This question is painfully simple, yet it plays a major role in the execution of your firm’s vision and priorities. Sadly, many leaders cannot accurately answer it. You may be surprised to find a sizable disconnect between your top priorities and how you actually spend your time.

People take their cues from the leader when it comes to time management. How time is allocated must match both your business priorities and your team’s actual day-to-day activities.  If they don’t match, have a look at your goals and priorities (you DO have goals and priorities, right?).  I’ve found that in most cases, time management issues are merely symptoms of underlying goal and priority issues.

Although time allocations may vary depending on time of year, staffing changes and external factors, time management must become a conscious decision that fits your vision and priorities. In fact, a periodic review of how you invest your time is a vital business habit.

Give yourself the gift of time for the new decade: track your time for 3-5 days.  Have your management team do it too, then review the results together.  Once you see the reality of how your spend your day, you can more realistically and honestly evaluate what needs to change to bring your time allocations back into alignment with your goals and priorities.  Like a fleet small boats bobbing in the ocean – they are bound to drift over time.

Back in the 1920’s, a PR man named Ivy Lee was hired by Charles Schwab – the President of Bethlehem Steel.  Lee gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He told Schwab “I can increase your efficiency. Pay me in 3 months whatever you think it’s worth.”

Lee met with Schwab and with each member of the executive team individually for exactly 10 minutes.  In the meeting he told them “Promise me that for the next 90 days, at the end of each day you’ll list the 6 most important priorities you need to accomplish the next day, and number them according to importance.  Then when you come to work the next day, work on them sequentially until they are all completed. Any leftover items get transferred to the next day’s list.”

They all said: “That’s it?”  And then they all agreed to Lee’s rules.

Schwab wrote Ivy Lee a $25,000 check 90 days later and said “This is the best investment I’ve ever made.”  Remember that this was in the 1920’s!

Whether you realize it or not, all your staff’s eyes are trained on you – looking for cues and norms to help them define how they should behave.  If you need THEM to make better choices around how they spend THEIR time, start by setting an example for them to model and follow.

Track your time, analyze the results, and make changes to your allocations. You might also consider taking Ivy Lee’s $25,000 advice to Charles Schwab – often it’s the simplest things that can make the biggest differences.

Here’s the answer.

Take 4 minutes to watch this video. You’ll see numerous Social Media ROI examples and a number of effective Social Media strategies. I promise it will impact your thinking about social media as a tool of business. In fact, the statistics alone will blow your mind.

Welcome to the world of Socialnomics!  Are you swimming with the current?

How much profit and productivity do you leave on the table in your organization due to misalignment and hazy focus? By implementing these 3 tools, you’ll be well on your way to more productivity and profit from your existing investments and resources.

3 Tools to Create Focus & Improve Performance

Here are the 5 steps that are required to create a comprehensive and practical plan for your business:

1.Identify your vision and clarify your values

Research shows that vision-driven leaders and their companies significantly outperform their competitors.  Your vision has 2 functions. First, it serves as a source of information, involvement, and motivation.  Second, it both informs and guides your decisions and the choices of your staff.  For example, I have a client whose vision is to “Automate, innovate, integrate, and simplify.”  After the management team communicated the vision clearly to the organization, it began to impact the myriad of day-to-day decisions and choices they and their people were making – moving them toward their objectives.
If vision is the “what” you are trying to achieve, then your values are “how” you expect your organization to behave along the way. 

They serve as guide posts for the members of your staff who, through their individual efforts, will collectively achieve your goals.  Values are the principles by which you do business and, once established, should be non-negotiable.  As you think about your values, consider what you know to be right, as well as how you want to be perceived by others. Values are demonstrated through behavior, and behavior creates lasting perceptions. Examples of core values are: trustworthy, we do what we say, fun, customers first, and respect for individuals.

Your vision and your values cannot be over communicated to your staff! In addition, they should directly influence your thinking in the 4 remaining steps of the planning process.

2. Assess external market and competitive conditions and trends

The first area to explore in the external assessment is customer segmentation.  That is, who your customers are now and who you want to have as your customers in the future.  Thee are many dimensions to consider here depending upon the nature of your business, for example, industry, revenue, and location for B-to-B, and income, home value, and number of children for B-to-C – just to name a few.  With deliberate focus onsegmentation and the needs and expectations of each segment, you will see opportunities more clearly.
Once you’ve clearly identified your customer segments, it is time to focus on your competition.  In doing this, there is value to looking at comparative strengths and weaknesses – both yours and theirs!  The ultimate objective is to find ways to leverage your key strengths against their weaknesses.  Although this exercise can be painful, understanding how you measure-up in terms of products, service, response time, sales skills, convenience, and value-added knowledge exposes opportunities and potential liabilities that your plan should address.

