I have recently been researching the subject of focus for a talk I will be giving for Mum’s the Boss on the 10th September. As I was researching the topic I found that there are two types of focus – business focus and personal focus.
In this blog post I will look at the importance of business focus and how you increase it for your business.
Before I start any work with my clients I always determine what is the ‘so what’ of embarking on a course of action. Putting it very simply business focus is a major factor in business efficiency – which leads to greater profit for less effort. Using an analogy if all the people in a tug-o-war team are pulling in the same direction they are more likely to win. The more focused a business is, the greater the chance of achieving business goals.
Here are my seven top tips for how to achieve fantastic business focus:
1. Keep it simple
Keep your business strategy simple and easy to articulate. Your employees, clients and customers should easily get what you do. If a teenager can’t understand what you do, then it is too complicated.
2. Tell your employees and suppliers
It’s amazing how many companies do not tell their new employees (or existing employees if the business strategy changes) what the company’s strategy is and their role in helping to implement that strategy. Every employee should have personal objectives focusing them on what the business needs them to achieve.
3. Your actions speak a thousand words
Make sure at least 80% of your time is spent on implementing your company’s strategy. This way the majority of your conversations will be to do with some facet of the company’s strategy. Your employees and suppliers decide on what to focus on for your company based on your personal actions and words.
4. Give it time
Many businesses don’t give a new strategy enough time to bed in – and throw the baby out with the bath water. For example if you are using a social networking media to market your business, you need to give it at least 3 months before you see any return on your investment. Ideally, you should give a social networking medium 6 months before evaluating whether you are getting a good enough rate of return to warrant continued investment
5. Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate
Knowing where to focus your efforts is vital for great business efficiency. This means evaluating the likely rate of return for new ideas as well as existing investments and strategy. It is all too easy to get sidetracked on new ideas for revenue and businesses…
6. Pick your battles
As a business it is easy to get side tracked by going into battles that you are unlikely to win. For example, tendering for work that you don’t have a good chance of winning… going after a no. 1 ranking for a very popular keyword in google
7. Focus on doing the basics well
You wouldn’t go far wrong by focusing on doing the basics well – by this I mean, doing what you say you are going to do, and doing it when you say you are going to do it.
If your business needs help in focusing, give us a call – 01234 48 0123, for a free no-obligation conversation.
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