8 Strategic Questions That Will Help You Grow Your Business

8 Strategic Questions That Will Help You Grow Your Business

 

I am going to talk about what I do on Sundays to propel myself forward into the week. I’m not married and I don’t have kids yet, so I can use Sundays to get some additional work done and do a lot of planning around the week.

Blocking Out Time for Creativity

First and foremost, I’ll go ahead and look at what meetings I have on Monday, see how everyone on the team’s doing, and see what I can do to help out. These one-to-ones are really structured and should come with an agenda centered around the person I’m helping. So really, Mondays are for me to help people out.

Because I have so many meetings and calls during the week, I really try to work on creative stuff. For example, I can work on the advertising or creation of content for a project. I need to block out time for that because I’m doing phone calls all the time. But I don’t really like calls, so one of the things I’m trying to do right now is spend more time creating.

But the most important thing I do, by far, is reserve a strategy day, usually 1–6pm on Friday afternoons. During this time, nobody can book a meeting with me; I try to just sit and do strategy stuff. Sometimes that might eventually lead to me doing actual work.

8 Strategic Questions That Will Help You Grow Your Business

Here’s what I ask myself during my strategy sessions:

1) What am I doing well?

2) What could I do better and improve on?

3) What could I do more of?

For example, content creation’s working well for us, which is why we’re doing, besides blog postsFacebook Lives, YouTube videos, podcasts, interviews, webinars, etc. So we’re just creating content all over the place because we’re trying to establish more goodwill. We’re trying to figure out how we can repurpose this content, too (e.g., audio → transcripts → blog posts).

4) What could I do less of?

Really, I should be doing fewer calls, because the number of sales calls you have to do is directly related to the number of clients you have. But there’s still only one CEO. So, instead of jumping on daily sales calls, maybe I should be doing something that only I can do.

5) How can I 10x my business?

I recommend reading the book by Grant Cardone, The 10x Rule. What are some crazy things I can do to 10x my business?

6) Who should I be reaching out to more?

Which leads should we be reaching out to more? In terms of recruiting, who should we be maintaining the conversation with? Who should we be partnering up with more? What kind of mentors should I reach out to more? Maybe you can invite them to lunch (and treat them!) and then build a stronger bond that way.

I also mentioned in a recent post the importance of being in groups such as Young Entrepreneurs Council or Entrepreneurs’ Organization.

7) Where is my business today?

I actually just heard a podcast two days ago with Russell Brunson, and he was talking about how he has his accountant give him two lines of information every single day: how much revenue they’ve generated year to date, and how far off he is from his goal.

Let’s say you have a $10 million goal, you’ve generated 500K, so you’re off by $9.5 million. Well, guess what? That’s going to light a fire under your ass and you’re going to have to decide what you need to do today to reach your goals in the future.

8) What can I do to improve in 30 days?

This is an action plan. I’ve taken to creating strategy docs (one per week) which I review weeks or months later (sort of like a business diary). That way, I’m being more deliberate with my time and not just reacting to everything.

The sooner you can do that more consistently, the sooner you’re going to be able to either hand off your business or sell it.

This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:

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