An interesting day at the office

It's not everyday that I get asked a question that makes me stop and think. It's normally me challenging directors and managers about how they communicate or tell their stories rather than being stumped for an answer.

The question was simple " what do I want to achieve with my business"?

I, like many other owner operators of SME's have spent the large part of the last year just trying to find a way to keep moving forward and we have mostly been very succesful in our purpose. We are still here, even better we are expanding with new appointments iminent I am hoping we can capitalise on some recent success. But with all this fire fighting and reacting to the opportunities directly in front of us I have not considered the " why" part of running my business for a long time.

Although I don't think you need to navel gaze everyday it is essential you can imagine where you want to get to. Call it what you like without a prize or endgame in place it can be very difficult to decide if a certain course, job, aliegence or contract is the right thing to do.

A good case in pint is our decision this year to move away from producing live events. This very time consuming activitiy is actually quite profitable but last year we realised it no longer aligned with our core business and required to many resources -more resources than we had available - to deliver the events at the kind of quality we would want. We still supply videos into live events and even the odd presentation but we will no longer design and deliver complete live events. We couldn't have made this decision without referencing it to our ultimate goal, the prize.

So back to today, the sudden realisation that I had no idea why I was in the meeting I was in. I don't want to talk about the meeting yet but it was a really useful conversation. I spent the slow train journey home contemplating this idea - what's the point, what are we trying to achieve and are we in course to achieve this?

By tomorrow morning I hope to have the answer



-- Post From My iPhone