How to prioritise your biggest business challenges?
And escape the cycle of meeting, meetings and more meetings:
As a business owner, you are stretched in all directions.
You never have enough hours in the day.
Still, you try your best.
Everyday you begin with the intention of giving your best and growing your business
& everyday you get sucked into the petty urgency of trivial tasks.
& everyday you feel bad about not prioritising right.
Find yourself in a similar position?
I totally understand.
I was a 1st time manager to a team of cross-functional teams of Marketing & Sales, Customer Support, Admin & Logistics and Legal departments.
It was a humungous challenge but I was prepared to ace it.
Once I got the hang of basics: the people, the challenges and how to manage change;
I started taking time to plan, prioritize and implement what I thought moved the needle the most.
At times, it means taking a break, working on yourself, getting help or simply hiring.
If you fail to identify your biggest challenges, you won’t solve it.
And if you want to solve it, you have to be serious about solving it.
What that means is that finding the important thing to optimise for.
Only you can tell whether out of the 100 tasks that occupy your plate every single day, taking 10 sales calls, or taking 10 interviews or taking a few hours of online tutorial is worth your time.
As a business owner, you have to evolve.
Every stage of your business demands a different you
&
You have to understand what your business needs from you today.
As a business grows, you might have these questions:
- How to fight my competitors with deep pockets?
- In a constantly changing environment, how to keep up?
- How to learn a new skill with so much clutter online?
Marketing specific challenges you will have:
- How to hire for marketing teams?
- What channels should I be using?
- What kind of content converts?
- How to build an audience and acquire new customers?
- Is social media marketing worth it?
It’s a lot to process…
Start by identifying what’s bothering you the most
I know, it’s a huge list.
Find your top 5
Now, look at this list and ask yourself.
“If I solved these 5 problems, would my business look drastically different than it looks today”
If sales is the #1 challenge, you have to learn or gain the capability to do sales for your business. Whether it’s B2B or B2C, your problems need to be fixed before you create a grand vision for the future of your business.
Similarly, you might have other problems…
Like hiring or marketing or retention or business development or processes
My point is that it can be anything, but only if you identify that this problem is what you will prioritise today, you’ll be able to solve it.
Stop optimising things which are already working or which if improved don’t make a drastic impact on your business.
And start prioritising 20% of tasks that will bring 80% of the returns
