This week on “Mind Your Own Business,” five signs that your strategy isn’t working, do you have a strategy in place in your business? If you do, is it working? Is it giving you everything that you need?. 

Here are five signs that it may not be: first, is it difficult to make decisions? If it’s difficult to make decisions, then your strategy isn’t working. A good strategy acts like a compass, it should help you make your decisions because essentially it comes down to: does this thing  help us move closer towards our strategy or further away?. 

So if you don’t have a proper strategy in place, making decisions will always be a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Next up, how is your financial performance? Are you profitable? Do you have good cash flow? If you don’t have the right business model in mind and you don’t have the right strategy to be able to deliver that business model then cash and profit is always going to be tight and the problem with that is as you grow and scale your business, if you don’t have good working capital then you are going to run out of cash. 

As you grow your business, if you don’t have good profitability, then you’re not going to be able to invest in further growth So, a good strategy should help you optimise cash and should help you be more profitable Next, you are trying to be all things to all people, that is just never going to work it’s a mugs game. If you want to have a scalable business, if you want to grow your business you need to focus on a core customer type that way all of the decisions that you make in your business will gear around how your strategy serves that customer type. 

Trying to be all things to all people is just never going to work and is not sustainable Next, you don’t have a proper people plan in place in your business and don’t understand what your organisational chart is going to look like as your business grows and develops If you don’t have a proper strategy in place, then it is quite difficult to understand what your people plan needs to look like. The trouble with that is that you’re on the back foot when it comes to recruiting you might not be resourcing and organising your functions properly and then that’s ultimately going to lead to poor execution because you’re just finding your way through it and fumbling along. 

And finally, it’s difficult to attract top talent If you are struggling to attract “A players” into your business it could be that you do not have a clearly thought out strategy and therefore you aren’t able to really attract the right people, because good people have options and if you want to attract the absolute best within your budget then you need to be able to show the people that come to your business that you have a clear goal and a proper plan to be able to get there So those are the five signs. 

Keep a lookout for those difficult to make decisions, struggling with cash or profit, trying to be all things to all people, not knowing how to organise your people for the future growth of your business and not being able to attract the right talent Hope you found that useful and I’ll see you next time on “Mind Your Own Business”

If you’re looking for more new business advice, then we’d like to see you every week on “Mind Your Own Business,”

If you’d like help implementing these tactics, then contact Marco Soares for professional coaching for business.