Make Progress
Without actually seeing any numbers, you can often tell which companies are successful, or will become so in the near future. One way is by looking into the offices of a small and young business which can be very revealing. If there is a lot of activity going on, it’s a good sign. It may take a while to make hard profits, but if the phone is ringing and you have important meetings regularly, then you are probably on the right path. Any office where there is energy, where people are being hired, and many meetings are taking place, is an office moving in the right direction.
If you ever think your business is standing idle, you are wrong. For a business, standing still really indicates that it is going backward relative to the well-heeled competition.
When there is energy and activity, it shows the entrepreneurs are doing everything they can to make sure their products and services are getting as much exposure as possible, and in the greatest variety of ways possible.
To illustrate the exponential value and power created by making proactive business improvements, consider if you were to enhance just one small aspect of your operation every day, in 5 years you would have over 1500 improvements. Presumably, some of those tweaks to your business will be significantly profitable if you have stayed focused on the items that appear to offer the highest yield based on your studies and discussions, or the “lowest hanging fruit,” which could become readily convertible to cash.
Conversely, if one of your competitors who wants a more relaxed lifestyle decides to improve one item merely every third day, at the end of 5 years, he will have just over 500 tweaks.
So with more than 1000 additional improvements to your business than your competitor, you will have a much more profitable operation due to the many added efficiencies and opportunities. Remember, there is always a means to improve and expand an already good product and its marketing. Overall, everything in your company will be a work in progress which means you always have additional opportunity to grow successfully.
In business and society, saving money is a natural obsession. Yet in order to be successful in your business, you are going to have to spend money to make money. Companies can spend far too much energy on cutting costs. Instead, you should focus on assertively enhancing your sales and marketing systems, since managing expenses should be intrinsic to every businessperson, and overdoing it offers scant value. Heads of companies often spend more time and money than necessary when contemplating and negotiating ways to cut costs, and they are therefore losing lots of opportunities in the process.
When you pull yourself and your employees away from the daily tasks to discuss saving money, and there is really none to save, you are instead wasting money and wasting your and your employees’ time. This is counterproductive to achieving your goals of financial success and is too stressful on your company. You ultimately will have to let go of money and control to invest further into your business as opposed to just saving money. Management activities should mostly be based on longer-term and broader goals, even if they are at the expense of short-term financial opportunities. Another way to look at this is that if you are always saving money instead of making money, then you won’t have any left to save.
Your energies are better spent on taking the costly activities that occur in your business, improving them to become ever more valuable, and applying the new processes learned to your Best Practices manual. When you focus on enhancing each day-to-day operational method that takes place in your business, including consistently addressing the quality of your products and services, your cost structures, and your customer service, you will ultimately make your company exceptionally profitable, efficient, and reliable.
