Are you someone who’s been working in your business way too much, and you recognize you’d like to work on your business more and more, but you’re not exactly sure how to make that switch? Well, this video is for you.
When we’re working IN the business, there is a very tangible effect -we’re turning that work over on a day-to-day basis.
When we move to working ON the business, it can be a bit puzzling about where even to begin.
When we’re working ON the business, we can work on
- THINKING – mentally working our way through and planning with big strategic thoughts
- DOING – implementing new skills in the business. (I’ve done previous business videos on those skills and how to develop them.)
Today’s video is on how to THINK about those bigger strategic thoughts for your business.
If you’re trying to think bigger strategic thoughts for your business, there are three different levels of thinking to focus on.
- Strategic thinking
- Tactical thinking
- Day-to-day operations thinking
Pre-Requisites To Being Able To Improve Your Business By Thinking Strategically
In order to follow through on actually thinking deeper about your business, there are two key things to keep in mind.
If Not You, Then Who?
Number one is that as the CEO of your company, if you’re not the one thinking about these deeper problems, nobody else is.
Everyone else in your organization is going to be mostly focused on just turning over each day’s work and getting that done, not the bigger picture.
- Where are you going?
- What will things look like in a year, two years, five years?
- How to get there?
- What changes have to happen?
They’re more interested in just keeping things going on a daily basis.
It is important to recognize that if you’re not doing this, nobody is. And if nobody is it’s likely to become like Groundhog Day, the movie where every single day is just like the day before, repeated over and over again – a year or two from now is likely going to be just like today.
Taking time out of the daily grind and focusing on this big picture stuff is essential to making the future you want and not finding yourself in a jail you don’t want.
Focused Time And Dedication
The number two key thing to remember is that it takes dedicated time and focus to spend to be able to actually even think these thoughts.
I know you’re a busy entrepreneur.
Your to-do list is a million pages long. You’ll never actually get through all of it. That is okay.
In order to have time to think strategically ON your business, it’s very likely you’ll end up having to let some of those “fires” just burn for a little bit, letting them smolder.
Maybe you have to step away from your thinking again whenever there’s a major catastrophe and then come back again.
It becomes a juggling act.
If you don’t forcefully make that space, it’s unlikely that you’ll actually be able to do it ever because you’ll never finish your to-do lists and have a clean day with nothing on the schedule.
This is where it’s an art form of how much time can you claw back and protect to do this thinking time versus how much is needed to keep daily operations going. I’ll talk more about that in future videos.
I just wanted to reiterate that this is not a thing you’ll have the luxury and the leisure of doing. You’ll have to specifically make this a priority to carve aside an hour or two every week or few weeks to kind of focus on this.
Types Of Thinking To Improve Your Business
Let’s define these terms and then talk briefly about the order of priority.
I’ll do a deeper dive in a future video on each one of them individually.
The three areas of thinking are
- Strategic
- Tactical
- Day-to-day Operations
Strategic Thinking
Strategic thinking is like an art form.
It’s your overall approach to business and what you’re trying to do, and how you’re expressing yourself.
Tactical Thinking
Tactics are the scientific part of the business.
You’re running various experiments.
If you do this versus this, which one is working better? Which should you do more of? Which should you do less of? Which Tactics help our Strategy come to light?
Day-To-Day Operations Thinking
Finally, there are the day-to-day operations.
This is how you keep things going on a daily basis. This is key because these are repetitive tasks you’ll do over and over again, and the more efficient they are, the more bandwidth and space that gives you.
Prioritizing The Order Of Thinking About Your Business To Improve It
In order of priority, I recommend that if you haven’t done much thinking about the business, to start with the Strategic Thinking.
It should take just a couple of hours to have a general idea of where you are. (I’ll have a video that dives into how to do that more in-depth later).
Next would be Tactical thinking.
Once your Strategy is clear, again, just taking a couple of hours working through deciding on a few key Tactics to make that come to fruition, and then you’re probably going to be on autopilot for another six months or a year implementing those.
The day-to-day operational thinking is very, very important because it is recurring returns on that, but until you have strategy and tactics in place, the day-to-day operations can be kind of flexible. That’s the last one. It is the one you most likely are spending some amount of time on already, whereas Strategy and Tactics are more likely to be ignored.
Day-to-day Operational Thinking is also the biggest chunk of ongoing time.
So if you’re just beginning to think of how to work ON your business more than IN your business on the thinking side of things,
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Then day-to-day operations
Stay tuned for future videos where I’ll dive in more on each one and how to specifically think ON your business to improve it and get to that next level.
Thanks and have a great one.
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