Do You Have A Business Strategy in Place?

64521313There are some small business owners that started their business out of necessity; they got laid off, they got fired, or they did not agree with the ideology of the new management.Whatever the reasons they had to start their own business, they believe that the road to success was possible through this venue. There are probably many entrepreneurs that made it, but some are still wondering what went wrong. Being a small business owner requires you to do many “jobs” daily. The task is not easy, and the time you seem to require to accomplish those tasks seem to grow bigger every day. Time management is an important factor for every entrepreneur, planning and executing tasks on time are of the utmost importance for the success of your company. Are you having trouble finishing your tasks daily? Is your strategy for your business not even in place? Read the following articles below for more information about this topic.


Stop Thinking Long Term. Execute Strategy 90 Days at a Time.

Most savvy executives fully understand the value and necessity of doing strategic thinking and planning. After all, the saying goes, “Without a map every direction looks good.”

There are many well-known planning tools for businesses to use as guides, such as Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’ Big Hairy Audacious Goal, a blueprint for helping enterprises hone in on an objectiveor Michael Porter’s Five Factor Analysis.

But while planning tools are very appropriate for defining the current state of a company as well as its desired future state, they rarely include a process for getting there.

Envisioning where your company will be in the future is important but the companies that are really great at executing their long-term vision do it 90 days at a time, focusing on bite-size pieces of progress that everyone in the company can understand and work toward collectively.


10 secrets of success for small business

What do you want to achieve in 2015 for your small business? The beginning of January is the time for New Year’s resolutions, so here are my top 10 resolutions for small-business owners and entrepreneurs.

  • Focus on recurring revenue.You may be thrilled to find any source of income, but some types of customers contribute more significantly to your long-term financial well-being. Focus foremost on customers who have the need and capacity to buy from you repeatedly rather than one-off purchasers.
  • Limit your time on social media.Social media can eat up your day even when it’s for a business purpose. Establish a time limit (I’d say 30 minutes maximum), schedule it for a specific time each day and then click off and get back to work. To limit your time on social media, schedule your social media posts in advance using a social media management tool. We use Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com). Others are Buffer (www.bufferapp.com) and TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com)

Dodge The Unknowns In Your Business

The New Year is a great time to challenge our assumptions concerning what we know about our businesses. A fresh look includes questioning whether business givens are all that accurate. You may be aware of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous comment about the dangers of the unknown:

But there are also unknown unknowns…the ones we don’t know we don’t know…it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

In the business world, the point of this idea is that we need to keep an eye out for those things we don’t know – but think we do. Bad assumptions lead to bad business judgments.

5 assumptions that can lead to bad outcomes

Paraphrasing to protect the innocent, these comments I heard in 2014 demonstrate the business risk of bad assumptions you can avoid in 2015.