Sarah Lakhani Consulting

Where Brand and Business Come Together This is the space where ambitious women come to bring clarity to their ideas, structure to their growth, and meaning to the businesses they’re building.

mindset

The 3 Business Success Factors

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I love strategy just as much as the next management consultant, but as a business owner, I’ve got to say, there are 3 business success factors, and strategy is just one of them.  The other two are action and mindset.  And more than ever, when you’re starting/running your own business, you’ll notice the (negative) effects when you’re focused on only one or two of these areas.  They may not all need equal amounts of your time, but they do all need your attention.  

Why these three factors?

How did we get here?  What makes these three things the areas that everything else falls into?  Well… it’s quite simple really:

Strategy keeps you moving in the right direction.

Mindset ensures you’re removing your own blocks and moving forward in a way that feels good.

And action keeps you moving.  

Lack of Strategy

Most of my clients come to me for strategy.  And that’s totally understandable.  Strategy is deciding where you want to be, how you want to position yourself and mapping out a roadmap to get there.  It covers your overall business strategy, brand strategy and all the pieces that fit into them, such as your marketing strategy, your sales strategy and your customer strategy.  

When you have a gap in this particular business success factor, you’ll find that you’re either lost, not taking any steps forward because you just don’t know what to do or you’ll find yourself jumping from one strategy to another.  You’ll likely also be listening to multiple people, maybe multiple mentors or business coaches, and consuming all their free content.  Piecing all this free content together to form a strategy is near impossible.  Why?  Because each piece is part of a different strategy. 

Instead, what you need to do if this sounds like the situation you’re in is to commit to one strategy.  One way of making money, of selling, of marketing, of moving people through your customer journey.  Define that one way and then map out how you’re going to get there.  Commit to that.  And stop listening to and being swayed by other strategies.  The truth is, many strategies will work.  The trick is to find the one that suits you and your strengths the most.  

Lack of Action

It goes without saying that not taking action is going to result in not getting anywhere, right?  Logically, this makes sense.  But many of us (myself included, once upon a time!) love the strategy and mindset elements and just end up spending most of our time there.  Action is moving your business along the roadmap that you’ve created from your strategy work.  It’s moving the needle every day, taking action, implementing a part of your strategy.  

When you have a gap in this business success factor, you’ll notice that you have lots of great ideas, an incredibly well defined strategy, but nothing that others can see.  It’s all virtual, or in documents, but nothing has been implemented.  To be honest, I’ve seen a lot of strategy work end without any action being taken.  And the truth is, no amount of strategy work is going to helpful if you don’t take the required action.  

So if you find that you’re the type of business owner who loves to spend time in strategy mode and not enough time implementing, here are my three recommendations:

  1. Take small action.  Any action is better than no action.  So break things down into bite-sized chunks and do a small bit every day.
  2. Reward yourself for completing your action.  Save that piece of chocolate until after you’ve completed your task. 
  3. Remind yourself how far you’ve come and put things into perspective.  It wasn’t as difficult as you imagined it would be, right?  And the benefits of taking action far outweigh the benefits of not taking action.  Read that again if you need to.  

Lack of Mindset

Ah, mindset.  The one thing no one thinks they need until they realize they need it.  Personally, I try to impact mindset through sharing my positivity, my energy and my way of thinking with my clients.  But that’s not enough.  Mindset includes figuring out why you are resisting certain things that you know you should be doing, and then working through those reasons.  

When you have a mindset block, you’ll most likely be living out one (or a few) limiting beliefs.  Perhaps you don’t believe you’re ready to take action.  Or you don’t think you deserve to make money.  Or you think sales is icky.  These beliefs then drive your subconscious and you’ll live them out without realizing it.  You’ll give a less-than-stellar strategy call or pitch.  You’ll be too busy to do any marketing.  Or you’ll spend minimal amount of time, if at all, “selling”.  

Watch out for your thoughts.  What do you tell yourself frequently?  “I am terrible at marketing”? “I don’t want to be that type of sales person”? “Sure, she’s making $50k a month, but I could never”?  Your thoughts drive your beliefs which drive your actions.  If you think you can’t, if you think you shouldn’t, if you think you don’t deserve it, etc, you won’t do it or get it.  You might not realize it, or see it happening, but your thoughts literally drive everything you do – in life and in business.  

Now you know the 3 business success factors. What’s next?

Now that you know what the 3 business success factors are, I challenge you to take the time to really watch yourself.  Find out where you’re falling short.  And then use the tips above to fill in that gap.  When you do, you’ll see the changes start to unfold right in front of your eyes.  These 3 factors literally drive the success of your business.  You’ve got this! 

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Decision Making: Your Greatest Asset

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Decision making is one of the hardest things that you, as a business owner and founder will have to do.  Hands down.  Why?  Because it always feels so permanent.  In this article, I’m going to cover three types of decisions: (1) Your overall business proposition (2) Your business direction and (3) Your mindset. 

Why Decisions Matter

Before we explore the three types of decisions, let’s take a moment to examine why this is an important topic.  Whether you’re in corporate or running your own business, whether you’re a small, medium, large or global business, the same reason applies.  Trying to move a business forward without being able to make decisions is highly unlikely to happen.  Basically, you just can’t move forward if you’re unable to make decisions.  

If you think about places you’ve worked at where your boss, manager or the president of the company were unable to make decisions, I’m sure you’ll find that the people within the teams reporting into them were always confused about what the right thing to do was, always doing something then changing course, and always busy working but producing a low result for the business.  And here’s the thing – it’s not the team’s fault.  Unless everyone knows what they’re meant to be working towards, it’s just always going to be this way.  Sometimes, the results can still be great – because of luck.  But most of the time, they just won’t be.    

