Skip to main content

3 Tips To Determine Your Top Priority


When we don't set priorities, we find ourselves putting out fires instead of working strategically to grow our business. This is a real cause of major bottlenecks for most businesses because it's really hard to identify these issues because you're running around right in the middle of it.

So the question is, are you really focusing on "busy work" or "strategic work"?

When we are working on "busy work", we are finding that we are reacting to everything else that's around us. We begin to lose control and we start to feel overwhelmed. This is just a symptom of an underlying problem that we have not set clear priorities in our business.

I know what you’re thinking, and it's like “Yes, Steve I have priorities. We have tons of them.”

I'm going to let you in on a secret.

The truth is, if everything is a priority, well, nothing is a priority.

You might be trying to maybe go too wide and not deep enough into each of these issues.

I want to help you to understand right now how to set clear priorities in your business. Let us take a look right now at how we're going to do that.

The first thing we need to do is identify what’s the one single thing in your business that you need to see a change in. Just one thing. There might be many things but there's going to be one that you're going to find that is the most important.

The thing is, you have to give some thought to this. Maybe work with your leadership team or other key players in your business on this. Because it's really good to have multiple perspectives when you're trying to dig deep on this. So if you're not sure what that one thing is, reach out to me. I could help you figure that out too. But you have to decide on what is that one thing that you need to see some change in your business right now.

Next, once we have that identified we have to ask ourselves, “Why is this happening?”

You just can't look at it and say, “Hey, here's an issue that I'm not happy with.”

This could be just another symptom of a root cause that I spoke about before or it could really be or can't be the underlying issue of what's going on. So, for example, let's say, you do service work and your customers all of a sudden aren’t happy and you start getting complaints, in other words,

your service team and technicians, they're just not doing a great job.

Well, the first reaction that you might have, and most of us have is right, is to reprimand these service people or maybe we need to do better training. Well, that might be true. However, again, these might be symptoms. It could be that maybe you don't have an effective recruitment process and maybe you don't have your core values aligned with service and maybe, you're not attracting the right people into the job so you can train them well and then they're going to have a mindset that they want to do a great job. We are looking over “here” when we want to be when the problem is actually over “there".

So you need to make sure that you're not just fixing the symptoms, but you're really truly going after that root cause. You have to ask yourself, “Why is this happening?”

And when you determine the cause, ask yourself again, “What is this leading to?”

And that's really important.

You got to go really two levels deep on this because now you're getting closer to that truth and your real true priority.

So once you've identified that true priority everybody on your team needs to be on board. They need to set goals on how they can help improve that one priority for the company as well.

So when you start focusing on this one priority, you're going to find that you and your team are going to be working less on putting out fires because you're now working on fire prevention.

I hope this has been really helpful in understanding how to drill down on what you should really be working on in your business.

But if you're not sure, if you're maybe, one of those businesses that have a million priorities and you're going in all kinds of directions, let's talk so I know I can help you whittle down and really get focused on that #1 thing that truly needs to change in your organization so you can start moving forward and start scaling up.

Labels:
Location: Jacksonville, FL, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are Your Employees Keeping Up With Your Growth?

There is one challenge that I see that keeps popping up for organizations that hold them and their teams back from achieving more. Are your employees having a hard time keeping up with how rapidly your business is growing? If your team is struggling to handle the capacity of work that comes from scaling your business, I'm going to suggest to you a few strategies to help them to keep pace with your organizational growth. If you've noticed that projects seem to be falling through the cracks, the more work that your business has, this is a great thing for your business but not so good with the things that are falling through the cracks, right? I suggest to don't be too hard on your employees because maybe it might just be very hard and difficult to adjust to the growth of the heavier capacity of the work that they now have. Instead of cracking down on them, you need to focus on being heavy on accountability. If your employees are missing deadlines or aren't completing ...
Post a Comment
Read more

5 Keys to Get Your Business Working without You

Business ownership is one of the American Dreams; being able to be in control of your own destiny and have the freedom to choose what you want to do and when. But for many entrepreneurs, that dream has escaped them. They have fallen into the business trap. The dream of freedom has fallen into the daily challenges and frustrations that struggling entrepreneurs face every day. No Cash – You may be selling, but there’s never enough cash to pay the bills at the end of the month. There no cash left over to invest in new technologies or to upgrade equipment or put into your pocket. No Time – You’re not running your business, it is running you. You are spending most of your day solving problems and putting out fires. Instead, you should be planning your company’s next big venture, or just have time to do things you want and spend it with the people you love. No Team – Instead of having a team of professionals that are working together toward a common goal, you have ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Stop Fixing Your Business and Start Building it

Are you spending your day putting out fires that are popping out of nowhere? Are you always trying to fix something that’s not working in your business? Or, are you working on fire prevention enabling it to be more valuable and sellable down the road? Let me tell you what I mean... If you’re spending your day putting out fires, the fire itself is not the problem. If you find yourself always fixing your business, you haven't put the right structure in place.  You haven't put the right systems in place to be clear on what your ideal customer or employee is that will represent your brand and fit in and align with the culture of your organization. You might not even have a well-defined culture for your organization. There may not have an onboarding process for your team to make sure they are trained properly and show them your unique way of doing business. If you don't have all these systems in place, you're consistently putting out fires and fixing your business. Syste...
Post a Comment
Read more