Opportunity or Distraction?

Strategic planning can seem like something that only huge corporations need, with scores of "suits" sitting around a conference room table.

NOT !

You and I, as owners of small-to-mid size businesses, can benefit from a little planning, too. It's just that it's not an exercise that's capped off by a document that sits in a drawer, followed by "life as usual." It can be as simple as saying:

(1) What's my "vision" for the company-- what do I want it to look like "x" number of years down the road.

(2) How does that compare to what my company looks like now? That difference is called the "gap" -- and what I've just done once I've answered these two questions is called a "gap analysis."

(3) How do I bridge the gap? Or, "how do I get from here to there?"

That question is where you start planning that journey. How to do that could be a lengthy seminar. So I'm skipping to a question that many business owners fail to ask:

Is that "deal" I'm looking at an opportunity or a distraction?

The answer is: would chasing that "opportunity" pull us off-course & off-plan? Would the benefits of that opportunity be short-term and end up taking our sights off the target (the goal / the vision)?

Sometimes, the benefits of a deal that may temporarily take us off-course outweigh the distraction from the longer-term goal. But in other instances, that distraction may set us on an unanticipated path that, down the road, leaves us wondering: "How did we get into this quagmire?"

So when you're presented with the potential of an attractive deal that is outside of your normal scope of work, just ask: opportunity or distraction? Is it really as attractive as it seems?

-- Steve Caccavo, President of Constructive Business Solutions™, draws on his years of entrepreneurial experience to help owners strengthen and grow their small and mid-size businesses. © 2009 by Constructive Business Solutions™, a division of Positive Employment Practices, Inc.