The final component of the external assessment is trend analysis.  Here you’ll be striving to understand the trends that are taking place – in your industry, among your customers, in our nation, around the world – that could have an impact on your business.  What is changing around you and how can you adapt?  You’ll pick this up in your trend analysis and it will help you minimize the impact of external events and capitalize on favorable developments.

3. Assess internal structure and resources

 Your organization must be structured to respond rapidly to the needs of your customers.  Sounds great, but is it? In evaluating your organization you may want to ask yourself some of these questions: Are we easy to do business with? Do we really add value, or just talk about it? How do we react when we make a mistake? The structure of your organization and the clarity of roles, responsibilities, and processes within it have a direct impact on your ability to provide value and positive, differentiated customer experiences.
 When you consider your available resources, don’t just think about people.  The resources at your disposal might also include real estate, equipment, growth capacity, service, technology, capital, intellectual capital, and expertise.  How you utilize them in aggregate is critical to understand, since business results are directly linked to your choices of how you acquire and deploy resources.  Understanding your market segments is another important dimension in the evaluation of your resources. Think back to customer segmentation and ask yourself: Do I have the right resources in place to meet my customers’ needs?  Are my sales producers and service staff sufficiently experienced in the segments we serve?

 4. Document Your SLOT (strengths, limitations, opportunities, threats)

Your external and internal appraisals identified concerns to be addressed and strengths upon which you can build.  The thinking you did about your competition, trends, organization structure, and resources highlighted areas that will have an impact on your ability to succeed in your chosen market segments.  Your SLOT analysis will help you summarize these issues and begin to conceive actionable ideas to maximize your strengths and opportunities, while minimizing your limitations and threats.
Strengths are defined as areas where your organization excels.  Limitations are usually weak points.  Opportunities represent significant and favorable situations in your markets that can help you be more successful.  Threats are like ticking time bombs that must be defused before they explode and do their damage.  While you may be tempted to focus on eliminating limitations, be sure to place an equal – if not greater – emphasis on exploiting your strengths.  This is how competitive advantages are built!

 5. Identify critical success factors (CSFs) and tactical goals

CSFs are the categories of things that must happen or must be in place for you to achieve your desired results.  Ask yourself: What broad elements are necessary and sufficient to achieve my overall objectives?  Some examples of CSFs are: Customer Service, Book Growth, Technology, Staff Development, New Market Penetration, and Sales Effectiveness.  Ideally, your business should have 4-7 critical goal categories to support your plan.
Your goals should be recorded in a spreadsheet, within CSF, including due dates, and – for each individual goal – the name of the person who will be held accountable to complete it.  The results of steps 1-4 can now be converted into specific, measurable, and attainable goals for your agency, forming the tactical road map – perfectly aligned with your strategic thinking – that will lead you to the results you seek.
As Confucius said, “A man who does not think and plan long ahead will find trouble right at his door.”  Centuries later, his wisdom still holds true – particularly for many companies in today’s waffling economy.  Whether you employ 6 or 600, a right-sized, well thought, appropriately executed plan will dramatically improve your competitive positioning and your performance regardless of market conditions.

Find a way to remove the obstacles that are preventing you from investing an appropriate amount of time in a disciplined thinking and planning process for your business. Your ability to outthink and outperform your competitors depends on it.

As Aretha Franklin says: “Think!”

In today’s mile-a-minute, e-connected, global, frenetic, here-today-gone-tomorrow world of commerce, it is no surprise that many of us don’t take enough time to think – and I mean really think, in a deep and focused way – about our business.  We’ve become reactionary experts, essentially sucker-punched by our clients, by our competitors, by 24×7 connectedness, and by the pundits who espouse turn-on-a-dime flexibility as the panacea for 21^st century business success.

Well, the pundits are at least partially right; flexibility is important.  But not at the expense of a well thought strategy and a logical plan of execution.  This is at once both the challenge and the opportunity with great potential to impact your performance and competitive position.

