10 Questions to Improve Your Strategic Thinking
It’s the first week of 2014! – Are you ready for 2014?
I love new beginnings when everything is fresh and you know that you now have a chance to start all over again, smarter and wiser and do those things that you didn’t do the year before.
However, there are certain mistakes you keep doing year after year just because you don’t even know you are making that mistake.
One of the biggest mistakes I found business owners, and especially women business owners do, is thinking tactics instead of thinking strategically about their business.
As a woman I know you are a great organizer and I know you solve many things at the same time, however, due to this you always focus only on what is needed NOW.
You are probably great in putting fires down on a daily basis, but business should be dealt on a long-term not a short term. When I am talking long-term I am talking speaking about Vision and big ideas.
You tend to think in tactics – meaning looking at this month or maybe the season and thinking what should I DO to get me to where I need to get – but you don’t look at the overall picture of what you need to achieve.
So you send an email, or you call a few clients, or you put some tweets out there, or you post a few posts on FB, LinkedIn etc.. but this is not thinking strategically.
You might even have learned that it is all about Value creation – so you spend days and weeks creating a new report, video, CD and even an E-book – but have you thought where does it need to lead you?
Worse, you might have created products and services without even thinking how am I going to market it – hoping that just because you set up your website people would buy it from you – have you thought what would be the marketing campaign that you would use to drive people to buy that product?
Does that sound familiar to you?
So you want to change it? Right? You want to start thinking strategically, but the question is – do you KNOW what strategic thinking means?
Strategic thinking is working ON your business. Planning, analyzing the market, adjusting course, etc. Working within your business is essentially keeping the systems running.
For a business to be successful, both levels of engagement are important.
Unfortunately, most small business owners spend virtually all of their time operating their business, and no time thinking strategically about it.
This year – you want to do it differently. You want to start thinking strategically from the start of the year.
Here are a 10 questions you can ask yourself to start training yourself in thinking strategically about your business:
The most important question in Strategy thinking is:
“What are you trying to achieve?”
What is it that you wish to accomplish in the world?
What is your WHY for your business?
Once you have that in place here are a few more questions that you want to devote time to think about. If you don’t have answers to it… GREAT! That means you need to go out and make a research in order to get the answers for them.
• What does your brand stand for?
• How would you describe your best, most valuable customers?
• Who don’t you want to do business with?
• Who do you win the most business from and why?
• Who do you lose the most business to and why?
• What is your biggest expense in your business?
• What things would be most devastating (or most embarrassing) if your customers knew about them?
• What’s the biggest unknown in our market?
• What are the best opportunities available to you?
Now I’m curious….
What is your WHY for your business?
Share it with us in the comment box below - What are you trying to achieve in 2014?
As a thank-you gift for your comment I will send you an invitation to my new Webinar which is all about thinking strategically in the series of Women Do Business Differently
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Have a magical week! Vered
