Can You Improve Your Business?
When we are a business owner the question we should ask ourselves is “how can I improve my business” and then understand whether we have the ability to pick things up quickly or we need more time to learn the skills than most.
We have this inborn desire in us to want to be better than who we are today.
Now there is a difference between Joe Average say wanting to be better at Basketball and Michael Jordan wanting to better at Basketball. But it is still there that want to be better than you are right now.
So what has made the difference for some people to improve and be significantly better and others to become average or even just good?
It’s the same question, Jim Collins asked when he wrote the book “Good to Great”.
What Made Companies Great instead of just good?
It all starts with trying to understand this and then asking the question “how can I improve my business using this understanding?”, if you don’t ask the question then how can you become Great?
Notice I asked several questions in this article already. Now the first step is to ask more questions, great questions actually come from being inquisitive and asking better questions once you have asked that first question. Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of the little kid asking WHY over and over again till you come out with “Because it is SO!!!” That is not effective, ask a question and then the follow up question is more specific and so on a so till you have the specific way to improve.
We have the same problem when searching Google today because of the vast amount of knowledge on the Internet and marketers ruining it for most people thank Gary Vaynerchuk for pointing that out “Marketers Ruin Everything” check out this video at 2 min 34 Sec.
We are asking Google a question when we type in something in the search engine and this important because we are doing the same with our brains Our brains do exactly what Google is doing, ask a
Asking your brain “How do I get Better?” is much the same as asking Google. Please I want you to go do it and see the general responses you get, now depending on your previous searches the area you live in, will all count on your answer.
Now you are starting to see that how Joe Average has been asking his questions and how Michael Jordan asks his questions. Joe Average is asking the general question. Michael Jordan is giving you a long list of very specific questions to what he wants to be better at. The results are quite different!!
Don’t you think the exact same thing is happening in business? Let's take Jane Nobody she is asking questions about how to be better and asking very general questions so her brain is consumed with too many ideas and starts to become overwhelmed.
If we look at Warren Buffet he goes into a company that he has just invested in and asks the CEO or Owner very specific questions as he has a vast amount of experience about these situations. You have more experience in a certain area and can easily spot the rookie questions.
How do you go from Jane Nobody to Jane Somebody?
Ask better questions sooner and listen to the answers to then ask better questions
Dustin Curtis wrote a great article about how being experienced now he can listen to advice and know which parts to listen to where as before he was listening to the wrong advice here is his words ” The most important lessons you can learn from people with experience tend to be things you don’t think are important until you have experience.” Dustin Curtis Article.
In Summary so you can start to take better action.
How do I get better at a specific skill in my business is a better question.
Let me give you a few.
- How do I get better at following up clients after I have explained my services and offered them my pricing?
- How do I get better at being productive with my time during the day?
- How do I get better at communicating with my staff?
You get the point SPECIFITY is the key and by the way it will help your Google searches too.
Turn this into a habit and refining the questions you ask yourself.