Find Your Trail: Your Current State
At Elevation Business Consulting, we are focused on helping small business owners stop scrambling through each day. The journey involves building a map to guide you toward success on your terms. The process progresses from finding your trail to planning your course with continued guidance to keep you on your trail.
You are invited to follow the journey of a small business owner eager to end the daily chaos and spend more time doing what he does best and expand his impact on his local community.
Each month we will explore the steps of building your map through the eyes of Travis from Hunchback Graphics. By studying his experience you will be better positioned to start your journey to end the daily scramble. When we first meet Travis, he needs to find his trail. The first step he takes is articulating his current state.
Find Your Trail: Your Current State
When Elevation Business Consulting was engaged, Travis needed to stop scrambling. A creative, fast-paced and highly motivated entrepreneur, he loves helping clients with their graphic design needs. He gets an idea a minute and wants to design all day. Unfortunately, owning a successful business requires focusing on the operational components as well. Travis asked Elevation Business Consulting to help him build a roadmap to achieve success on his terms and conquer his frantic pace.
The Struggle
While there are two partners in the business, only one is working full-time for the business. All sales and administration are on Travis’ plate in addition to most of the design work. There is plenty of work and the business is making money. Both owners have a vision for growing the business and expanding its impact across the county. The challenge is that sustaining growth requires attending to operational components consistently and neither owner has the time or passion for that portion of the business.
Each day is busy with many priorities to attend to. Travis often loses focus when he starts to attend to the operational aspects of the business. Generating invoices, following up on accounts receivable, crafting proposals, coordinating marketing activities, and leveraging social media get pushed to the back burner until things get desperate, resulting in a chaotic fire drill to address those tasks that had been ignored. The daily activities of running the business result in the entire business feeling haphazard and not well- positioned to achieve its goals.
Taking action
The first step in ending the daily scrambling and building a roadmap to success is to identify the business’ trail. A critical piece of knowing which trail to take is to identify your current state. Together with Elevation Business Consulting, Travis assessed the different activities of the business and evaluated which tasks on his plate prevented him from selling and designing. He identified the fire drills that consistently came up and which activities he intentionally moved to the back burner. The guided conversations with Elevation Business Consulting created the space for understanding the primary reasons for the issues: low interest, lacking skills, and minimal perceived value to the business.
Once there was a clear list of activities that were going to be a challenge for the business owner to stay focused on, discussions revolved around barriers to changing how the daily operations of the business are managed. Identifying steps to overcome roadblocks and make progress towards relieving the chaotic feeling would ensure the roadmap to success was more comprehensive.
Success on your terms
In a small business, changes cannot always occur immediately. Resources are not easily accessible to delegate or shift tasks. However, the sense of relief felt by Travis was immeasurable. Simply understanding the cause of the scrambling and the challenges that would be faced to make changes provided a glimpse into what was possible for Travis, his business partner and Hunchback Graphics.
Stay tuned for the next step in Finding Your Trail: Clarifying Where you Want to Go
