Do you have a SMB leadership strategy for your business? As the leader of your micro as well as small to midsize business (SMB), are you continuously reinventing wheels? Not only that. Do you assume that your activities represent progress targeting business growth, expansion and sustainability? If so, you end up like a hamster in a wheel, expending a lot of energy but getting nowhere else.
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First, you may want to rethink not only your business strategy, but also the processes supporting executing that strategy. Next, you may want to rethink the timeframe in which you execute your business strategy. Then, ponder your own capacity to lead beyond a one-week, as well as one-project, timeframe.
Tactical mindset may start a SMB, but it doesn’t sustain a SMB.
More than a few micro and small businesses I have worked with have a one-week or per-project attention span. They tee up their projects, people, supplies and To-Do list based on the clients they need to serve, that week. Period.
What is more, these leaders start thinking about and planning and leading for that week or project Day One of the week in question. Where is the continuity in that strategy? In fact, where is the strategy at all?
The issue is that leadership has order-taker mindset, instead of innovator mindset. While what is created during each week, or per project, may be exceptional (or not), any creativity involved is reset once the project or week is completed.
Not only do these SMB leaders continuously reinvent their business wheels. Their business wheels are mired in the mud, and spinning wildly instead of strategically.
Once that week’s tasks and orders are completed, the leader breathes a sigh of relief. And then sets their sights on what is supposed to happen for the next week. There is no debrief, no documentation, no root cause analysis, no learning.
As a result of the leader’s myopic world-view, he or she is continuously reinventing wheels. Frankly, it is as though the prior week – and past weeks and months – never really happened. Running that micro and SMB revolves around reinventing the same wheel, each week, with different customers.
Then, these leaders wonder why they are unable to scale their businesses to expand beyond their current capacity. Also, these leaders are surprised when competitors win over their clients. In addition, these leaders are annoyed that other business leaders do not give them recognition and respect.
Continuously reinventing wheels, as a business strategy, isn’t a SMB leadership strategy at all.
It takes courage to start a SMB. Often, growth represents a series of small wins, and referrals, which take a business to a certain revenue level. And then that SMB hits the wall and cannot expand.
As a SMB leader, consider your own backstory. Did you come from a business environment and model in which you served in an order-taker function? Do you have formal training and coaching for leadership, as opposed to order-fulfillment? Would you like to grow yourself, professionally, in order to grow, expand and sustain your business?
Then take your next steps towards professional innovation:
- Read these related posts. Discover these 6 processes essential to your SMB. Then find out whether you are a SMB business model prisoner.
- Has what you read today started you thinking about tomorrow? Contact me and let’s discuss.
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Babette Ten Haken serves organizations as a corporate catalyst and innovative speaker, strategist, coach and storyteller. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ Workshops and Speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention, especially in challenging Industrial Internet of Things environments. Babette’s playbook of IIoT team collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association.
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