ActionBites: How To Step-Up In Your Business.

Accepting personal responsibility for our actions and our performance in the roles we undertake is a sign of our maturity and character.

Performance is something we can judge in others and conveniently miss when it comes to our own.Often the topics of business issues come up and there is a rash of activity and articles posted online and in books about marketing and ways to move things around in business. Working with business owners on many of these issues, it is clear that they all tend to resolve back to the same issue.

It all comes back to the actions, skills and attitude of the business owner.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we can end up in business without preparation and training in the particular skills that will enable us to perform excellently in our new role as CEO of our business. Sometimes we just start doing what we love and before we know it, our doing-what-we-love activity has become a real life business and suddenly we’re faced with employees, compliance issues, customers to serve, and a need to keep the rent paid and feed all the mouths that are depending on us. Meanwhile the world has changed, and the way that we always knew how to do what we do, have changed too.

Now we have to contend with competition from big operators with vast budgets for marketing and advertising and a willingness to sell under our cost of goods, just to squeeze out the local operators. We have a changing marketplace where customers expect access 24/7 to our business and will spend their money elsewhere if we don’t make provision for them in a way that suits them best. Higher expectations and access to an internet full of alternatives makes it important that we keep up with the new changes, but often we can be so busy just ‘putting out fires’ that we don’t even notice how much is changed – or that those changes can also bring us opportunity, along with threats to the status quo.

So how do we grow into the role that our business needs us to assume?

How do we move from the harried business owner, to the calm, in control CEO who runs the business as a business, and maintains a standard of service and product that can compete in this new environment?

Here are some areas to focus on that can help you be that person.

Review Your Current Position

Think about it ... What commitment you are going to make to yourself and the contract you’re willing to enter with YOU to perform at the level the CEO of any business, should deliver. Commit to deliver for your business. Write it out and sign off on it. Get it witnessed!

Get Help: See What’s Hiding In Your Blind-spot

You know the signs on the trucks when you’re driving “if you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you”. The same is true in business, and while we are looking the issues that are right in front of us, we are in danger of not seeing those things that might be causing some of our problems, or those things that can blindside us and wipe us out fast, or just cause a slow and miserable death. What is in that blind-spot can be leading to money bleeding from the business, preventing money coming into the business, or creating an environment that is stressful and bad for business and everyone in the business, and customers who would willingly spend money ‘if only’.

You get a different perspective when you can share what you see, with someone who can see the same thing from an outside perspective. This value of this can be immeasurable. Make sure what you think you are seeing is really what’s there and get an external viewpoint from someone who can not only see, but understand how to analyse what they are seeing.

Consider Your Business Vision

Nobody can build anything well, if they don’t know what it is supposed to look like. Try putting that furniture together if you don’t know what goes where. It is too hard! And it doesn’t need to be. Pick what YOU want your business to be like.

Understand if the business doesn’t look like you thought it would – or would like it to – then it is up to you to recalibrate, retool if necessary, and revamp to create the vision that you DO want.

And you need people to help you, so you need to engage your employees, and others who will help you achieve bring your vision to life, so they know what it is, and you all know when you have arrived and can keep it flourishing.

Create A Blueprint

Just as you need to know what something should look like, before you can build it, you need some guidelines to make sure that you put it together the way that can get you to the final result for which you are aiming. Your blueprint is your working document to show you what, how and where everything goes and when it will be done.

Follow Through

This is blueprint is worthless unless you make the commitment to yourself and to the project to do what you say you will do those actions that need to happen in order for it to be done now. If you don’t know HOW to do it, or to do some part of it, then that’s okay. Just find out! Yes you can find out anything you need to know, and you can find it inside the business, or you can find it outside the business if you don’t have what you need to do it. Finding the help you need, well that’s part of your commitment. No excuses.

Make Yourself Accountable To Someone

One of the great things in business is that we often get to make the decisions. One of the terrible things in business is we often get to make the decisions, and not be accountable for the results. That’s bad for the business and while it sometimes feels like a good thing... it is bad for us too.

This is where ‘the rubber hits the road’ and this is where we find out if you are really Stepping Up in your business. It can be scary, here on what can seem like the ‘bleeding edge’ but is just doing what we should be doing from the outset.

Push through that barrier, and you’ll find your better self on the other side.