Strategic or Opportunistic – Which Are You?

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In my last post I talked about the need to take time out so that you can clear your head of the day-to-day issues and problems and focus on thinking about your business from a high-level, big picture perspective.

I talked about how it’s only when your brain is empty and relaxed can it become creative and help you find solutions to problems and possible ways to innovate your business further and take it to the next level.

When you start to do this you start to become strategic.

If you don’t take the time out to do this, if you’re not being strategic, then you are being reactive and opportunistic and your business will suffer. If you are opportunistic you can only fill your day by reacting to issues or events and you can only try to take your business forward by reacting to an unexpected opportunity that lands in your lap.

But an unexpected opportunity is more likely not going to be the right fit for your business. That’s because, you have limited resource and time. Hence, to grow your business the right way, you need to focus on winning business from your ideal prospects – a small section of all possible prospects.

This is vital and I talk about this in length here.

As entrepreneurs you are likely to be inundated by emails from people you don’t know, offering you the latest and greatest software tool or secret that will transform your business by say, bringing you as many customers as you want or by getting you the number 1 ranking on Google.

If you are strategic then you know how to attract and convert the right prospects for your business and you’re able to dismiss these unsolicited emails, which are like shiny objects to a magpie, and you’re able to stay focused on the marketing strategy that you have devised.

If you are opportunistic you probably haven’t set your marketing strategy and you are more likely to be that magpie and reach out for that shiny object and waste valuable time, money and effort.

So, which are you? Strategic or Opportunistic?

If you don’t give yourself the time out to be creative, to be strategic, and to create the right strategy, then you can only be the latter. And if you are the latter then your business will undoubtedly be suffering because your limited time, effort and resource isn’t solely focused on doing what you should be doing.

Be the strategic leader your business needs – create the right strategy and focus on implementing it. If you need some guidance to get you started then check out my library of free resource.

 

 

Related posts you may have missed

Don’t Simply Hope Your Business Will Succeed – Make Sure it Will

Every day thousands of new businesses are formed. New entrepreneurs make that massive leap to starting their own business with feelings of excitement and trepidation as they take that first step in a long, difficult but highly rewarding journey.

Everyday a similar number of businesses close, the majority having struggled for a while and finally called it a day. Their owners doing so with feelings of despair and dread as to their future and that of their families.

The deeply sad thing about many of their businesses is that they needn’t have struggled and failed. Here’s why.

Strategy Equals Hard Choices

The purpose of a good strategy is that it clearly shows where you are aiming to be and sets out the steps you need to take to get there. By setting out this destination and the path to it, it’s then down to you to stay on that path.

To do that, you have to make (often hard) choices. You have to choose your ideal market niche(s), who to target in that niche and what you can deliver in order to give you the return you need to hit milestones along the path to this destination.

Hard though it may be – this is how you build a successful business.

Photo credit: Rev Stan at Flickr