You know, something that’s come from this pandemic is, people are spending a little more time at home or in their office – maybe it’s a home office – and pondering their business. And I’m seeing a common theme come up with people who I’m helping grow their business. And that is complexity.
Their business just keeps adding things. It’s like having a house and you add a little extra room and you add a little bit of this, and you keep bringing things back from outside. And before you know it, it’s just complicated. And it’s taking up a lot of brain energy thinking about it.
So the easy reset exercise, is to pull out a whiteboard, and to say to yourself, okay, knowing everything I know about my market, my customers, and the things that work well, within my business, what would be my dream setup for this business if I were to whiteboard it from scratch? What things would be essential that we must have? And what things do we know work really well? Put them on the whiteboard and start with that! As you get further down the pecking order – things that you do that maybe you’re not sure you get great results, or maybe you got people in the business, you don’t even know what they do anymore, or the thing that you hire them for doesn’t matter anymore, or they’re just not doing a great job anymore – knowing what you know about them, would you rehire them?
So knowing everything about your systems, would you have the same system or would you do something else? And if it turns out, there’s a big gap between what you put up on that whiteboard and what you’ve got, then create a little action plan for yourself to eliminate, purge, delete, switch, and get your business to the whiteboard version of it. And the likely scenario is that there’s less things on the whiteboard than what you’re currently carrying around: all that extra dead weight. Like if you’re going to hike a mountain, you wouldn’t bother taking a refrigerator, right? You would just take some things out of the refrigerator, like a bottle of cool water, and put that in your backpack.
So travel lighter, get rid of all the excess and start from scratch. This is your best time to re-engineer your business because whether you like it or not, there’s a storm going on. And what you want to make sure is that you have a good boat to weather out this, so you’d want an icebreaker. So think about what would be the ideal business model from now on. And try and let go of the sunk costs, the attachment to everything you’ve already got. All the systems, all the people, all the things, all the business models. What would you have if you were to start your business today or to take over your business today from an outside perspective, knowing everything you know? And I’d love to know what change you made as a result of listening to this today and come back and let me know that you changed something, got rid of something or that you stared that elephant in the room that you’ve been, that you know is wrong, that you just need to move on.
Now is your time to do it.
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