After a busy week behind me, I am looking forward to building momentum for 2018. As a business, we have achieved most of what we set out to achieve but this is no time to take the foot off the peddle.
In fact, now is the time to accelerate forward and get busy planning. As you will appreciate, when you are busy with the day to day job (For me, delivering workshops) it’s easy to take your eye off the ball.
With some great work booked in for 2018 already, it does take some of the pressure off, but if we want to grow and develop the business, we need to use the space to look for new opportunities.
For the first time, in a long time, I am excited to visit the office and get speaking to people, catch up with my business partner and set some challenging business targets. We started this business in 2001 and, as most people did, we felt the times change and experienced the pressure of a downturn in the economy, it hit us hard.
There were tough times, sleepless nights and difficult conversations to be had. Not only as business partners but also with our families. We had to ‘cut our cloth’ if we were to survive and that was in work and at home!
Looking back on those times make me appreciate where we are now and how much, collective effort it took to get past, over and around some obstacles. It required support and understanding, hard work and persistence. This never stops though…
Like any other business, there will always be external factors we can’t control and changes we may not like or welcome, but these things happen. When you have a team of people with the same vision, it’s amazing how powerful this can be and how far it can get you.
I did some work last week with an experienced group of people, who have recently been put together to create a new direction for a part of the business. We had a great 2 days with loads of heated and passionate discussions on how the future looks. By the end of the session we had action plans for the first steps to the vision. It was not perfect and there is still a lot to do, but this group are already becoming a team and together they will build a strong business.
It’s good to have support from others and great teams take hard work, patience and understanding to be successful.
Even if you work on your own, you need a team……..
Who is in your team?