In the past couple days, I have run up against business strategy. I went to a business mixer last night and the individual I spoke with I could tell she was very frustrated with the technology that she implemented that was supposed to fix all her problems. Same thing with a close friend of mine. He is really trying his best to automate his business and only finds himself frustrated at the end of the day because he didn’t get his expectation of what that software was supposed to do for him.
I’m sure that if this happens in my small circle of friends that its happening all over. In fact, since I started putting a coaching program together I have experienced an unparalleled increase of new business startups. I’m sure it has something to do with the changing economic climate. Even so, most of the people I talk to have no clue what they are doing much less how they will take the next step. I worry about folks because they have no strategy.
We live in age of mass advertising and with the advent of the internet we can research what we think we need to buy to run our businesses. Most of the time the reasons why someone picks say an operating system over another is personal preference. In some cases it seems to be a religion. I wouldn’t put it past some apple owners to convert their user groups to prayer groups. There are all types on this earth.
The danger in relying too much in technology is that you become lazy and you let people dictate to you how you run your business. At the end of the day, isn’t that part of the reason why you started a business? So that you and you alone could make executive decisions?
I tell everyone come up with a strategy. Figure out what you need to do on a daily basis to run your business. Try running your business without a computer for day and you will see that you need to develop some kind of system. They did it 50 years ago and guess what. You can still run a business today without a computer. I don’t recommend it, but its possible.
When you completely remove the business boob tube, you gain a perspective on your business and you build processes based on necessity. Then when you define that process, open up outlook and other tools and see how you can automate that process. Pretty soon you get rid of the crap that wastes your time and ruins your life.
With a little ambition and goal setting you will be on your way shortly to running smooth engine. So smooth you might even find out you can do without much of your overhead.
If you try this, send in a comment. I would love to hear your feedback good or bad.