Are you driving with your eye on the end of the hood?

When I learned to drive, we watched a series of videos that taught us some simple “rules” for good drivers. One of those rules was “Aim high when driving.” The instructor was trying to keep us from looking right at the end of the car instead of watching further down the road and trusting that the nose of the car would follow our gaze.

Business owners make this same mistake. 

Let me explain. 

Pop open your calendar for the last week. Did you spend most of this week focused on things that were happening in this week or month? How much time did you spend on client deliverables? How much on following up sales leads?

Contrast that with how much time you spent thinking about what needs to be done in the next quarter, or working on things that won’t impact the business until the end of the year, or even next year? 

If you spent more time on the former than the latter, you were driving right off the end of your hood, and you are in danger of missing what’s happening further down the road. 

Worse, you’re spending high dollar hours on low dollar tasks.

When you are working on things that have a short term impact on your business, you create value today (or this week). But then you have to get up again tomorrow and do it again. When you spend time working on systems, or programs, or audience building that might not bear fruit until next quarter or next year, it creates equity. Value that persists and builds over time.

We’ve been talking about how when you are “doing the thing” it holds your business back from growing, and how being “in the business” all day can steal the focus and thinking time that you need to grow the business. What are you going to shift in your schedule, or your daily practices to get you more time working on your higher value, longer-term priorities?

If this is a particular challenge for you, I want to help you get over this hump. Hit reply, and  I’ll book us a quick call to help get you started on making this shift. It’s one of the hardest shifts in business, so don’t be shy about it!