Do you know exactly where your business is going? Do you know which activities you need to be focusing on and what challenges to expect next? If your answer to any or all of these questions is “no,” then you are right where even the best entrepreneurs have been. There is hope.
One of the most vexing problems for most entrepreneurs is that they don’t have a clear path to follow in their business. It can be surprisingly hard to know what success looks like. But as the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.
So, as entrepreneurs we need to figure out where we are going, then we can figure out how to get there and how to take others with us.
Most small business entrepreneurs don’t necessarily set out with a clear destination in mind. If they did, this would be easier.
It’s relatively straightforward to leave a port of departure, board a ship and follow a map to your destination. But for many entrepreneurs that metaphor does not hold. For them, it’s more like they jumped off a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean and boarded a life raft. They don’t know exactly where they are going, but anywhere is better than the bottom of the sea. At least at first. Once rations run low, there are no visible landmarks, and no rescue in sight, some begin to question even that assertion.
But to get where we want to go, we’ve got to understand where we are. For navigating out of the waters of crises and into the sea of success, we need something to help chart the course – something that can tell us what to aim for first and what to expect next.
