Tag Archives: KPIs

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Is Your Business More Like a Lamborghini or a Lada?

A Lada may get you from point A to point B (if you are lucky), but a Lamborghini is a highly tuned engineering marvel! Not only will it get you from point A to point B, it will do it quickly, efficiently, and in style! It is a thing of beauty!

Just like a Lamborghini, a finely tuned, high performance business is a beautiful thing!

Understanding what to monitor in your business to ensure that it is finely tuned and highly performing is not an easy task. As you can imagine, there are as many opinions on the definition of high performance as there are businesses. And for good reason.

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How to “Freee” Up Your Time and Make More Money

Those who know me, know that I always look for ways to optimize everything! I want to find the most effective and efficient way to get things done while saving time and making money. From automating tasks and eliminating unnecessary activities to outsourcing work that I don’t need to be doing.

This was kicked up to a whole new level when Timothy Ferriss published The 4 Hour Workweek in 2007. I found his way of thinking outside the box to be quite inspiring. The timing of his book was also impeccable as it coincided with the massive economic downturn and recession, creating urgency for businesses to become more cost effective.

My First VA Experience

In 2008, I took over as the business leader of a large engineering company in Calgary. We were in the depth of the “great recession” and the business had been losing a lot of money. In fact, they had just laid off over a third of their staff – the first lay-offs in their 35 year history!

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Can You Complete the 15 Minute Business Challenge?

If you cannot write out the plan for where you are taking your business in 15 minutes or less, chances are, you do not have a plan!

If you don’t have a plan then you and your business are just floating through time and you are at the whim of the marketplace and all of your competitors! Basically, if you cannot articulate what you are building or why you are building it then how do you know what you are doing or where you are going?

For those that regularly read my posts, you know that Thinking Business has a very detailed business blueprint that you can download (from our Business Tools) and apply to your business. We call it the Thinking Business Blueprint. It takes you through all aspects of your business to ensure that your business model and strategy are defined clearly at all levels.

However, I was recently challenged by a client to come up with a simple, high level, tool that would allow a business leader to summarize their business and their strategy in one simple page. This one-page tool must be simple to implement yet powerful enough to capture the very essence of an organization. A leader must then be able to take the completed tool and easily communicate it to any and all of it’s stakeholders.

To meet this challenge, I have come up with the “15 Minute” Business Blueprint described below.