scientist, an agent, a PA and a coach. All come together to make that athlete a winner.
It’s the same in business. To win you need support staff. If we go back to when you started your business you may have had some support from the bank, a local business support service like an enterprise zone at a university or a mentor.
You start to build your business, you have a focused goal, you are resilient and you work on continuous improvement. What is your biggest enemy? That’s right. Time to do all you need to do. A support team like a telephone answering service is going to give you time.
A service you can trust to pick up your calls, and even make appointments in your diary is going to save you time so you may focus on the goal.
A decent and professional answering service is also going to give you confidence and more opportunities. You’ll need all the support you can get so you may learn more about your business, your market, your sales people and something of the competition.
Conclusion
It’s hard motivating yourself but if you have a focused goal, it becomes a great deal easier. You’ll be a resilient character and you’ll have discipline. But you won’t be doing this on your own. You need to build a team around you. That team can be outsourced and grow with you until you are ‘winning at business.’
