You’re a marketing director at a senior housing community and you spend your workdays running around showing units, talking with leads and trying to fill vacancies. No time to think about how you’re trying to market your community or what you might do differently to increase your growth.
Or you’re responsible for the budget and spend your day fielding calls on your Blackberry and crunching numbers on spreadsheets. You’re so busy reacting to day-to-day events and putting out fires that you’ve starting to lose sight of what all those numbers really mean…
Both those scenarios scream to me that you need to take time out to work ON your business, rather than just IN your business.
When you’re only dealing with the moment - and not the long-term direction of your job or your company - it’s incredibly easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Think about those bank executives processing all those subprime mortgages – maybe if they had actually thought a little harder about what they were doing, we might have averted our economic meltdown!
One of the absolute greatest things I was ever taught by one of my mentors was to block out some time every single week to take a look at my business from a different perspective – without the immediate pressures of daily tasks, emails and phone calls.
I took that advice on board – and for the past 3 or 4 years, every Friday, I pack up my laptop and head off for the nearest Starbucks. I avoid email, I turn off my phone and I spend three hours working ON my business. What am I doing, where am I going, what do I need to do to move forward? Is there an innovative product or service I can offer that I’m not…? In other words, I take a big picture assessment of where my business is – and try to do necessary outside-the-box thinking to create new long term strategies to take things to the next level.
I can’t tell you what an incredible difference those few hours have made to my business. During those years, we’ve experience phenomenal growth and doubled our sales.
Now more than ever, this is a time when the senior housing industry needs to change and adapt to today’s economic challenges. We need new “big picture” thinking to cope with the rise in vacancies – and we can’t make a change for the better by continuing to blindly do what we’ve done before.
We’ve just started offering coaching services designed to do just that – take our clients outside their business and help them view it from a completely new perspective. I personally coach executives and CEO’s, while my marketing team coaches marketing directors. We hold our clients accountable for following up on agreed-upon plans of action and modifying patterns and behavior that aren’t advancing their companies or their careers. Most of them begin to see the difference in their thinking immediately - and it ends up paying off like gangbusters.
I challenge you, whatever your role in your company, to take some time every week and examine what you can do to stand apart from your competition and create the business growth that’s required. Get out of your work environment – away from the daily pressures and hassles – so you can clear your mind and do some real brainstorming. It could be a bookstore, a coffee shop…wherever you feel comfortable and it’s the right atmosphere for thinking things through.
When you think ahead…you’ll find you don’t get left behind!
0 comments:
Post a Comment