Your Team Is Working Hard on the Wrong Things
“What am I supposed to do, Steve?” he said as he slammed his hand down on the desk in front of me. “I’m putting in over 60 hours a week. My wife is upset because I’m barely home, and even when I am, I’m not present. I don’t have time to take care of myself. I’m not working out, I’m not sleeping, and I’m eating like crap.” What I said next, this president did not like, but it changed his perspective forever.
Too many of us in business are running around like crazy, putting out fires, responding to endless emails, texts, phone calls, and direct messages, tracking things that do not matter, sitting in meetings that matter even less, and burning out in the process. I remember when I was running my first company and communication came through an office phone line, a pager, a fax machine, and the occasional email. Now multiply that by 100 with AI, social media, apps, Zoom calls, and constant notifications, and it is no wonder so many companies struggle to execute well.
Several businesses I work with are feeling intense pricing pressure. They imagine the day when things return to how they used to be, when prices rise again and customers stop pushing back so hard. But this is where I offer a word of caution. While competitive environments do change, many aspects of the one we are in today may be here to stay.
Take speed to value, for example. We teach this as part of the pricing value formula because it is a critical component. We live in a world where expectations will only accelerate. Clients want better results, and they want them faster. Too many companies are struggling to keep up. The answer may not be waiting for market conditions to shift so you can raise prices again. It may be rethinking your business model and building a culture of focus that lowers your cost of delivering products or services to your customers.
So how do you get more focus? I believe it starts with a crystal clear strategy. At Coltivar, good strategy begins by clearly defining the problem your strategy is meant to solve. From there, you define initiatives that accomplish at least one of four things: overcome your strategic problem, enhance the customer experience, foster innovation, or build competitive advantage. If your initiatives do not do one of these four things, they are probably not the right initiatives.
For example, I have seen companies struggle with operational excellence, which leads to high churn and declining revenue from their customers. Then I look at their initiatives and see them focused on updating their website and brand guide. What? It may sound extreme, but if I had to guess, something similar may be happening in your business.
Consider your meetings. When you have a room full of executives sitting for hours discussing something that could have been communicated in an email, that single meeting can easily cost $2,000 or more. Multiply that by all the meetings your company holds each week, and the number becomes significant. But the real cost is not just the money. It is the opportunity cost of not focusing on what actually drives results. You may argue that face to face time is important and that email is not always the best form of communication. I agree. But consider an even bigger waste.
Imagine I told you there was a treasure chest buried in your backyard with $100,000 in cash inside. You start digging. After more than 80 hours of work and several trips to the chiropractor, you give up. Then I show up with a map, and within 15 minutes of digging, you find it. You would be frustrated, right?
That is what happens in businesses every day. Employees spend time trying to figure out the best way to do things when the key levers have already been identified by others who have gone before them. Take finance as an example. There are eight levers of cash flow: price, volume, cost of goods sold, operating expense, accounts receivable, inventory or work in progress, accounts payable, and capital expenditures. Easy to list. Much harder to execute in the right sequence and with the right actions to produce results. You can try to figure it out through trial and error, wasting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in the process. Or you can put a system in place that tells you where to focus.
What the president missed at the beginning of my story was that he was confusing effort with results. There is no prize for the number of hours you work. What matters are the results you drive and the outcomes you produce. That is what changed his perspective. It was not about working more hours. It was about cutting everything that was not directly tied to the levers he could pull to improve the business.
Ask your employees, one by one, to name the top initiatives of the company. Then compare their answers. Next, ask them what they are personally focused on to drive value in the business. Compare those answers too. The gaps will tell you everything you need to know. If your team cannot clearly articulate the same priorities, you do not have a focus problem. You have a strategy problem.
Focus may be the single biggest lever in your business this year. Not more hours. Not more meetings. Not more activity. Clear priorities, aligned to the right levers, executed with discipline. That is how results change. Onwards.
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