If you’re a founder, a CEO or even a humble manager, what you’ll be doing every day is taking decisions. You have responsibility for a business’ resources (or a portion of them!) and it’s your job to look at the challenges facing you and allot those resources to effectively face the challenges, in such a way that your investments are returned or increased.
It’s not uncommon to be faced with anxiety after you’ve made a decision – waiting for the results to come back and learn whether you’ve made a good decision or a bad one can be nerve wracking. Today we’re taking a look at how you can diffuse this business anxiety and rest easy with confidence that you’re taking good decisions.
Tracking Progress
One of the most important things you can do is track the progress and capacities of your business. You need to know if you have the sheer capacity to get something done before you promise it. Breaking promises to customers undermines your brand and makes them less likely to choose you again. It can also cost you more directly in refunds and gestures of good will. Even if it only affects people within your business, it’s going to undermine your managers, CEOs or shareholders trust in you and compromise the trajectory of your career.
The solution is to ensure you have a good understanding of how your business performs, how much the teams under you are typically able to accomplish each day, and the extent to which you can push them. It’s no good committing yourself to provide a certain amount of revenue for your company or goods to customers if you’re not sure you can actually deliver the goods, both literally and metaphorically.
Outside Research
As well as your own company you need to understand the market. Working with market research companies is far from a waste of your resources: it’s an investment that pays off as you’re able to make better decisions in future, confident that they will pay off!
Brand trackers are surveys that measure the strength of your brand and the responsiveness of customers to your advertising and to your rival businesses, so you can see where your strengths and weaknesses are, and track the success or indeed failure of your branding efforts over the course of weeks and months.
Competitor research helps you find out what your competitors are planning so you can make your plans around them – don’t lose out on revenue by launching a new product at the same as your closest rival. Instead, get the best of the situation and launch first, scooping the big prize and the big bucks!
