How good are your circus skills? Well if you run your own business you will know that juggling skills are a prerequisite (and if you don’t recognise this you will soon be in trouble). In fact it is one of the reasons so many start ups fail in their first year.
It’s not enough to have a great idea for a business and to have researched there is demand for your product/service, you need to be able to spin a whole load of plates or juggle lots of balls at the same time.
So what juggling skills do you need exactly? There are 3 key areas you’ll need to be good at juggling:
- Be great at delivery your business today – to keep your clients you will need to deliver a great product / service and continually delight your clients
- Keep focused on where the business will come from tomorrow – businesses who rest of their laurels and rely on the business they currently have, are headed for trouble, so no matter how busy you are delivering today’s business, you need to pay attention as to where business in the future will come from.
- Finally, if you have staff, then you also need to put focus on managing, developing and keeping them – staff retention in 2015 is the number 1 biggest challenges for UK business, so staff retention should be at the top of your agenda
Avoiding those peaks and troughs (or ‘dont smash the plates’)
So the main thing you need to juggle is time. And time is in short supply so getting structured becomes super important. Allocating time to working on the business (strategy) and managing staff is as important as delivering client work (revenue). And the first two can’t go out the window when you get busy with client work because if they do, what will you do when clients eventually stop working with you (and trust me, at some point they will)? Those companies who proudlhttps://www.dacostacoaching.co.uk/whitepaper/y tell me they are super busy and get all their business through referrals so don’t need to do any kind of sales or marketing, will eventually find themselves in a trough and it’s at this point that businesses make poor decisions.
A business in the trough will be desperate to get more work and do one of 2 things: they either discount to win business or take the wrong kind of work on. Both scenarios are examples of poor decision making and will eventually lead to more balls being dropped, short term client relationships and poor staff retention.
So how good a juggler are you? It’s a skill I would definitely recommend gaining.