When your business is busy and there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything, many important but not urgent activities get pushed to the side. It's important take the time to invest in your business, to not only make your business better, but to better yourself as the leader of your business.
Get Training/Education
Invest in extra training or education for yourself and your employees. This can be done via online training programs, in-person seminars, or simply reading the top books on building your business up, being a better leader, or whatever it is that gets you motivated to do better.
My absolute favorite business guru and success coach is Darren Hardy. My team and I watch his FREE daily mentoring videos. If you haven’t read his book The Compound Effect, now is a great time to do it. It’s an amazing book that has transformed my life and my business. Another good one from Darren is The Entrepreneur Rollercoaster, which we are all riding at the moment. Some of my other favorite books are The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, by Stephen R. Covey, How To Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, and See You at the Top, by Zig Ziglar. Entrepreneur.com also has a great list of some more contemporary titles too. Many organizations are doing free webinars and lots of business coaches are offering free trials of their materials too, so now is a great time to invest in yourself.
Document Your Processes and Procedures
Take some time to document your businesses processes and procedures. Those are such a valuable thing to have when it comes time to selling your business, when you pass the reins onto your predecessor, or if an employee leaves the company and you need to train their replacement. This documentation process of all of the key roles and functions of the business is time-consuming and can be a daunting task to document every step you or your employees do to carry out each task, but once you have that library of written procedures, you are making your business much more valuable. It makes employee training exponentially easier and it means someone will be able to step into any of the roles you have documented with ease. Practical advice: the way we have done this in our business is to have each person who is responsible for carrying out the task write out the procedure and post it in our shared file database, so that we have it for the future. That way, if that particular person had to walk away from their role today, we could hand the documentation to the person who is coming in to fill that position.
Revise and Update Your Business Plan
You should also revisit your business plan on a regular basis. Update projections and numbers based on your current statistics and start brainstorming ideas on how you will be able to grow your business even more. Make realistic goals for your business and outline your plan to achieve those goals. Don’t have a business plan? Now is the perfect time to develop one. There are many resources for business plans online, so just do a Google search to see which tools might be most useful for you in your industry or line of work. A business plan is the roadmap for where you want to take your business. Without one, how will you get to where you want to go? It’s not going to happen by chance, especially during these uncertain times, so rally the troops and draft a plan of action.