One of the key objectives for your business should be to optimize it. Optimizing is the process of assessing, identifying and correcting components within the organization with the goal of making marked improvements. When an organization is fully optimized, it is functioning at a high level of performance with time, money and experience. While continual maintenance and adjustments will always be needed, there aren’t any major components of the organization that are broken or malfunctioning.
I just heard someone talk about going on a ten day silent retreat. This is an annual ritual that they’ve been doing for the last several years. If you’re not familiar with what a silent retreat is, essentially you voluntarily lock yourself in a small, empty room that is completely dark. You are completely isolated from the world, save someone who once a day brings you food and water. This person spent 10 days alone with themselves sitting in the darkness, with only their thoughts to keep them company.
While, on one hand, I very much admire this person for being able to do this, I very much understand my own limitations, both physical and mental, and know that I couldn’t pull it off. I’m sure many of you would struggle to build these ten days into your schedule, much less hand your cell phone over to someone else. But, if you spent just 30 minutes a week, alone with yourself thinking about nothing but your business, what would you discover? How long would it take you to identify what is working and what needs improvement?
This briefly scratches the surface of the movement called “mindfulness”, which I am not at all an expert of, but do believe that the beginning of every solution, at some level, comes from setting aside time to think about the problem and to weigh the various solutions available. Having said that, if you were to sit back and look at your business, thinking about all that is going well, and all that isn’t going so well, what are the top two or three things that you’d identify need to be improved?
To help you focus a little more specifically, let me help you identify the three major areas I see businesses struggle with – they are time, money and experience.
Time is the operations of the organization. It is the systems and processes, the controls and quality checks that make sure everything tied to producing a product or service is functioning the way it should. And the way it should function has been defined correctly. Time can also include your personal time. Are you getting enough time away from the business to enjoy life, as opposed to being run ragged by it.
Money is the financials of the organization. It is the recording and reporting of financial transactions in a way that provides useful and actionable information. It is also the profitability of the organization where resources are abundant enough to support the organization in both immediate and long term needs. It addresses the
fundamental question, “Does my business have enough money to accomplish the goals I’ve set for it and for myself, and am I able to read and understand the reports about this money?”
Experience is the customer and employee relations of the organization. It is the interaction between the organization and the customers and employees that ensures both are satisfied and ready to be an ambassador for the organization. Experience includes both the culture within your business and the customer service your business provides.
Many business owners are very adept at setting great goals for growth for their business. Things like, “increase revenues by 10%”, or “expand into a new product line” are fun and sexy to to push toward. However, I’ve found business owners struggle with the idea of setting goals to optimize their business, goals like “develop meaningful financial reporting by department”, or “decrease order to delivery times by 20%”. As boring and unsexy as these may sound, goals like these help build a strong foundation for your business to grow upon.
You certainly don’t have to go on a ten day, silent retreat to come up with ideas and goals to optimize your business. But, what kind of improvements might happen if you spent a few minutes a week thinking about it? Better yet, what kind of improvements might happen if you actually planned to optimize your business?
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