When it comes to making decisions for their business, many business owners have a hard time making the right ones. There are so many things to think about that it’s easy to feel confused by all the choices. So, today I wanted to tell you about a simple exercise that I do with all of our business coaching clients to help them find the leverage point in any business decision.
Take 10 minutes
This should take no more than 10 minutes. If you don’t give yourself that much time, you might not look at the decision from all sides. If you think about it for too long, you might talk yourself out of some really good ideas. Here’s how the process works: Think about your problem or issue, and then write down all the ways you could solve it on a piece of paper. There are no bad ideas here, so write down everything that comes to mind during the 10 minutes. To keep my thoughts straight, I like to do this exercise on a white board or a big piece of paper.
The first go-around
After 10 minutes, you should look over your list. You want to do this from two different points of view. The first is easy things to do. These are things that you or someone else on your team could easily do. Let’s say you’re having trouble getting leads and you want to increase the number of leads you get each month. After you make your list, there are a few things on your website that could be changed to help you get more leads. If someone on your team or your web developer could do them with little or no work from you, they would be “low-hanging fruit.” If the task is more complicated and needs more than one step to complete, it wouldn’t be considered “low-hanging fruit.” Go through your whole list with this in mind and put a checkmark next to the things that are easy to do.
The second go-round
Your list has two passes. The second one is about home runs. If you do these things right, they will have a big effect on your business and your bottom line. Let’s say you were giving away a free white paper to people who visited your website and you thought you could turn that into a way to get leads. If that piece of content gets a thousand downloads a month, and you could turn that into a lead capture, that would be a huge win for your business and a home run. But the lead capture opportunity on your blog page that doesn’t get a lot of traffic wouldn’t make the home run list.
Finding the right balance
It’s important to do this in two separate passes all the way through. Don’t try to find either of them on the first few passes. But once you’ve given each one a name, you’ll be able to see which ones are both easy wins and home runs. Those are the easy things that will make a big difference. That’s where you can get the most out of what you have. And what you should be paying attention to in your business.