
ARE YOU STUCK? A Must Read For Business Owners!
“I am Stuck, I do not have time, our cash flow seems to be stagnant, my team doesn’t understand our vision, our customers are moving to our competitors and I do not have resources to solve any of these problem.”
If you are a business owner and resonate with any of these or all of these and if you often find yourself stuck with such challenges this blog is for you.
Here are the five reasons why you as a business owner find yourself STUCK in your business and eventually forget the very idea of starting the business and scaling the business.
Reason No 1: SYSTEMS
Good businesses are built using money and great businesses are built on systems.
Systems are the operational manual of your business. They help you leverage the most important resource of running your business successfully — time. Business systems enable you to leverage your time by automating activities that are performed more frequently. Lack of systems create lack of time and that’s when your business actually turns into busyness. An effective system helps you bring consistency and control, it lowers your operational cost, helps you in scalability and it creates freedom.
Action:
Identify which of the business processes that can be systemized in your business.
Reason No 2: TEAM
Do you go on a vacation and often find yourself hooked onto your laptop or phone? Do small business decisions are delayed due to dependence on you? Then the truth is you do not own the business your business owns you.
In most cases the later one is true i.e., your business owns you and if in your case it’s the same then it’s time to create a second –line leadership in your business. A team of individuals who are empowered and are aligned to your business vision and business goals. The truth is Bigger the dream you have, stronger the team you need. And if you think it is difficult to find people who are as passionate as you are for your business goals and it almost seem impossible to find someone like that, then it is the test of your true leadership capabilities. Notice the words here, it says leaders who “build a team of leaders” and to build it requires you to identify and nurture the potential in them and sell them your vision.
Action:
Begin with identifying 2–3 individuals who are capable of taking up the leadership role.
Reason No 3: YOU
The truth is your business is a reflection of who you are. Your business grows as much as you grow and most of the time the bottleneck is at the top. You find most business owners doing almost everything on their own or micromanage most of the activities and constantly breath on the shoulders of their team members. What it does to you is, it makes you lose focus from your primary business objectives to day-to-day transactional work. You get side tracked and never leverage your business capabilities.
The key is for you to start working on your business and not in your business.
Action:
As a business owner define your role clearly and stay focused with your business objectives.
Reason No 4: Consistency
One of the top reasons why the growth gets stagnant is lack of consistency.
Consistency is the foremost reason why people do business with you or any other brands. It helps you gain credibility, trust and loyal customers. What consistency does is that it creates predictability in the minds of your customers. Predictability creates unique experience every time the customer chooses to work with you. The best example of this could be McDonalds. You know exactly what to expect when you visit a McDonalds across anywhere in the world.
Action:
Identify where all you must bring consistency in your business.
Reason 5: Knowledge
Does the vision of your business match your current Knowledge & Skill? Is your team well informed with the current trends and knowledge required to operate the business at optimum level? How often does the knowledge get updated? Do you have a ongoing process that enables you to update your knowledge?
In the constantly changing world, it is very easy to find yourself redundant and miss the opportunity of staying ahead in the game of business. Knowledge is the potential power that can transform your business and enable you to scale your business faster than your competitors. On the other side, lack of right knowledge can hinder in your growth.
Action:
Perform a Knowledge Gap Analysis of your team today and identify the areas where the knowledge needs to be improved.
To sum-up the five simple reasons remember the acronym S.T.U.C.K (SYSTEM.TEAM.YOU.CONSISTENCY.KNOWLEDGE) and identify which are the ones that needs to be addressed and how soon can you address them.
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Author:
Sharat Sharma — a leading Leadership, Sales & Productivity Expert. He is an upcoming Author, recipient of “Young Entrepreneur For Business Excellence Award” for his contribution in the field of education, A prominent speaker at various forums and contributes articles in world’s highly acclaimed success magazines.
