As the year draws to a close, and we all get a little break from our day-to-day activities (and from the regular crises and fire drills that accompany them), it’s a good chance to find some time to catch your breath and spend a few hours just thinking – and not doing anything else, but thinking – about the year ahead and where you want to take your business.
I’m not talking about some foolish New Year’s resolutions (like Zuck’s optimistic, but stillborn, daily “thank you” plan) or your desire to definitely get in great shape this coming year or to be a much better person in 2015. I’m talking about thinking strategically about how you can make the next 12 months a lot more valuable and productive for your company.
This isn’t about some make-work exercise, crystal ball predictions, or chart drawing contests – it’s much more basic than that. It’s not about making roadmaps – it’s about your mindset. It’s about you and you alone taking a moment to take stock of things and to ask yourself some very basic questions. There’s plenty of time for group activities and facilitated/moderated conversations (whatever you might think those are worth) and/or sharing your wisdom with the team. But, first and foremost, you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got your own head on straight and fully back in the game.
None of us does enough of this simple exercise these days (we’ve all got plenty of explanations and excuses for why this is) and, as a result, too many businesses lose sight of the main chance, the critical things they need to be doing, and the most important questions they should be asking. Questions like: why did I get into this business in the first place? Am I doing any good and/or making any difference that matters? Does anyone outside of my friends, family, investors and employees care about what we’re trying doing?
And while you’re at it, I wouldn’t waste much time reflecting on the past 12 months since: (a) there’s nothing left that you can practically do about them; (b) you oughta already know what you did right and wrong since you lived through it and hopefully learned a lot from the experience; and (c) fretting over mistakes and missed opportunities doesn’t really move anything forward. You want to build your future on strength and resolve and not on regrets and “shoulda, woulda, couldas”.
But those are not even the main reasons why it’s not effective to spend a lot of time looking backwards. Looking in the rear mirror is distracting and a great way to run off the road if you’re not careful or to smack into something big and ugly that would have been a piece of cake to easily avoid if you had been paying a little attention to the outside world and, even more importantly, to what your customers are doing and saying about their own pressing needs and their current desires. Customer expectations are progressive. If you’re not on top of them, you’ll be at the bottom of their list of choices soon enough.
And the most important reason that you don’t want to get all wrapped up in reliving and analyzing the past is that it’s almost always an invitation to largely look inward. To spend your time navel gazing, making excuses, and bemoaning the bad breaks. It’s mainly about you and your issues. And that’s not where you need to be focusing your energy, your research, or your efforts as you try to get the business set for the New Year.
You need to get out and find out what’s going on now outside the four walls of your business because that’s where your future will be found and fixed or frittered away. We can surely learn from the past and we react every day to the present, but we can leverage and change the future. But that kind of change won’t happen by itself. You’ve got to be asking the right people the right questions. And, right now, that’s your most pressing job as a leader.
And here’s a flash: you will never get straighter or more useful answers to your questions than the ones you get directly from your customers. The truth – with all its wonders and warts – comes from the consumers and the users of your products and services. They don’t have any other agendas (apart from always wanting a lot more for a lot less) and they’re the real reason you got into this startup mess in the first place so pleasing them and addressing their notions, ideas, and needs seems like the obvious thing to do. But it doesn’t happen if you don’t do it.
And here’s some more breaking news: you might just discover (when you take the time to think, to look, and to ask) that there’s a bigger and better opportunity right under your nose which you’ve been practically tripping over for months or years without ever noticing. One of our 1871 startups (We Deliver) thought they were in the delivery business for small merchants until they discovered that what those many businesses really needed was a mobile ordering app for their products and services which they couldn’t afford to build for themselves. Even more importantly, when you roll up hundreds of those businesses into a one-stop, mobile ordering app that consumers quickly learn about from all the individual merchants – you basically create a destination platform (with critical mass) that also makes life a lot easier and more efficient for thousands of shoppers who can now aggregate and bundle their purchases from multiple sellers into a single transaction. And, by the way, all those additional products don’t end up delivering themselves so the new platform approach also drove the basic business to new heights as well.
If you want to take the plunge, here are a few of the main questions to ask yourself. It’s a pretty simple process, but, as you’ll see, the results can be game-changing.
(1) What’s the problem you initially set out to solve?
(2) Are you trying to solve the same problem today or doing something different?
(3) Is the problem still important to your customers and worth paying you to solve?
(4) Are there cheaper, quicker or easier solutions to the problems offered by others?
(5) Are there new, more important or different problems to be solved?
You’ll notice that all these questions – in the first instance - address the customers’ problem(s) and not your products or solutions. This isn’t just a question of semantics. If you don’t understand the pressing problems of your customers, you have no chance at all of building a successful product or service to solve them. You can keep building the greatest software never sold or the cure for no known disease, but you won’t be building a business that will be here at the end of next year.
_0.jpg)
.jpg){kind=spacer}
