Thinking Time: Priority One for Business Success

You can’t run a successful business without putting in some serious thinking time. This statement might hardly seem worth writing down; it's so obvious. After all, being to think long term and abstractly is the single most important factor that sets humans apart from the millions of other species that inherit the earth.

So read on. Indulge me.

The most successful businesses are those that have evolved within the framework of a well thought through long-term strategy ─ a strategy that is clearly articulated, rigorously followed, and regularly adapted in response to outside factors in an ever changing world. These outside factors include new technologies, competition, unfolding business opportunities and ever changing economic cycles.

Every company, including yours, runs a serious risk of underperforming, and even failing, when you neglect to put in the thinking time required to review and adapt your company’s operations in response to a changing world.

This may seem simplistic. You might be saying to yourself,” Of course I do this" ─ but let me ask you a question.

How much dedicated time have you spent over the past 60 days quietly analyzing your business ─ looking for potential problems and how to avoid them ─ and analyzing prospective business opportunities.

Chances are you’ve spent very little structured time doing this very important work. When you think about it, you will probably realize that most of your time in spent on two things: running the day-to-day operations of your business and responding to information requests that rain in in the form of a relentless barrage of email, text messages, voice messages, and mobile phone calls. Fact is, today it is becoming increasingly difficult to shield your time from distracting intrusions.

If you relate to this situation, here’s something you might want to try.
Every week, for the next two months, book in a half day of “alone time” during which you give serious thought to the state of your business and do some serious strategizing. Make this high priority time that takes precedence over everything else, except dire emergencies
Set an agenda for each week’s “alone time”. Close your office door. Here are some suggested topics to explore; each week focusing on a single topic.

1. Look for weaknesses in your present operations and decide how to fix them..
2. Do some thinking about prospective opportunities for your business and what has to be done to capitalize on them.
3. Take an “alone meeting” to learn more about new technologies that can be used to make your business more efficient and more profitable.
4. Give some thought to the people in your company. Have you got the right team? Should you be providing more training? Does your team need strengthening? Is there anyone who is not working out and should be replaced?

If you’re thinking, this sounds like a good idea but does it really work? Well I can tell you this; it has worked for me, big time. Here’s just one example.

At one of my “alone meetings” the agenda item was, “what other products can my company sell to our data base of about 200,000 individuals who have purchased our Successful Investing and Money Management course”. With a little dedicated thinking time devoted to this topic, I realized that once our clients had learned new investment skills, they would be looking for information on specific investment opportunities.

This line of thinking led to the thought that we could launch an investment advisory newsletter and offer it to those who had enrolled in our course. After the “alone meeting” where this idea was developed, I tried the idea on a sampling of clients and got an enthusiastic endorsement of the idea. With this, The MoneyLetter was launched. It was up and running within 3 months and ─ within a year ─ fully 20% or 40,000 of those who enrolled in our Successful Investing and Money Management course were also subscribing to The MoneyLetter, at $79 per year.
In the first year after its launch the company generated over $3 million in additional income and almost $1 million in additional profits from The MoneyLetter, and this was just the beginning. Within 5 years we had almost 100,000 MoneyLetter subscribers, and this publication had become our highest margin profit center.

Now, I am not claiming that, eventually we would not have figured out this special business opportunity was right under our nose. But I do know this, if thinking time was not specifically dedicated to focusing on what else we could sell to our data base, the idea of The MoneyLetter may not have come up for years.

This “alone time” strategy is something I learned many years ago from Charlie Sweeney the President of McGraw Hill Ryerson. At the time I was working there as a bright eyed young executive. I noticed that every Thursday afternoon Charlie would shut his office door and make it clear to everyone in the company that he was not to be disturbed, except in the direst of emergencies.

Along with many others in the company, I was quite sure that he was grabbing a quiet afternoon nap. Then, over a drink at the end of a weekend planning session at his cottage, he finally disclosed that Thursday afternoons were his “alone time” sessions devoted to thinking about the company and how to make it better.

I was so impressed with the logic of devoting regular time to thinking and strategizing about the business that I adopted this as a model for myself. I began setting aside every Friday morning as a high priority meeting with myself. At the end of each week's meeting, I would decide the topic to be considered the following Friday morning. Then, I would take the next week to assemble the necessary background information for my upcoming weekly “alone meeting”.

Following each "alone meeting", I would follow up with others in the company to further explore issues and ideas that seemed worth pursuing.

This I can say with certainty. From the date I began to hold my weekly “alone meetings”, my business thrived as never before. Try it. I think you might be very pleasantly surprised at the dividends you will reap from this simple strategy.