Business Article: Where are you going?

One of the habits he advises, is “to begin with the end in mind.” This takes my advice from last month a step or two further. Real effectiveness, in a business sense, is not just about working on the business rather than merely working in the business. It is about making sure you are working in and on the right business to start with.

To begin with the end in mind means that before you go to work in your business, you should have a crystal clear picture of what business you want to create looks like and feels like. Michael Gerber also discusses the importance of this perspective in his book, “The E Myth Revisited.”

His advice is to work on your business from the perspective of having a clear idea of how it will be when it is finished. Most of us don’t work from this perspective. When we start a business, it is normally a business based on our technical skill. We are good at making something or providing a particular service, so we start a business based on making that product or providing that service.

This what Gerber calls the “Entrepreneurial Myth.” Businesses are usually not started by entrepreneurs, but by technicians. When we operate in our business from the perspective of the technician, our focus is on the work that the business does and how that work can create income. This is an internal perspective with a focus on the present.

On the other hand, Gerber claims that businesses started by entrepreneurs are started from a different perspective which provides much greater opportunity for growth and success. For the entrepreneur, the focus is not the work of the business, but rather, how the business works. For the entrepreneur, the product is not the business, the business itself is the product. The technician starts with the present and tries to create a future, but the entrepreneur starts with a vision of the future and creates that reality from the present, always working towards developing a business that works and delivers what the customer wants in a systematic, consistent and predictable way.

For the technician, the future is unpredictable and so is the future of the business. When the technician works on improving business performance, it is only possible to do it one step at a time. The entrepreneur however, is always concerned with improving business performance, not from the perspective of what is wrong, but from the perspective of how to get to where he or she wants the business to go.

To put this in the way that Covey describes, beginning with the end in mind, the technician is like someone leading a group through a thick forest, making sure that everyone works harder at wielding their machete and hacking a road through the forest, taking time to make sure that the team is well organised and that the blades are regularly sharpened.

The order of the day is efficiency. The entrepreneur however, takes a different approach. The entrepreneur steps back from the activity that is going on, climbs to the top of a tree to get a better overview and comes down to tell his team that they are working in the wrong forest and need to move to another one. The order of the day for the entrepreneur is effectiveness rather than efficiency. The question is not, “Are we working well?” but, “Are we doing the right work?”

This reflection on the different perspectives of business leadership has again sharpened my focus and brought me back to my real intention. It is so easy to be distracted by the present urgencies that you lose focus on the future vision. But we can develop systems that help us to stay in focus and on track and my focus over the last month has been on doing that.

What about your reality? The works of Covey and Gerber are so insightful but intuitively common sense at the same time. You know from experience that they have described reality in such a way that it makes sense immediately. Take it from me that asking yourself the following questions will present a challenging exercise, but if you are willing to go there the experience of thinking through these issues will ultimately provide liberating alternatives that will lead to creating a better and more profitable future for you and your business.

Do you have a clear idea of what your business will look like in its ideal state, how it will be “when it is finished.?” Do you usually operate from the perspective of the technician or the entrepreneur? Are you confident that when you work on business improvement, you are working to achieve greater effectiveness or are you focused merely on improving efficiency?

How much of your time do you spend working “IN” the business compared to “ON” the business? Is your business everything you hoped it would be when you began? If you need help with these questions or finding the answers, call us to discuss your situation. We don’t charge for our first meeting and you will be under no obligation.