Tool Box
Issue No. 13 - October/November 2003
The Fine Art of Leverage
Leverage Your Time to Safeguard Long—Term Business Success
by Brian Jackway
What do the super profitable businesses do that the not so profitable should be doing?
LOTS!
There is not one single thing. It is a lot of things that make the huge differences. Over the years I have heard people say:
“You must take advantage of your trusted relationship with your clients and cross sell new services” Or
“You must get some more new clients”.
or
“You must market your services better”
Yes you must do all of these. However, not before you make your existing business work better. After analyzing the highly successful company’s I have come to the following conclusion.
You will be far more successful if you sort out your existing business before you get involved with new services, new products, new clients, marketing, mergers, acquisitions or consolidations.
And the good thing about that is you will make a lot of profit and create much more business value by initially focusing inwardly — in other words working ON your business in a systematic way.
What I have seen over the years is the reverse of that. Most people take off and do something new and sexy only to find it does not work as promised or expected. One of the big reasons is because their existing business wasn’t working as well as it could.
The first step in doing all of this is to develop the discipline of working on your business each week. Far too often we meet business owners that are spending time doing tasks in thei...
