Seven “Diligent” Steps To Business Success

“The plans of the diligent lead to abundance.” Solomon

This simple quote contains some amazingly profound advice. One of the things that stood out to me in this quote was the key word “lead.” Success or abundance is not instantaneous, it is a process. You cannot just build a plan and blindly execute it and expect success to be immediate. Success is a process that happens over a period of time during which your plans will be tweaked and your product or service will morph to meet the needs of the marketplace.

So, how does this apply to your business?

Has your organization improved over this last year, quarter or month? How do you know you have improved? What concrete measurements do you have in place to show your progress. Back on May 1, 2014, I posted “How Do You Measure Success.” In this post I explained that you need to select critical measures of success for your business and monitor these diligently in order to understand if your organization is on track or if it needs to be tweaked in some way.

Selecting critical measures of success and monitoring these measures are important. However, if you are serious about achieving these targets, you must build a strategy and a plan to succeed (this assumes, of course, that your business has a purpose and a viable product or service that the marketplace finds valuable!) Once you have your plan in place to deliver your product or service, you must execute the plan while you continually monitor your progress and tweak things as required.

The process can be summarized as follows;

1. Create a high level execution strategy to deliver your product or service
2. Create a plan to implement the strategy
3. Select critical factors that accurately measure your business success
4. Execute the strategy and plan
5. Monitor progress against the plan and the strategy
6. Monitor the critical factors and tweak the strategy and plan as required
7. Repeat steps (4) to (6)

This seven step process must be done diligently and relentlessly and, as Solomon says, it will lead you and your organization to success.

For a good example of this process in action, refer to my previous post What Does Ray Dalio Have To Do With Your Business And Why Is It Important.