“Entrepreneurs know all too well how difficult it is to work in the business and work on the business at the same time. Creating the product, delivering a service, often also getting the word out and developing customers are a full job already. Yet we also need to take some time to step back and look at the big picture — where is the business going? What opportunities might we miss because we simply don’t see them?” says Valeria Maltoni in her post ‘The Seven Deadly Diseases of Management‘
This is of course a major difficulty I live with every day as an entrepreneur. When we get a great mission with a client that takes all our time and most of our intellectual capacity, it takes a lot of will to continue doing marketing and business development, not to mention R&D and exploration of new topics that could bring a lot of value to the business and to the clients.
Still it must be done unless, on the short term, we have long inter-missions with no revenue or, on the long term, the company becomes irrelevant.
I have not found better than a lot of self-discipline, reminders and a list of business development actions to be taken every week. Still I have not found a great magic solution to resolve the conundrum. Any suggestion?
The best situation I have experienced is of course to stop being in the business in the sense of being involved in operations (acting as director and involved in the strategy). This has the drawback of not solving the paycheck issue one has when in charge of his family. However increasingly I tend to try to diminish my time compensated by clients and spend more time outside of the business thinking about how to grow it, because that is really the most effective at the end.
