In both business and life, one can only count on death, taxes, and change. Your business's future depends on how you plan for, then adapt and react to change. Change can serve as the lifeblood of your business or its greatest threat. Strategies that accommodated change in the past may not work now or in the future. When you can keep up with it or even staying ahead, that can help ensure your business’s survival.
Survival, however, remains uncertain. Almost 90 percent of all startups fail and even Fortune 500 companies can disappear after decades or even a century of solid service. Good strategies to plan and adjust can help your business to avoid their fate. Those that survive embrace strategies of innovation, while those that remain tied to old ways face failure.
Here are four of our top tips to help you ensure that your business future remains certain in an often less-than-certain marketplace.
Use Mind Mapping as Your Foundation for Success
Success requires a starting point, as does facing the need to adapt to change. Many reflexively default to the tried and true. While that may work, we believe your company should also provide a forum where new ideas can emerge and compete to prove their value.
Mind mapping serves as a catalyst to transform ideas and dreams into reality and fruitful plans. It serves as a way to involve thinking from multiple angles to develop solutions and overcome problems. Mind mapping can draw from altruistic impulses, imagination, experience, and other aspects of thought to form cohesive ideas that will coalesce into a plan.
Realize the Value of Strategic Planning
Once you come up with some concrete ideas from mind mapping or future mapping, the elements of a strategic plan can come together. We've learned that mind mapping and future mapping uncover ideas and issues that help business owners learn the unknowns and alternative perspectives necessary in developing that plan.
Strategic plans require thinking beyond the traditional because they anticipate change. They also incorporate ways to deal with future changes, both expected and unexpected.
Stay Innovative
Even the most successful businesses can find themselves in ruts that insulate them from recognizing changes in their industry. Ask anyone under 30 and anyone over 45 about IBM. Those over 45 remember it as the name in computer technology, while those under 30 likely never heard of the company. IBM failed to recognize change, stuck with its traditional approach, and lost market dominance.
Eventually, IBM chose innovation, but not before they lost their premier position among world computer companies. Many other companies do not even survive when they grow slow to adapt.
When your business truly embraces innovation, means more than simply keeping an open mind to different ideas. Successful innovators pursue innovation, learning from others, working out problems, and doing their research.
Realize that No Business Owner Is an Island
Each business owner can take pride in what they created, nurtured, and raised into success. Entrepreneurship requires hard work, a solid plan, and, most of all, the courage to take a risk. While some business owners can carry an entire business on the back of their own efforts, we believe that most need input from others to help them succeed.
One way in which business owners can build for success lies in fostering teamwork. Create an atmosphere in which input from all has value, whether it eventually gets acted on or not. When members of a team embrace “team think” over their own needs, the group functions at a higher level and pushes the company forward.
As Ronald Reagan put it, “It’s amazing what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit.”
Another way that business owners can work with others to find success is through coaching. Business coaches who have “been there, done that” can help newer entrepreneurs avoid mistakes. They can also mentor their charges through challenges and setbacks, reminding owners that all businesses experience them. Coaches also have knowledge of opportunities that people inexperienced in the field may overlook or be unaware of.
These tips, in addition to our programs, can help you transform your business’s future into a bright success. Click this link to schedule your complimentary and let me show you how to shape the future of your business.