The View From 30,000 Feet

Most entrepreneurs we know find it challenging to look at their businesses with some perspective. The daily battle to keep the lights on requires your full attention: dealing with clients, managing staff, staying on top of the admin. This is what we call ‘being in the weeds.’ It’s perfectly normal, and a certain part of your job requires you to be in the weeds. That’s the ‘work’ part of this whole entrepreneurship thing.

The thing is, being in the weeds means that you aren’t looking up and planning ahead. It means you’re not out marketing and selling. If you’re staffed up, you’re not hiring. If you’ve got a decent supplier, you aren’t researching other ones...You get the idea.

Growing your business requires you to look at your business from 30,000 feet - to identify and study the trends and patterns in your business and plan accordingly. How can you accomplish this? For starters, track EVERYTHING. Run reports on sales by product, sales by customer, sales by month, ROI of marketing efforts, etc. Consider the amount of hassle or benefit of your suppliers, and the productivity of your employees. Quantify everything you can to help you consider these questions. Then, and this is the important part, try to identify patterns, and draw conclusions. It might be something like, ‘September is always busy, June is slow,’ or ‘we lose 10% of our staff every year,’ or ‘ABC Supplier is always unreliable in the Spring.’

By starting to look at your business with some distance you can make decisions to mitigate the patterns you identify. If you lose staff fairly regularly, consider both retention efforts and ongoing hiring. If you know it is likely to be slow in June, think about your sales and marketing in Q1 to help avoid it.

So become (and stay) insanely curious about your business. Gaining a bird’s eye view of your business is not only attainable, it’s essential to taking your business to the next level. If you’re struggling on how to get there, just reach out to your business coach.