If you are thinking to yourself, “my business is too small to need a strategy” or “I’ve gotten this far without a plan,” you might want to consider whether you are thinking too small.  Acknowledging that what got you where you are today isn’t necessarily going to get you where you want to be in the future is the first step. Committing to some form of disciplined thinking and planning process is the next.  Sustained competitive advantage is linked to continually implementing change and, as both research-based and anecdotal evidence illustrate, the odds of doing that successfully plummet without a well-thought plan.

According to Theodore Levitt, professor and editor of the Harvard Business Review, the job of every manager is to “think rather than just to act, react, or administer.”  The question to consider is: How much time do you actually spend thinking versus acting and reacting?  If you are almost always acting and reacting, what are the potential risks associated with not taking the time to really think?

Although finding the time to think and plan is often posed as an obstacle by business leaders I’ve met, the time commitment for a structured process – similar to the one I will outline for you in this article – can be as little as 16-20 hours. That’s just 2 hours per week to spend working “on” your business instead of “in” your business, spread over 8-10 weeks.

There are 2 major components to understand: strategic planning and tactical planning.

Strategic planning is a thinking process that helps clarify and then merge your concept of what you want your business to achieve with the external realities of the marketplace and the internal realities of your organization.  The result is vastly improved precision regarding direction and focus, and a realistic assessment of your organization’s strengths, limitations, opportunities, and threats.  Tactical planning becomes much easier when a big picture has been defined – not just in terms of what must be accomplished, but importantly why it matters.

Business planning – the combination of strategic planning and then tactical planning -sets the stage for competitive advantage.  It also facilitates the integration of your plan, your people issues, and your processes into a single set of tasks specifically designed to get you where you want it to go.  An effective plan gathers no dust on the shelf.  Rather, it is a day-to-day communication, decision-making, monitoring, and tracking tool to hold yourself and your team accountable to accomplish your objectives.

In my next blog entry – part 2 of this 2-part series, we’ll outline the 5 steps that are required to create a comprehensive and practical plan for your business.

He goes on to point out that it is the work of the owner – not employees – to create and to nurture them. Value drivers include:

• A stable and motivated management team.
• Operating systems that improve sustainability of cash flows.
• A solid, diversified customer base.
• A realistic growth strategy.
• Effective financial controls.
• Stable and improving cash flow.

Due to the freeze in credit markets and a slowdown of M&A, today’s economic environment – for the foreseeable future – gives owners time to install and/ or improve value drivers in their companies. It also gives them time to demonstrate the sustainability of the value drivers they create. Buyers want to know that success or growth charted in one year can be maintained over several years. They bank on (and pay for) a company’s potential to grow, so they look very carefully at how long a company’s value drivers have yielded positive results.

Experienced owners know that change takes time. Really experienced owners know that positive results from those changes take even longer — likely longer than even they expect.

Regardless of when you might sell, it makes good sense for owners to concentrate on those elements of their businesses that create more cash flow, more sustainability, and more future value. After all, isn’t this why you’re in business?

A great place to start is to evaluate how you’re doing currently with respect to each value driver and then put a plan in place to improve each one – steadily and continually – over time. Then, when it finally is time to sell, you’ll be assured a handsome return for having built something of lasting value.

As a private pilot and an aviation enthusiast, I have the opportunity to attend all sorts of seminars related to improving my skills and staying safe in the skies.  Several weeks ago, I attended a session sponsored by the Air Safety Foundation (ASF – an organization with a very worthy mission) that was entitled “The Last Five Miles.”

It turns out that the overwhelming majority of general aviation accidents occur within five miles of the destination airport.  As a safety-conscious pilot, this is good to know – along with the reasons why these accidents occur.  By understanding the risk factors, I can become more aware, make better decisions, and fly more safely.

I have found that we can apply these same concepts in business.  For example: 

• Can you identify the “Last Five Miles” of activities for each of the critical job functions in your organization?  
   
• What are the most likely points of failure - 
  • in your sales process?
  • in delivering your products and/or services?
  • in completely satisfying your customers?
  • in other areas? 

Once you’ve identified these critical activities and most likely points of business risk, you have some good information to use in planning and decision-making.  Even better, you can predict that these things are likely to happen unless you put processes in place to work around or completely avoid them.   

This is, in essence, a very simple risk management process that you can use to rationally plan for unexpected, but not totally unanticipated events. 

In his closing remarks at the aviation safety seminar, the speaker said it best: “Hoping that nothing will go wrong isn’t a plan.”  If you take the time to understand the risk areas in your business, you can move from “hoping“ to knowing how your business will behave – with better outcomes – in the “Last Five Miles.” 

I wish you safe, predictable, and happy flying!