The Business Owners' Blog

I was talking with Jim, owner of a $50 million per year boutique private equity company that we coach about the coming year. As we clarified the most important initiatives and goals for his company this year what became clear to me was that every company needed to go through this same clarifying and focusing process.

In a recent business owner survey we conducted with several thousand of our business owner clients it became very clear that email had eclipsed phone calls and meetings as the single biggest time distraction in business. It’s addictive; it’s never ending; and it’s overwhelming. Here are our top 10 e-mail best practices we think every company should adopt.

How do you consistently get your company to invest its time, talent, attention, and money on the right things in the face of so many demands and urgencies crying out for its resources? You lean heavily on the strategic structure you’ve built for your company. At its most basic form, your strategic structure is how your business rationally and effectively plans its pathway forward as you scale.

What if there was a magic concept that you could employ that would powerfully align your company’s goals, priorities, actions, and culture? In other words, your company would invest its best resources in alignment with its top goals. And each of your team would act daily in accordance with these priorities, letting these priorities and agreed upon objectives guide their actions and execution. And finally, as a company, you’d hold to this discipline long enough that this pattern of behavior would become the norm for your company.

You’ve seen it happen so often it’s become a tired cliché – the business owner who sees a better path forward only to procrastinate implementing the needed solution with the ready excuse, “Now is just not the right time.” This is the business owner who says, “David, I know I need to do things different, and I can even see the ‘different’ that I need to do, but now just isn’t the right time. Later… After I finish this one project… After I make this one hire… After [you fill in the blank]…”

A short while ago, a business owner named John came to my business coaching company with a difficult dilemma. His new teleconference company had just launched a few years prior and was on the verge of reaching profitability. His current sales when he called covered about 70 percent of his total costs. He had an exciting opportunity to change the company’s business model for the better, yet had reached a crossroads and knew it. He wanted our input to help him make a key decision between shifting focus to this new venture or staying with his original business model.

One of the biggest challenges you face as you scale your business is getting the right team on board in the best manner. Every business owner should at least consider using independent contractors in some fashion in her company. Here are 10 concrete suggestions to help you avoid the most common pitfalls of using independent contractors so that you can protect your company.

Strategic planning is essentially making the tough decisions on where to invest your business’s resources (money…staff time… staff focus… customer attention…etc.) and where you WON’T invest your business’s resources. Here are ten tips to do it better.

It happens… a lot more than most of us would like to think. We are working so hard to grow our business that we don’t realize that the way we’re doing it has trapped us in the business. It can’t operate without us. If we don’t show up – the business suffers. If for some reason we couldn’t show up for an extended time – the business would fail.