How important is working on the business?

12th May 2011

One of the hardest things to do when everything seems incredibly busy, is to find time to stand back and do some planning. When you are running about like a headless chicken, desperately trying to keep all the balls in the air the last thing you feel like doing is to stop, take a deep breath, and reconsider where you are going, and perhaps what needs to change.

When I start out working with business owners, it may quite often take a few months before they fully appreciate and understand the significance and importance of our meetings. Quite often they will cancel at the last moment, either because they haven’t progressed things and taken action as agreed, or because they organise something else at the same time (generally a meeting with a client or lead) which they still perceive as being far more important than a meeting with me. The truth is, however that whilst these alternative activities are indeed important, they are no more important than sitting down and discussing the next actions to be taken, which will then improve the way things are done, lead to greater profitability and sales, which in turn will allow them to employ new people and free up further time for the business owner. Whilst the business owners can see the sense and logic behind this, and will happily agree that pursuing the planned step by step procedures to make things change for the better is the right thing to do, they will still keep on fire fighting doing all the tasks that “need” to be done, until at some point something happens where they finally “get it”.

At that point they will start to book out time in their diary to start working on their business. This is when they can do the “homework” we mutually agree, so that at our next meeting we can assess the actions taken, and then plan the priorities to achieve the goals and changes that were planned at the outset. So how important is working on the business? Until you start on a regular basis, your role will be constantly that of an employee not a business owner.

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