This Week@Work, AI has stormed into the mainstream with ChatGPT and similar tools bringing the promise of AI into every office and workplace. But what impact does it really have? Can it make tasks easier or business systems more efficient? Can AI drive business growth for you?
Innovation creates something more for the same price, OR the same for a better price. It means you should constantly create, test, experiment, and improve what you already have….even if it works. It’s a practice and mindset and the key to unlocking the excitement your business needs to attract talent, suppliers, and customers and make it more interesting for you.
As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of your business. After all, there are endless tasks that need to be done, from managing employees to coordinating with vendors to ensuring that customer orders are fulfilled on time. However, if you want your business to truly thrive and grow, it’s important to shift your focus from working IN your business to working ON your business.
What does it mean to work ON your business? Essentially, it means focusing your time and attention on the strategic initiatives and developments that will drive growth and success in the long run. This includes things like identifying new market opportunities, developing new products and services, and creating scalable systems and processes that can support growth.
On the other hand, working IN your business involves focusing on the day-to-day operations and activities that keep things running smoothly. This might include managing employees, handling customer inquiries, and ensuring that products are delivered on time and on budget.
Of course, both types of work are essential for a successful business. However, if you’re spending too much time working IN your business, you may find that you’re not able to devote enough time and energy to working ON your business. This can ultimately limit your ability to grow and scale your business over time.
So how do you make the shift from working IN your business to working ON your business? One approach is to conduct an ON vs IN audit, which involves creating a spreadsheet to track your time and attention across different business functions and activities.
For example, you might create columns for input functions, activities you perform, minimum time required per activity, frequency per month, and time allocation per month. This can help you to identify areas where you’re spending too much time on day-to-day operations and not enough time on strategic initiatives and growth-oriented activities.
Ideally, you should aim to spend at least 70% of your time working ON your business and at most 30% of your time working IN your business. This balance can help ensure that you’re dedicating enough time and energy to growth-oriented activities, while still ensuring that your day-to-day operations are running smoothly.
To make the shift from working IN to working ON your business, you may also need to focus on simplifying, systematizing, and delegating your business operations. This might involve streamlining your processes, automating routine tasks, and delegating responsibilities to trusted team members.
Ultimately, the key to working ON your business is to build a scalable platform for growth, then focus on driving growth through strategic initiatives and developments. By taking the time to step back from day-to-day operations and focus on the big picture, you can position your business for long-term success and create a lasting legacy for yourself and your team.
If change is the new constant, responding to it will not win the game. Driving change so that competitors must react and play by your rules is a better approach. Put differently, innovate, or die.
Listen to this podcast from The Money Show where Pavlo Phitidis unpacks three strategies to drive innovation in your business.
Innovation shapes itself differently but ultimately offers one of two outcomes. It all begins with the “something”. You are doing something better with what you have or doing something better with something new.
Here are three simple strategies that you can use to yield the most effective innovation that can and will be implemented, fast in your business every 6 months.
From marketing to operations, sales to procurement, your employees are active daily. They are performing activities to get their jobs done. Engaging with them to understand what actions they perform and how they perform them opens a conversation on how things can be improved. Often, the tedious, mundane tasks are the first ones your employees will volunteer for improvement. And often, these tasks lend themselves to either digitization or redundancy. Across your business, these conversations yield insights into the many minor process improvements that add up to create a more efficient outcome and motivated team. Imagine one such innovation each month. Then imagine the impact over 2 or 3 years. Besides preventing cholesterol building up in your business systems, you build a culture of accountable innovation that gets implemented as it’s built.
A growing company in a competitive environment is relevant to its customer’s needs and wants.
They are miles apart! The benefit of positioning your business like this means that your company is built from the customer back to the product or service, not the other way around. Immediately this opens the door for conversations with your customers that go beyond a blow-by-blow product advantage over competitors. It talks more to the problem that your customer has that you solve and the experience they want to support you. When things change, for example, legislation, competitors, technology and other, the status quo of your customers change. The problem might get bigger or appear faster and the experience they would want in return would change too. As the business owner, identify your 5 toughest customers and build a relationship with them personally. Be sure that besides being demanding, they are themselves growing. Tough, awkward conversations become insightful inspirational conversations if they are intentional and enhanced by a genuine investment in relationship. It’s these conversations that identify the earliest signals of change and insights into how the experience your company generates needs to change to keep ahead of them.
Across your supply chain, sort your suppliers into three categories of importance.
Then, within the vital and important categories, arrange to speak and meet with senior managers or owners to set an annual coffee conversation. That conversation must center on you learning more about the product or service your supplier provides you with, what changes are driving innovation in their businesses and how that will change and shape their relationship with your business. What you are looking for is how their innovation can drive yours through your supply chain.
In all three strategies, the relationship-driven engagement will yield the most uncomplicated innovations that you can make with the greatest degree of follow through and execution. If time waits for no-one, and if change is the only constant, innovation needs to lead, not respond to that of your competitors. Develop this system and implement it as religiously as you’d do your month-end billing.
Aristotle said it “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”.