People make decisions on daily basis. And decisions either make you a better person or make it difficult to get close to your goals in life. Decision making is a skill you need to master in business. You don’t want to spend most of your time and resources on ideas and make decisions that could sabotage your efforts.
Unfortunately not every decision works in the favour of most leaders in business. You never know what could happen when change the direction of the business. But you can always manage the risks. In reality, however, different decisions require different mind-sets and different skills. Those big business-changing decisions can have a lot of impact on your overall growth. Do we spend a lot more on marketing this year?
Do I hire more people? Do we expand into other markets? Do we provide a lot more services or products? Some business leaders have the courage to make unpopular and counter-intuitive decisions and they turn out as smart business decisions. Others make popular decisions that make things worse than they were before.
Samsung’s decision to launch a sabbatical program that sends top talent all around the world continues to be the secret behind Samsung’s success as a global brand. The board’s decision to bring back Steve Jobs to Apple, after firing him a decade earlier, led to some of the most amazing product innovations in the world. Henry Ford’s decision to double the wages of his workers enabled him to attract the talent he needed and allowed his employees to deliver their best and afford the products they make themselves.
These are a few business moves you can consider making for your company.
1. Quit getting ready to get ready and get out there and do it. If you intend to start a business this year, just get on with it and put it out there for feedback. Don’t keep postponing the decision to try.
2. If you starting out and building a new product, you need to act fast. Build and launch fast. Get feedback, iterate fast. If you can’t do all these things fast, then you’ll end up failing fast, or even worse, fail slowly.
3. Make decisions that brings in the revenue. If you’re the boss, you need to own the revenue line. You can cut costs, work efficiently and be full of great ideas, but you’ll always fail if there’s no money coming in the door.
4. Start selling value instead of product. In selling, prospects will always say NO. The reason prospects say No: they don’t have any reason to say yes. The see no value in what you the sales person has to say. Put value in your approach. Give them a reason to say yes.
5. Learn public speaking. Being able to sell your idea and yourself in a few sentences is tremendous.
6. Hire people who are smarter than you. If you intend to hire this year, don’t settle. Get the best brains into your business. Finding the right people is key. There is not shame in hiring someone smarter than you. They will make your business better. They get the job done. And you get to focus on what you do best.
7. Treat your customers better than last year. Good is not enough. Obsess about your customers, not colleagues or competitors. It’s your job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
8. Begin to maintain balance this year. Just because you can work on your business 24 hours a day doesn’t mean that you should. If you can’t execute effectively because you’re mentally shot from working too hard, you’re screwed. Customers don’t care how long you spent on it. They just want to see a working product.
9. Change how you do business or how your customers do business with you in ways that dramatically boost performance. Change the customer’s total experience: Make it simpler, faster or more beneficial for customers to buy from you.
10. People will only change the way they do everyday tasks if it’s overwhelmingly clear how it makes their lives better. If you want to attract a lot more customers and sell more this year, change your business site and make it reflect the value you offer. What you sell should be obvious. The value you are offering should be simple and easy enough to understand the moment prospective customers land on your site.
11. Be a thought leader. Traditional PR will not guarantee success this year. Your standalone product or service is not very newsworthy for influencers and blogger to start writing about it. Instead, offer your domain expertise. Start educating your target audience..fast. Business blogging is the new marketing. Start sharing domain knowledge. People appreciate a little education from brands.