However, mere tools cannot create a peaceful zone for you to stop and think and grasp the significance to you and your business of the rapid change that has taken place and the rapid changes coming.
You need slack. I make a case that everyone needs more slack, which is rather counterintuitive to most business brains and business thinking; but I put great stock in taking the time to be introspective, to value time to think, to respond to situations which arise rather than react. But I am wandering on point here...
You need to protect your slack time at all times. You need to get stuff off your plate and onto the plate of your team members that have earned your trust.
You need to be planning for business growth and the most critical factor in long term growth is to have people working with you who are talented and always improving their skills and their abilities to move up in your organization.
Now only you know what is unique in your company- your niche or niches, the type of projects your team excels at and the location or locations in the market where you best fit and so I leave it to you and your trusted team to formulate your strategy.
But protect the time to pursue your strategy. I have great clients who are smart and dedicated; but when the going gets rough and life is filled with distractions, the daily urgent and the weekly urgent gets in the way of the important and not urgent; and the strategic thinking turns more towards strategic yearnings. More gas and much less action.
Keeping your slack and staying focused on strategic issues saves an incredible amount of time rehashing and getting back up to speed. Quite frankly, I have clients who have lost millions in potential growth, because of the friction created by being distracted and waylaid along the path to strategic growth. You have to anticipate your constraints and have an action plan in place rather than hitting a wall after passing any number of warning lights.
You also need to improve your productivity and make more money with the great people you have, so that you can bring new people on, and so your people can have more slack so you can spend a little more money on innovation and doing things differently. Innovating and creating change means you're less productive until new work habits are formed. Innovation and change to improve profits and productivity is an investment now in future prosperity.
Therefore, increased productivity can be powered by great marketing that helps the right people find your company as a resource, better understand how your company works before you are ever called, and make the buying process more productive by making sales cycles shorter and conversions of estimates and proposals higher.
Now that is sort of a sales pitch for creating great content and that is the main contribution I do for companies, and it is a tremendously powerful tool to improve profitability in an age when people are doing their own shopping online for even service companies now... but beyond my little impassioned speech there...
Make sure the sales process works as well as it can. So many companies do not take as full advantage of the estimate creating process as they can, and there is nothing more expensive in the company that to create estimates. Improving conversions of estimates is a huge lever for increasing productivity and profitability.
Now how much diversity in closing rates do you have across your sales team? What can be learned from the leaders that can be used to make everyone more productive? What could your people do working together rather than being so competitive with each other, that could empower improved sales and improved service to customers.
This is the age of teams. What could your people working and sharing sales efforts do together that might make more sense than everyone on their own? Millennials are much more attuned to collaboration than us in the older generation. What can we learn here? What can we test? What can we fail at first and then learn from and improve? :)
So coming back to the main theme, find the slack to think through your best strategies and work out your plan for taking action. If you do not have slack and find the time to be and act with acumen, then the whole team suffers, and the business suffers and your profitability suffers.
Take care of yourself and rely on your team.
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