I'm sure you've heard the cliche:  "A picture is worth a thousand words."  Have you ever felt like you are working hard - lots of actions, lots of doing - but not really moving forward?  Maybe you're overcommitted.  Perhaps you're unsure of where you focus should be.  Fires need to be put out and the customer is always number one.  Being a small business owner means you have to be especially smart aout how and where you focus resources.  You have limited time, money and people and juggling all three requires laser foucs and judgement.  One technique that can help to highlight your areas of focus is to look at where you are in your business lifecycle.

1.  Marketing Excellence - Are you at 80% of capacity or are you at the 80-100% level.  Are you concerned the next big client will break some of your systems, perhaps leading to service and/or fulfillment failures?  If not, continue to allocate a good deal of your company time and effort on marketing, making this a driving critical success factor.  If you answered yes, move forward to the next phase of the cycle - profitability.

2.  Increasing Profitability - This is the time to re-evaluate all expenses.  Find the waste and inefficeincies, using the 80/20 rule as a guideline (first look at where 80% of your expenses come from and then analyse those for cost savings - you'll find it's likely only 20% of your line items!).  Be sure you understand the profit margins associated with each product line, markets and/or types of customers. Should you drop certain product lines?  What about firing customers - are there some you are losing money on?  Once you know you are making the most from every revenue dollar, move forward to capacity and capability expansion.

3.  Expand Capacity - In this phase, your focus should be on securing funding for more space, equipment, people and other resources.  You may need to hire the right people to move you forward.  The people who got you where you are today may not be the people who will take you to the next level.  This is the phase where many businesses get stuck.  Which comes first - expansion or revenue growth?  Growth requires increased capacity either through funding or reinvestent.  After you've added capacity, you can move your focus onto Operational Excellence.

4.  Operational Excellence - You're at market saturation, you've identified profit opportunities and you've expanded capacity to grow.  Now it's time to kick operational excellence ino high gear.  How do your processes and systems need to be updated?  What can you do better, faster, less expensively.  Focus on where your core competencies are, or where you want them to be and where you can gain competitive advantage - this may involve outsourcing some areas that can be done better, and more cheaply, or it may mean rethinking how your organization operates in total. 

5.  Innovate for life! - Of course, siince we're talking about cycles, there is never an end - as to be a great company and best serve your markets you need to adapt to new technologies, changes in the market and changing customer needs.   This requires a solid assessment of where you fit into the competitive field, how you are currently meeting customer needs and what outside forces are doing.  Instill a culture of innovation and it will pervade every aspect of the lifecycle.  Whether you're in phase 4 or phase 1 - a new company or old.  There's always room for innovation.  Which, in turn leads us back to step one to look for more opportunities!

Portions of this article are courtesy of Tips from the Top.  To find out how to excel no matter where you are in the growth lifecycle and receive our Strategic Business Leadership white paper, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it