What is your bottom line? What’s the most important aspect of operations in your business – Right now! This moment! Do you know? If you don’t, how long will it take you to find out?

Gaining clarity of vision in your day-to-day business operations is vital to your business success.

[list][list-child icon=”fa-check”]Do you have unaddressed issues that are stalling operations?[/list-child][list-child icon=”fa-check”]Where do you need to look first and most often to keep things running smoothly? How do you know (HDYK)?[/list-child][list-child icon=”fa-check”]Is your business flourishing or is it languishing? HDYK?[/list-child][list-child icon=”fa-check”]Are you pumped every day about its operations or is your energy flagging? HDYK?[/list-child][list-child icon=”fa-check”]Do you know what’s wrong but you don’t know how to fix it? HDYK?[/list-child][/list]

If the answer to any of these questions is “I don’t know” or I’m not sure” or “There is more than one problem point but I’m not sure which one to deal with first”, you may want to think about hiring a coach, but you definitely need to spend some time reviewing and revising how you are doing business.

The value received over time may well outweigh the cost you pay up front to get a trained individual to coach you through your business ups and downs. And, of course, I’m a coach and consultant; so what else would I say?

The bottom line here is that if you need to think outside the box, it’s pretty hard to do if you are doing it from inside the box. You need someone who is not. That individual will be able to bring you a whole new perspective and insight to your business that you will have great difficulty achieving while inside the box, no matter how clear you think you are or how focused you are.

A coach or consultant will help you refocus your attention and identify the aspect of your business that will have the best leverage to help you change what needs changing, and/or stabilize what needs stability and structure. A coach will help you gain clarity about your business and your current position.

Keeping your attention focused on the right thing at the right time is easier said than done in most cases – with most businesses. Business owners, executives and managers are always pulled in multiple directions at any point in time. And…there is no news in this paragraph.

Just keeping up with emails and information technology aspects of business these days is a major challenge for most. Does the IT aspect of your business draw your attention away from the other operational aspects or even the raison d’etre (i.e. the reason your organization or business exists at all)? How do you create balance in order to ‘do it all’?

The answers aren’t simple. If they were, you wouldn’t have any questions or doubts about what you are doing. And everybody would be doing it. If it were simple, your business would, unlike almost 70% of businesses, be flourishing, growing and developing at a fast pace, with you in complete control – forever. No bumps, no slips, no real problems. But life and business are not simple to navigate.

Solutions abound that don’t seem to fix things; this may be due to the failure to find the right intervention point or failure to identify the right issue, or failure to hire the right coach for the right issue.

Trying to solve issues that are impacting the whole organization while you attend to business-as-usual means burning the midnight oil. How long can you keep that up without losing your health, your family life, or in the end, possibly your business?

If you think you can do it all alone and survive in the long term, you need more clarity about the big picture than you’ve got. Think again. Do a little investigation, a little reading. Go to the nearest book store and look on the shelf at the number of books on business development, ‘business success in a box’ books, change management (it’s all change management by the way) and you will perhaps get the picture. Managing a business is not as easy as you thought when you started out.

If you are ‘just plugging away’, or ‘just putting one foot in front of the other’, you are in the box and need help getting out – or at the very least, seeing outside your box. If you are finding that the dawn of each new day brings only new problems and challenges, do you and your business a favor – hire a coach or consultant. Find a mentor. Join a club. Use the resources available to you that will help you gain a new perspective and greater clarity about the possibilities in your business and life.