Strategic Discipline Blog

If you’re facing an uncertain period with your business, or concerned about the economy, then you’ll be interested to know that there are just four decisions in your business that you need to get right to assure you grow. To stay competitive and grow you need to keep your people smart. The best companies in the world take learning seriously. In fact they make learning a competitive advantage. Success is a moving target and the only way to make sure you are moving with it is to make sure your people are getting smarter.

So let’s look at the four decisions in your business that you need to focus on to grow.

The first decision is People. This may be a little contrary to the principles you might be familiar with if you’ve been an E-Myth fan. The bulk of entrepreneurs don’t like working with people, including their own employees.   It’s the major reason why 96% of all firms have fewer then 10 employees and the vast majority have less than 3. Perhaps that’s why Michael Gerber’s mantra’s that systems were the solution resonated so well with most entrepreneurs.   While systems are important, the first reason why people are so important is that it’s not much fun succeeding if you don’t have any one to share it with. The result of people is happiness. If it’s fun to come to the office for you, your employees, shareholders, customers, vendors, than you know you’ve got one thing right. The People Decision outcome is happiness. Get the right people doing the right things right and you’ve got people solved. 

The second decision is Strategy. Most businesses fumble the ball here, since getting this right is not as easy as it sounds. You must be able to state your strategy in one sentence. This means your strategy must be clear and concise. The interesting thing about strategy is that you can make mistakes in the other 3 decision areas of your business, and if you have your strategy right you can still dominate your industry. So nailing your strategy is very important.  You don’t need the smartest people or the greatest execution if you have a strategy that is cutting edge and people need what you have.

Execution is the third decision. Here is where the typical entrepreneur struggles. There’s a lot of discussion today about how small is the new big, small giants and the value of staying small, lean and flexible in today’s market. It’s not something to deny, yet the place execution shows up is in profit and time. If you’re growing and not making enough money you have an execution issue. You haven’t solved how to produce what you make efficiently. You may also have discovered that as you grew you had to take more time for daily activities. You simply can’t keep up with everything and slowly the business is becoming less enjoyable because you don’t have time for anything else but monitoring and making sure your business is operating right. Time and profit are always execution issues and suggest you need to work on improving your systems and structure to execute more efficiently. This takes discipline, and most entrepreneurs fail to recognize the value of discipline. Routine sets you free! Yet most entrepreneurs see routine as boredom, no matter the fact that most reached success by being absolutely disciplined and routine in their success patterns.

The final decision is Cash. You may have caught how important strategy is, but frankly every thing in your business depends on cash. Cash is oxygen to you and your business.   It yields options that nothing else can. You can get by with decent people, execution and strategy, but you will never get by without cash.

These four decisions are the beginning of Rockefeller Habits 4-3-2-1 formula for results

Here’s an invitation, if you‘d like help discovering how to get these four decisions right please consider attending the 2 Day Rockefeller Habits Workshop coming to Cedar Rapids, IA, Tuesday and Wednesday, April 8-9.  You learn a lot about these decisions and how to make sure you are applying them correctly. It will be worth much more to you than the two day investment in time and money. It will change how you do business and give you confidence that you can succeed.