How do you decide what happens next in your business? For leaders who want to experience business growth, the answers might not be obvious.
Every business has a multitude of problems that need solving and issues that need chasing. How do you determine where to focus your energy for maximum success when all your priorities are competing for attention?
Leadership choice: Maximize productivity or fight fires?
Business leaders are mistake-fixing machines. Business owners and managers experience a continuous stream of problems that must be fixed.
As a result, those business leaders dedicate most, if not all, of their day to solving problems, correcting mistakes, and reacting to the latest obstacle.
Some business owners spend their entire career fighting fires, caught in a perpetual cycle of reactive management.
How many times have you come to work with a clear idea of what you want to accomplish, only to have your plans derailed by competing priorities?
Every business productivity app in the world will tell you that reacting to problems is not the best use of your time.
If fulfilling your vision statement is the ultimate goal, chances are you’ll need to step back and rethink your entire business management system. This is especially true if you are guided more by circumstance than through a strategic plan.
Dig Deeper: Learn how to establish a business strategy.
Focusing on strategic planning and execution is a key factor that separates the most successful business leaders from the rest. The best use of your time is working on activities that help you achieve your vision, mission and business goals.
Save your brainpower and energy for those activities as your first priority.
Turn your strategic plan into a business operating system
There are plenty of business strategy apps available but most only provide suggestions and inspiration. What you want is a business operating system that allows you to operationalize your strategic plan.
It should be specific to your business and tell you, at a glance, how you’re tracking against your success factors and what needs to happen next.
Using a strategy execution platform like StrategyX takes all the guesswork out of:
- Planning a rock-solid strategy, which is the foundation for the success of your business
- Implementing your strategy so it becomes a business operating system focused on achieving your vision, mission and goals.
Sustainable business success happens when you master these two steps. It’s the same formula used all over the world, across every industry and every size business.
What does a business operating system look like?
The difficulty for business leaders is every business is unique. In the past, businesses had to figure out the path to success for themselves or rely on consulting companies to help them know what happens next.
Both options are costly in their own way. With the right technology, it’s possible to create your own business operating system that provides a way to sustainably achieve your goals over the long term.
A business operating system is the underlying support you need to operate an efficient and profitable business. Consider how the Windows or IOS operating system works on your personal computer.
It ensures your computer operates the way you want while putting everything you need at your fingertips. It protects you from making costly mistakes that could corrupt your machine and your data.
The operating system ensures every program runs compatibly and you remain productive. You don’t have to make decisions about what’s required to maintain productivity because the operating system handles it for you.
A good business operating system will be based in technology that’s configurable to your unique requirements. It should provide enough structure that you can rely on it to guide your whole operation.
It should have a prescriptive approach that leaves no doubt about what happens next. It should NOT force you to change the way you do business to fit the technology.
Moving your company from reactive mode to proactive operation
A platform that focuses on strategic planning and implementing the strategy helps you achieve more every day as you meet and exceed your business goals.
It moves you from working in a reactive mode to proactively managing your business. You should expect the technology to:
- Use automation to manage repeatable tasks
- Provide scoreboards and dashboards to give you an immediate understanding of where you need to focus your efforts
- Schedule alerts and notifications to let you know when things are going off course
- Delegate responsibility to your team and make them accountable for results
- Show how to increase employee productivity
- Improve employee engagement and morale
- Be used throughout the organization, both my managers and staff
- Make it crystal clear what should happen next in your business.
It should also come with a business app (entire business operations contained on a single mobile platform) so you have access to your complete operation any time and any place.
Make StrategyX the foundation of your business operating system
If you want to focus your time on activities that directly contribute to exceeding your goals, StrategyX can help. Business owners who use StrategyX report high levels of growth, employee satisfaction, and goal attainment.
You can book a demo today to find out more. The only thing you have to lose is uncertainty, doubt and lackluster performance.