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Is Your Business Achieving Its Potential?
What is the full potential of your business?
In my experience, most businesses never reach their full potential. We can aspire to the levels of achievement of the likes of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Richard Branson and other famous entrepreneurs who started with next to nothing and created a huge worldwide business icon. But how many of us actually believe we could do that? Would we even want to?
Whatever your aspirations, it would be fair to say, by virtue of the fact that you are even reading this article, you are striving to achieve more from your businesses than you currently achieve. We know there is greater potential, but our success is somehow limited. We can do better. We may even be on a learning curve and constantly improving, getting closer to our potential. But the fact remains, there is still a way to go.
In this article, I want to examine some of the typical limitations that inhibit our success and find out how we can clear them out of our way so that we can come closer to achieving the potential results we can achieve.
Living – Lifestyle – Legacy
One of the major limitations we can have on our business performance hinges on our purpose for being in business. For some, the main purpose is about generating a living, or simply making an income we can live off while we do something we enjoy. For others, it is about creating a lifestyle, or using the business to create a significant income that enables a level of financial independence and the freedom to spend your time pursuing pleasurable activities other than work.
At another level, some people have an ambition to build a legacy, or a business that provides something for others into the future. Building a legacy means more than providing for yourself. It means that you create opportunities and income for people and products or services of value to people in the community.
If your purpose is about contribution you are often inspired to go to greater heights than when you merely provide for yourself. When you provide for yourself, you are happy to stop when you reach a point of satisfaction. However, when you are inspired to give, at what point do you say, “Stop. That’s enough?”
When your purpose is to build a legacy, you are far more inclined to reach your full potential than when you are satisfied you have done enough to please yourself. This is not about judgement or what’s right or wrong. Just be aware that if you opt for anything less than creating a legacy, you are likely to be limiting your business potential. Your choice to feel satisfied with anything less than your full potential is creating a ceiling on your ability to achieve all that is possible.
Goals and Belief
Another influence on our successful development is our own ability to believe that we can achieve something great. Many of us dream of lofty and commendable goals, but then struggle to believe that we could really build the business of our dreams. So instead of setting a big goal and going for it, we make our goal smaller and only attempt the safer option that doesn’t stretch our belief beyond our comfort zone.
The truly successful entrepreneurs on the other hand, decide to believe they can achieve more than they thought may be realistic. Despite evidence to the contrary, they believe they can do it and go for it. Sometimes, they don’t understand exactly how the goals will be achieved, but they decide to believe they will find the way to get beyond the difficulty when the time is right.
Only you can make the choice, individually, to decide to believe you can achieve your big goal or to limit your potential by choosing the safe option. But as famous ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” If you want to achieve great things, you must first decide to believe you can.
Focus
The third influence on our ability to achieve our full business potential is our focus. This relates to what we actually do each day. With this aspect there are two elements we, as the business leader, have responsibility for. One is making sure our business achieves the daily, weekly or monthly productivity required to ensure we get paid and make enough profit to survive.
The second element is to ensure we do what needs to be done to move our business towards the achievement of our big goals. This requires something of a balancing act to make sure our focus is appropriately given to both elements. It is often tempting to focus too much on our survival activities, as these are often urgent and in our face. However, if we involve ourselves too much in working on these activities, we limit our ability to focus on the important work that needs to be done to achieve our development goals.
If we want to achieve our full potential, we must first find ways to leverage ourselves out of survival activities, either by employing others, using technology to create efficiencies or by outsourcing tasks. This will free us to focus on the activities that must be done by us, to develop our business into the areas of high potential payoff of our dreams.
Another aspect of focus that is important to note is that we must stay focused on our big goal and not get sidetracked by every apparently attractive opportunity that presents itself. It is tempting to go chasing after new opportunities that look attractive and may make us quick fortunes. However, what tends to happen when we do this is that we never complete what we set out to do. Even when we go after a new opportunity, we may get sidetracked yet again by the next opportunity we see, then the next.
If we keep jumping off the tracks all the time when we see opportunities that distract us from working towards our major goals, we will end up limiting our achievements and potential. So think long and hard before you decide to delay progress towards your big goal when something else comes along that looks like an attractive option. Your decision to change course may mean you have to sacrifice your most likely option for success. You shouldn’t make that decision too quickly.
Trying Hard to Do the Same Things Better
The final influence on our ability to achieve our full potential is when we engage in a battle with our competitors to win more market share or more sales or more customers than they do. In other words, we compete by trying to do the same things they do, only better than they do. This is a big mistake that many businesses make.
What results from doing the same things better is marginal improvements. We improve our results by a few percent. This approach is limiting our ability to achieve your full potential.
Highly successful businesses don’t win by doing the same things better, they win by doing different things. The best way to achieve this difference in approach is to study what customers in your general industry really want and discover what they don’t get, but would like more of. When competitors try to do the same things better, they tend to miss opportunities to be different. But when you go down a different path to create customer value, the potential is enormous.
By way of example, let’s look at how two businesses in the book selling industry took very different approaches and both became far more successful than the traditional industry players. Amazon.com discovered many book buyers wanting greater convenience and speed in the book ordering process and decided to use the internet as its bookshop. This gave customers the opportunity to browse books and make purchases from the convenience of their homes with the speed of the internet.
On the other hand, Barnes and Noble discovered a set of customers wanting a more relaxed book buying experience and set up their stores to allow browsing in comfortable lounges, or in an on-site coffee shop. The B&N business model emphasizes the joy of reading. Both these companies took a different approach to the established book stores and although they adopted strategies that emphasized opposite values to each other, they expanded the market in their particular niches. They achieve their success, not by being better but by being different.
No Limits
When you examine a number of the world’s most successful businesses, you will see that they were started by people who had no greater skill or advantage than most other business owners. However, their level of success was achieved because they refused to place limits on their potential. The lesson for us is that we can achieve far more than we ever thought possible, if we don’t limit ourselves or our businesses by our lack of belief or lack of vision or because we are too easily satisfied. If we choose to discover our full potential, there are many ways this can be achieved.
These methods are usually given full scope, not by following closely in the path of the many, but by changing the rules and playing a different game than that played by your competitors. I wonder what it would be like if we all decided to go for it and achieve all we could achieve. Perhaps the world may become a better place.
By Greg Roworth
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