ADVICE
WORKING ON
YOUR BUSINESS
Linda Whitney shares some top tips on how to
make time for strategic thinking
T
here’s a popular business
mantra that advises small
and medium-sized enterprise
owners and start-ups to ‘work
on your business as well as in it’.
The message is that you need to work
on your overall business strategy - but
when you’re running around trying to
achieve the thousand tasks involved in
operating a small business, how do you
find time to do it?
Here are some tips about how to
make time for setting strategy:KEEP IT SIMPLE
Business coach Simon Meadows, who
has run several SMEs himself and has
been coaching for 30 years, says: “I
recommend a one-page business plan
that includes the aims of the business
and strategies that you will use to reach
them.
“A one-page plan makes the strategy
easier to understand and get to grips
with.”
He recounts a recent visit to a
business that had a plan 48 pages long.“It included all the strategy, but it
was too long to work with or review
easily,” Simon says.SET ASIDE TIME IN YOUR
DIARY
Choose a regular time and day for a
weekly strategy review.
“You only need a couple of hours. I
do mine every Thursday afternoon,”
Simon says.
It’s easy to get carried away with
doing something urgent and put off
your strategy review appointment, but
it’s important not to let that happen.
Sean Thomson, chief executive of
Sandler Training (UK), says: “Strategy
should be measured and tracked on
a weekly basis. It’s all too easy to put
things off when you only look at them
quarterly - make it a focus each week
and block out time in the diary, with a