The Roadmap to a Successful Business Rebuild
If you’re in business, you know building your business can be anything but simple. What business structure do you choose? When do you hire employees? What’s the best technology platform to get started with? If you’ve been in business for a while, you’re also faced with another question: what if your plans don’t work out the way you’d hoped? Now you’re faced with the prospect of a business rebuild, which sounds even more challenging.
A business rebuild doesn’t have to be as daunting as it sounds. The best way to approach it is to keep it simple. According to many business strategists such as author Brian Tracy, there are four basic questions you should be asking yourself. The framework provided by the answers to these questions will lay out a road map for your successful rebuild.
Where are you now? The first step forward starts with actually standing still long enough to take a detailed look at your situation. What are your strengths, and what are your weaknesses? How are your assets deployed? What are your challenges? Be honest about your situation, but also be fair to yourself and others. There are probably plenty of things you could have done better, but also more than a few things you got absolutely right.
How did you get here? Very few situations pounce on you out of nowhere. Most situations are the cumulative effects of all the decision that led up to them. Where did your successes come from, and what mistakes did you make? What part did you play? Blaming others is not only unhelpful, but it can keep you from making the necessary changes to ensure your success.
Where do you want to go? There’s no point in starting a journey if you don’t have a destination in mind. What would your ideal outcome look like? Would it be more sales or a fabulous new product line? Maybe you’d like an office with an impressive skyline view or you’d like to work from a tropical beach, laptop in one hand, a cool drink in the other. Whatever outcome you want, try to visualize it in as much detail as you can.
How will you get there? They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. That may be true, but if you want to get to your destination in this lifetime, you’d better have a plan for how to take all those steps. Now that you’ve answered the first three questions in this framework, you now know what resources you have to work with, as well as what mistakes to avoid. You have what you need to make a realistic plan for future success, setting reasonable goals, marking important milestones and putting systems in place so you can track your progress with each step.
Rebuilding your brand or taking it in a totally new direction can be challenging, but like any journey, if you plan ahead, set realistic goals and keep pushing forward, you stand a great chance of getting there. If we can help, let us know.
Happy travels!