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Make Your Small Business a Winner: Keeping your 'edge'

by Anna Hipkiss

Are you steering your business exactly where you want it to go, or is it going its own way, with you frantically busy in the back seat, nowhere near the wheel....

As you spend your day rushing from the computer to the post box, whilst on the phone to clients and trying to meet that deadline, it is hardly surprising that you have no time to think or plan. In fact it’s easy to be reactive, and easy to say that you don’t have time for all that planning stuff, because you are too busy doing real work!

The problem sits in those two words: ‘real work’. You may say that planning isn’t real work, it’s airy fairy stuff that bank managers ask about when they want to find a reason not to lend you money! If you disagree, that still may not mean that you actually do much planning, because planning is rarely urgent, merely important, and in a small business, there are almost always more urgent things to do.

But if someone said to you, are you in control of your business or is it drifting, you would surely not want to say yes? You’ll want to say you know where the market is going, what your competitors are up to, what new ideas you have for the future. In which case, find a way to give reviewing and planning the priority it deserves.


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