One of my favorite quips about CAE Solutions is that we “help you work on rather than in your business.”
But what does working on your business actually mean?
For me, as a consultant and advisor, it means generating new client leads, meeting prospective clients, networking and marketing, planning content for this blog and social media, and continuously refining the frameworks, tools, and plans I use to support clients.
For an insurance agent, it means generating new business leads, setting goals and targets and evaluating progress toward those, managing staff member expectations, and identifying networking and marketing opportunities.
What about a less “office-like” profession like a creative artist or a florist? After all, people are buying the artist’s work. For this profession, it means something like continued professional development, time to find new creative expressions and try new styles, lots of marketing and promotional work, and ensuring the other resources are in place to get the work into customers’ hands without pulling the artist away from the creative process.
For an HR Director, it means moving away from transactional paperwork and training delivery tasks, focusing instead on making time to get the “pulse” of the staff team, revising and refining onboarding and training materials, identifying career paths and development opportunities for high performers, and reviewing recurring problems to develop new policies and procedures to address those proactively.
For a Marketing Director, it means reviewing data to see which campaigns worked by translating into increased customer traffic or bottom-line results. It also means looking ahead to upcoming events and promotional opportunities, brainstorming content for various campaigns, and connecting upcoming content to business outcomes.
For the small business CEO, it means developing medium-term growth plans and targets, identifying promotional and networking opportunities, and reading or attending classes to develop ownership skills.
And for my beloved retiree readers, it means constantly revisiting your vision of retired life, reviewing whether your activities are matching that vision, and identifying opportunities to act on new and interesting pursuits (you’ve earned it, after all).
We all may define it differently, but if all our time goes to product sales or service delivery, we’re working in our businesses. The reality is that we still must do that daily. But we also must stop those tasks, push back on the world, and take time to work on the business, too.
If you’ve never defined what “work on the business” means to you, your job, your profession, and your industry, you’ll always feel like you’re trapped working in it.
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