Strategic Thinking for Small Business: Where & Why

As a small business owner, you have most likely at one time or another referred to yourself as “Chief Cook and Head Bottle Washer.” For those of you in the food business, this may be a literal definition of your role. To others, it is a term that represents a business owner who does it all in his or her business. Sometimes, this is because you are a one-person operation. Other times, it’s because you like to… ahem… have control of everything in your business.

But whatever the reason you wear that tag, the fact is that the vast majority of your time is spent running the day-to-day operations of your business. While this may seem to you to be an appropriate, if exhausting, role, the fact is that while you are taking care of business today, you don’t have much time to think about tomorrow. And I’m not talking about tomorrow as one day; I am talking about the indefinite future.

If the world stayed the same for decades at a time, this would not be an issue. But you realize that today’s world is rapidly changing. This is no longer your father’s world. Hell, it’s not even the same world as five years ago. So how is your business going to continue to grow and thrive and remain relevant, if you don’t take the time to think strategically about the direction it will take in the future? This is the difference between working IN your business, as opposed to working ON your business.

As a business owner, you need to make the time to think strategically. You can’t just be operationally busy all the time; you need to escape the day-to-day business operations to focus on a short- and long-term strategy. And I’m not talking about doing this on your 15 minute lunch break, as you jam a sandwich in your mouth. I’m not talking about a 5 minute bathroom break.

Rather, I am talking about prioritizing your strategic thinking time as if it were an important client meeting. You know very well that if your best client or customer needed to have an hour long sit-down with you this week, you would make the time for that to happen!

But, you say, strategic business planning is for Big Businesses, the ones with layers of management with fancy degrees, who have teams of people under them to handle the day-to-day operations. To that, I say this: consider your smaller size an advantage. You are more nimble. You are better able to see an opportunity and switch gears to capitalize on it. You don’t have to sit through endless boardroom (or bored room!) meetings, while MBAs float theories and projections past one another. You are probably in closer touch with your customers, your employees, and your industry, than some bigwig Fortune 500 CEO. Use that to your advantage! Huddle together on a regular basis with your constituents – your top managers and customers - in order to address business challenges and explore options. Seize these opportunities to out-maneuver your bigger, slower rivals.

The Commercial Appeal, from Memphis, TN, recently did an online study where they asked small business owners: “How difficult is it to budget CEO time away from managing?”

Only 3 percent said they had “found a way to balance management and CEO duties,” and 8 percent allowed they were “inconsistent but getting better at it.”

However, over 50 percent of the respondents said they “can’t focus on CEO tasks for putting out fires,” while 33 percent of them completely rejected the premise with, “I’m a small-business owner, not a CEO.”

So, do you want to increase your CEO activity, especially on the strategic end? Here’s a suggestion:

At least once or twice a year (if not more), fire yourself from jobs that someone else can do. Promote yourself to jobs that only you can do. This will free up some time and put you on a course toward performing the tasks of a CEO, including charting the long-term course for your business.