3 Ways to Improve Your Business Focus
Practical steps toward mindfulness in a world of corporate chaos
By Parag Mamnani, Webgility Inc. Founder and CEO
Recently it has become clear that multitasking can be detrimental to both our productivity and our health. Research has found that multitasking inhibits our ability to successfully carry out simultaneous tasks, it can lower the IQ as much as 15 points, and increase the brain’s production of the stress hormone cortisol. It’s likely no coincidence that mindfulness and meditation are now all the rage. So whether you’re crunching your morning granola or creating a profitability spreadsheet, it’s all about paying attention, narrowing your focus, and clearing your thoughts.
Counter-intuitively, today’s commerce trends insist upon diversification, spreading resources across channels and employing a variety of specialized apps to run different parts of your business. For example, if you plan to make any money selling anything today, you need to be multi-channel by doing business on any number of marketplaces and platforms. To up the complexity ante, retail businesses that want to get and stay ahead of the technology curve need to become omnichannel, making sure their products are able to be sold via any device.
For those who would like to bring more focus to their business, here are three lessons learned from those who are able to find mindfulness in the distracted world of e-commerce.
1. Automate first, ask questions later
Because most entrepreneurs are not aware of what an enormous waste of time manual data entry can be, it’s ideal to set up automation right from the start. To draw a parallel: The responsibilities of running a physical store are managing the opening and closing, cleaning the space, stocking the shelves, and executing cash register transactions. Similarly, the responsibilities of modern enterprise include managing the necessary transfer of data in all of its forms — recording sales information into accounting, maintaining customer lists, tracking marketing programs, and updating KPIs for business intelligence, to name just a few.
Much like neglecting a brick-and-mortar location can lead to an unattractive storefront and dissatisfied customers, neglecting financial data can quickly lead to lack of financial perspective and confusion. If you’re not taking care of your data assets through automation, you are going to have to manually enter all of that data into the different systems or pay someone to do so. It goes without saying, data entry is an enormous time suck that leaves you vulnerable to inaccuracies. It may start out as a doable daily task, but soon enough you will be drowning in data — don’t wait until that day.
2. Grow through integration
“There’s an app for that” seemed like such a hopeful statement, it brought palpable opportunity to a world where technology can finally solve any problem and close any gap. Opportunity indeed — growth projections for the global SaaS market expecting it to go from $49B in 2015 to $67B in 2018. But as business tools are raining down from the cloud by the bucketload, we find ourselves pummeled and confused by their sheer volume and their puzzling inability to work together.
Yes, we want specialized tools to handle expertise that we don’t necessarily possess, such as business analytics, tax compliance, and accounting. But when it comes to transforming an SMB into an enterprise-level company, these apps often become limiting. What good is an order management tool if it doesn’t integrate with your business intelligence software? What good is an accounting tool if it doesn’t integrate with your inventory? Ensuring that your business apps integrate properly from the beginning will keep your operations unified and allow you to focus on growing the business strategically.
3. Be the hub of your business wheel
One beautiful aspect of business in the technology age as we know it is that there are no hard and fast rules about how to structure your business. But all of that freedom can sometimes leave you feeling ungrounded, directionless, and scattered.
To ground your operation in sheer practicality, I suggest structuring your company around a single source of truth and use it to run your business. Whether rhetorically or literally, picture that source — be it a dashboard for a specific set of metrics into which all of your data feeds or a tool that connects all of your revenue streams and expenses — as the sun of your e-commerce universe, the peaceful eye of your swirling sales hurricane, or the hub of your business wheel. Find tools that allow you to operate from a single command center and set a realistic pace for growth that allows for experimentation, failure, and agile expansion. You have choices, so make the choices work for you.
Most people go into business because they’re inspired by what they do, but amid the breakneck pace of today’s entrepreneurial world, one must fiercely protect that inspiration from the universe’s compulsive efforts to distract and diversify. Focus is your only hope — may you find it (and happiness) while building your empire.
Parag Mamnani is the founder and CEO of Webgility, Inc, the leading software solutions company for multi-channel e-commerce enterprise companies and SMBs.