The Impact of Decisions

So now what about the decisions you need to make (and could be struggling with) in your business?  How do they affect your business?  Whether you’re a solopreneur or have a team, not making the decisions you need to make will invariably slow you down by either stopping work from progressing or progressing it in multiple directions.  If you don’t have a team, this could manifest as doing and re-doing work such as changing your business purpose, your target audience or your services.  It could also result in changing your priorities every time you think you’ve made that decision, and therefore impacting the activities you’re currently focused on.  Eventually, this will lead to burnout and more than that – to that undesirable feeling of failure.  And if you have a team and are unable to make business decisions to guide them, you will cause them to spend their time in ways that won’t result in the ROI you need to make their hire a good investment.  But it wouldn’t be their fault!

How to make decisions

Decision making is a difficult skill.  It’s scary.  It feels permanent.  It feels like all eyes are on you, and any error in your decision will make you as the leader look bad.  But actually, none of that is true.  The first thing to know about making decisions is that any decision is better than no decision.  So even if you do make a decision that doesn’t produce the outcome you want, it’s still better than not having made that decision in the first place.  Why?  Because now you know that the direction you went in wasn’t the best for your business.  If you hadn’t made a decision, you wouldn’t know that.  You wouldn’t know anything, in fact.  Secondly, having made a decision also helps you and your team feel better because you have clarity.  You know what you’re working on.  You know what direction you’re heading in.  You know what you need to do and why you’re doing it.  Lastly, it demonstrates strong leadership skills.  One of the things people look up to leaders for is their ability to make decisions.  As a business owner, you need to be able to own that space within your business.  To help you, let’s look at three major types of decisions business owners need to make.

Decision Making Scenario #1: Your Business Proposition

In this scenario, the type of decision you’re making impacts the business at a fundamental level.  What is your business?  Who do you serve and how do you serve them?  What are your products and services?  How do they get delivered?  How do you make money?  Essentially, this is figuring out your business model.  Perhaps you have a ton of ideas about how you want to serve your customers.  Or perhaps you don’t.  Maybe you know exactly who your customers are.  But then again, maybe you don’t.  At the early stages of your business or when you’re going through a major change, pivot or adding a new line of products/services, you’ll find yourself in this scenario.  There are several decisions that need to be made here, but altogether, they’re your business model.  Most people I work with come to me with this piece of their business unanswered and we work on it together.  

To be able to make a decision on this, there are three major components that need to be considered: what your customers want and need, what your competitors currently provide and what you can do to stand out in the market.  Once you’ve collected the information across these areas, you’ll be in a position to create some options for your business model, and then pick the one that resonates most with you.  Don’t just go for the easy one, or the one that feels safest.  Go for the one that excites you – the one that gives you butterflies in your stomach and goosebumps on your skin.

Decision Making Scenario #2: Your Business Direction

This decision is the output of the earlier decision (on your business proposition or your business model).  Once you’ve decided what you want to do, you need to figure out how you’re going to get there.  This is where a business plan or a roadmap will come into play.  Knowing where you want to go and what you want to do is a prerequisite.  If you’re not sure about that, then figure that out first.  Once you have that, you can start crafting your plan or roadmap.

The way I like to do this is to break down my goal into 5 strategic areas: Sales, marketing, product, operations and finance.  I then identify what I need across each of those and then break that down into smaller goals.  Once that’s done, I can see the roadmap more clearly and it becomes easier to map out the step by step actions I need to take to make it all happen.  I follow this structure with my clients.  We first get their business model clarified – who they serve, how they serve them, how they deliver the products/services that serve them and how they make money doing that.  And then depending on their strengths, their preferences and what feels good – expansive, stretching but still in line with their values – we identify the steps required to get there, starting from the goals and working backwards.  

Decision Making Scenario #3: Your Mindset

This last decision is the most powerful one.  In order to get anything done in your business, whether it’s deciding to make an investment or deciding that you will fill up your program or sell out your stock, it all starts with the decision.  Why?  Because what you set your mind to is what you’ll eventually manifest in your physical reality.  This isn’t something we grew up realizing, nor is it something we’re taught in our corporate careers.  But the world of entrepreneurship is abundant with this knowledge.  And here’s how it plays out:  If you decide that you will get something, you will unconsciously act and do the things required to make that a reality.  It may seem farfetched, but it’s not.  You will show up, deliver, add value, work towards, and anything else to make that decision come true – if you truly believe it.  But when you don’t make that decision, it leads to an inconsistent set of actions on your behalf.  You just won’t show up in the same way.  

So how can you decide and change your mindset?  It takes practice.  It takes being understanding and curious as to why your mindset isn’t decisive or positive.  You can explore why you choose to see things in a negative or inconclusive manner.  And then, you absolutely need to practice making those decisions.  Decide that you will post on social media today.  Decide that you will meet a perfect client.  Decide that your content is being devoured by all your ideal customers.  Decide that your product will land in front of your target audience.  Decide those things first and see the magic happen.

Decision Making and You

In the end, only you can take control and start making decisions.  Eventually, you might be able to outsource some of these decisions, but when you’re in the early stages of starting and growing your business, it’s important that you shape it the way you want it to be.  Start small, make decisions that are easy, and then grow from there.  And with each decision, you want to ask yourself:  Does this excite me?  Does it give me butterflies in my stomach?  Does it scare me a little but also get me really pumped?  Does it give me goosebumps?  Remember, the direction you’ll head in with your business is dependent on these decisions.  And so you want your decisions to be expansive and push you without causing you to burn out.  You’ve got this. 

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