What Does Your Business Need?

Here’s a trick question for all business owners. Who should be treated like your number one customer?

Notice, the question isn’t who is, but who should be treated like your number one customer. You may have a list of potential customers running through your mind, but the tricky part is that the entity you should treat like your number one customer is your own business.

Think about your business outside of yourself. As its own separate entity. What does it need from you? From your team? Is it getting the time and attention that it needs to grow? To innovate? To thrive?

Your business doesn’t have a voice. It won’t stand up and demand your attention. Vendors will fight for your time. Customers will make requests and possibly complain publicly if they need your service. Your employees will have their own requests and possibly performance issues that need your attention. They all have voices. It makes it easy to divert your attention and energy to those sources.

Working on your business can seem like a luxury. Something you’d do if you had more time. If there isn’t a fire today. If things go exactly to plan. If you had a clone. It’s something that’s on your to-do list, but often gets pushed back.

Yet, if you’re not taking care of your business, how can it serve customers, work with vendors, and provide for employees?

While your business is not a customer, imagine what would happen if you treated it like your top customer.

Top customers often get priority treatment. You probably manage to get the impossible done when it comes to getting your top customer what they need, when they need it. If they need to meet, you make it happen. If they have a problem, you’re there to fix it. If they call, you make time to chat, even if it’s not an emergency.

Changing the way you think about your business and choosing to make it a priority doesn’t magically make things happen, but it does make it easier to give it the time it needs. Use these two tips in order to change the way your business is treated by you and your team:

• Treat time to work on the business like a meeting with your number one customer. How often would you skip or even postpone a meeting with your top customer? Chances are, it’s not often. Yet, how often does the time to work on your business get skipped or postponed?
  
  A simple, but effective change is to set aside small bursts of time dedicated to working on the business. And treat the time slot with the same guidelines you instinctively set with your top customer. For instance, if an interruption comes up during your time to work on the business, ask if you would cancel if it was a meeting with your top customer. If not, then you shouldn’t cancel on your business. It’s simple, but extremely effective.
   
• Always ask, “What does the business need?” As mentioned, your business doesn’t have a voice. Train yourself and your team to always stop and ask what the business needs. Your business still won’t have a voice, but you’ll have a group of people making sure it gets what it needs.