Prioritizing and Organizing
Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to observe hundreds of businesses as a consultant and as a business broker. In both roles I’m privy to the inner workings of the businesses I’m looking at—their marketing, finances, overall management, and overall success. One of my pet observations is that many very successful businesspeople attribute their success to their abilities—some going as far as saying their genius—in marketing, finance, or human relations. However, I find that their genius is seldom in the areas where they believe it to be but rather is in their ability to organize and prioritize.

On the surface, these businesspeople may not appear to be superorganized. Their desks are typically a mess of papers with no defined place for each paper and folder. But they also have detailed checklists of things to do in order of priority and detailed schedules for what they (and others) will be doing and when. They tend to have folders or notebooks that each details various facets of their business, such as folders for active customers, inactive customers, competitors, investor prospects, and promotional materials.
Most of the successful business owners I’ve observed have the ability to prioritize tasks, opportunities, and problems and then methodically organize a strategy for dealing with those tasks. They can keep their eye on the overall objective without getting sidetracked by daily brush fires; a letter from the IRS won’t mean they stop everything to fret over the letter. They can compartmentalize tasks and projects and deal with each when it is most appropriate to do so.
I’m not sure if the key is just knowing what’s important or declaring something important and sticking with that declaration. But I do know that constant changing of priorities is a recipe for trouble. Those businesspeople I see who get into trouble tend to change their priorities regularly, not have any priorities to begin with, or have priorities but no organized strategy for keeping to those priorities without getting sidetracked. A newly self-employed medical billing collection consultant may decide that one effective strategy is to sponsor seminars on effective collection techniques for administrators of physicians’ offices. Another possibility is to actually set up a collection service for medical offices. Either strategy may work if pursued, but making both work concurrently would be exceedingly difficult. Ideally, an objective analysis might point clearly to one or the other as being the better of the two. In the real world, though, there are often shades of gray, so we could see pros and cons for either strategy. Choosing one and running with it offers a reasonable chance for success. Choosing one, running with it for a while, changing to the other, and changing back and forth is a recipe for frustration and failure.
I once had a client who wanted to go into the software design business—or into software consulting and systems consulting. She couldn’t decide, so, you guessed it, she did both and therefore did neither very well. Her marketing was disjointed as was her entire organization. Her resources were limited, and she had difficulty deciding how to allocate those limited resources of time, money, and effort. Unfortunately, the business failed. Had she pursued one or the other, would the business have succeeded? It’s hard to know, and it’s hard to know which of the two possible directions would have been the better choice. I would argue, however, that her chances would have been a lot better had she based her decision on the best (albeit imperfect) information available and her lifestyle needs, prioritized her tasks, and set out to tackle those tasks without changing priorities at every challenging obstacle.
This isn’t to advise against f lexibility. In fact, f lexibility is essential because no plan or strategy works in real life exactly as it does on paper. There is a difference, though, between being f lexible enough to make appropriate adjustments to a strategy and the wholesale discarding of one strategy in favor of another or no strategy at all. Much of this book talks about the various aspects of up-front planning and organizing for a business, particularly a lifestyle business. Planning such aspects as marketing, financing, and technology are covered, but the overall lesson I learned in business school is the overall lesson you should learn too. It is essential to make plans and run your business based on objective analysis guided by an overall strategy. Doing this defines the business itself and the reasons for that business to exist. The marketing, financial, and technical aspects are the tools for building that business and keeping it sound.

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