Set your business priorities

Setting your priorities is the cornerstone to effective business growth. There are three types of priority:

  1. Urgency – how urgent is it? This might be the most important priority;
  2. Quick wins – sometimes there are things that can be quick and easy to do, that will lead to large improvements;
  3. Strategic priority – these will often be big things, but important, probably for the long term goals of the business.

The secret is balancing all three of these priorities. You cannot do everything at once, but you can work through your “To Do” list and come up with the priorities. These are simply a list of stuff to do in order of priority. Don’t ignore the elephant tasks. It can be too easy to put these at the bottom of the list, simply because they require a lot of work and the returns might be a long way into the future.

Tackling the three priorities;

Urgent items

You cannot ignore urgent items. There will always be things that need doing urgently – you need to do them. The temptation however is to treat lots of things as “Urgent” when they may not be. It is too easy to get swallowed up with “fire fighting”, ignoring some of the other things. I would make two points about this:

  1. Resist the temptation & be a bit sterner with yourself – maybe its not so urgent after all;
  2. Are you delegating enough?

Having said that – if it really is urgent then it needs doing.

Quick wins

These are fairly self-evident – think about the 80/20 rule. You can often achieve a lot with only a small piece of work or outlay. When prioritising it is often very wise to make sure you have a few “Quick Wins” quite high on the list, especially if they involve little work.

Strategic Activities

It will come as no surprise if I say that you simply must make time for this work. Your business just will not grow unless you are thinking strategically and taking action on your strategic goals.

Priorities are often very hard to sort out, but perhaps thinking of things in these terms will help you to get done the things that need to get done in order for you to grow your business.

If you would like some help with defining your business priorities and, more importantly with ensuring you get going with the right priorities, then give us a call today. Or you can simply drop us a short email and we will get back to you straight away.

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