Two Bold, Key Questions CEOs and Business Owners Need to Ask Themselves

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Two Bold, Key Questions CEOs and Business Owners Need to Ask Themselves

1. Most CEOs and business owners are driven by that two-sided coin of the realm - profits and expenses. However, profit linkages are too often overlooked. All of your efforts can be undone, and your achievements can be rendered obsolete by failing to realize what can sabotage your business, company, startup, or organization. Whether you operate in a low- or high-margin industry, the unintended consequences of this oversight remain the same.

2. The CEOs and business owners who only have eyes for expenses and profits overlook the rare oil that will lubricate the translation of strategy into practice - the profit linkages. I have seen some CEOs with blinders on, in denial, spending most of their time executing for the short term instead of strategizing for the long term. This is a recipe for failure. Such leaders believe that benchmarking (duplicating) what the competition is doing is enough to be successful. They become focused on one thing while blind spots allow competitors and a changing world to close in from every unseen angle. To avoid being the prey of the business world, leaders need to maintain a broader view of the landscape.

3. While the duality of expenses and profits stretches the vision of some CEOs, it can also put them in a proactive and reactive vortex - one foot in operation, the other moving tactically where strategy is warranted. Such a leader feels in control one day, and completely lost the next. They spend one day outperforming, another underperforming.

   A paradigm shift is needed, one that creates the waves and particles necessary for multidimensional thinking. Such thinking has a vision and a process to achieve it. Such a vision is the brainchild of strong foresight, not mere forecasting. Similarly, the sibling to that vision is a process of momentum that can continuously generate increasing, profitable, sustainable growth. Only by working together can the two succeed.

   To be distinguished in a competitive market, CEOs need to make these necessary distinctions and be able to filter relevant and reliable data from credible sources to enable them to make better decisions and solve problems. 

4. Two key questions present themselves, both requiring unabashed honesty.

   1. The first: How can one measure success if the foundation is built on shaky ground?

   2. The second: What measures are in place before forecasting resources?

   3. Okay, you got me. There’s a third. I’ve been known to be unpredictable at times. But rest assured, I can make your profits more predictable. So, here’s my third, ‘bonus’ question:

      Are you reconnecting with those forgotten, tangible, and intangible assets, core values, teams, and clients?

   4. Whoops, here we go again. A fourth, bonus, bonus question:

      How can CEOs lead toward the implementation of powerful sales and marketing plans if they don’t reverse-engineer a strategy - a plan mapped to market terms, capital, structures, customers, and the company’s own products and services?

      Options, decisions, and goals need to be crystal clear, and core values and lines of communication must be firmly established. Once this is achieved, then the next top priority is having a solid process to clarify the execution of goals, leveraging on profit linkages, and aligning with teams.

      A Return on Thinking x Return on Doing x Return on Communicating = Exponential Growth.

      A return on thinking should be the top priority of the CEO.

      Return on doing should be the top priority of teams.

      Return on communicating is the result of all of these efforts combined.

      That’s how your company can begin to lower its risk exposure, raise baseline profits, and grow while delivering results for clients.

5. I’m seeing a growing trend in the business world: CEOs and business owners thinking in a linear way, within a market that’s increasingly dynamic and nonlinear. Strength lies not in doing many things at one time - it’s about accelerating the pace of doing the right thing at the right time in the right place. Therefore, a multidimensional way of thinking, strategizing, and executing is crucial to any kind of organization - not only diagonally and horizontally, but also from the top and bottom, and from the left and right.

   When I meet with CEOs over a period of several days, whether it is to provide them with guidance, advice, brainstorming, or thinking, I notice one common problem: they want to do as much tactical work as they can themselves. Only a few of the strong ones will spend their time strategizing while empowering others to perform tactical and operational tasks.

   Every CEO is free to choose the direction and ignore the consequences. Such CEOs soon find themselves in the company of those such as Blockbuster and Borders. Consider the ramifications. This can happen to a company of any size and stature.

   There exist pivotal drivers for profits - ones that integrate with activities that can be tactically critical to leveraging strategy and marketing toward the desired revenue.

   What is needed is a way to embrace profit linkages, and to integrate this metric with marketing to increase sales velocity.