At Fourlane, we have a motto for our customers: “Spend less time in your business so you can focus on your business.”
It’s not uncommon to see our customers spending so much time struggling with the ins and outs of their bookkeeping that they aren’t getting to focus on growing their own business. A few years ago, Fourlane may have been guilty of that ourselves. We were so busy running the business that we didn’t have time to think about where we were going and how we were going to get there.
Here’s what we did to rectify that situation:
- We took the 30,000-foot view. We spent some time looking at our business from a higher level, starting with the WHY that drives our business and creating our business goals for the next five years.
- We found help. Once we were sure that we wanted to grow, we knew we needed insight from those who had done it before, so we hired a coach. We went through his process of identifying core values, a core focus, determining a long-term goal and developing a strategy to get there.
- We found more help. Looking at our goals, we determined where we needed help. In our case, it meant hiring an operations manager, and additional sales, service staff and external consultants, to help us move closer to our goals.
- We communicate. Finally, we work hard to be a transparent organization so that our employees know our brand promise (to help companies succeed), and can represent our core values in the interaction they have with each other and our customers.
I share all this in the spirit of helping you think about what you want to accomplish with your business. I encourage you to take it one step at a time – spend a few weeks looking at your business from the 30,000-foot view, get a sense of where you want to be long-term and think about how to get there.
We didn’t take these steps overnight; it took time to have the resources to hire externally. Let us know if we can help. After all, we specialize in helping our customers “spend less time in their business so they can focus on their business.”
