Its important to not only achieve profit, its the time period in which you can achieve it in.
For small business – this doesn’t seem obvious at first.
You need to become successful and profitable NOW, not next year, and definately not ‘one-day’.
You need to make the hard decisions, make the big changes, and have your success now.
If you wait, and go slow, your life will dribble away, and your business will just be wasting your time.
So when you are planning – move the horizon to something closer, make it immediate.
A lot of this depends on the owner of the business to implement, and its the old “work in the business, versus working on the business’. I think you need 30%-60% of your time spent working ‘on the business’ – being planning strategy, marketing, and working with partners etc.
If you are a public company, you have shareholders demanding profit this year, so generally there is a mandate to get things done. If you are privately owned, you can just wonder around, with little or no growth if you don’t get stuck into the changes now.
Google talks about velocity of business.
If its worth doing, is worth planning,
if its worth planning its worth doing,
if its worth doing its worth doing NOW.
Bring those plans sooner and faster. Bring the profit NOW.
In order to achieve sooner and faster you need:
– time – reorganise your time to work on the business (see above)
– skills – for planning growth, marketing, branding, sales – perhaps outsource some of this
– motivation / inspiration
If you need motivation / inspiration, read these :
Think Big – Donald Trump
Think 10x – Michael Hewitt-Gleeson
Be passionate – Charles Kovess
Two of these guys above I wrote about here