You can’t change the past but you can look back with the intention of leveraging off the learnings, identifying the gaps and seeing the opportunities for improvement.  These 10 questions will enable you to do just that, to strive for business success.

Turn your sensivity metre down and answer these questions truthfuly and without judgement, blame or excuse – just call it as you see it – tell it as it is.

1. Did you do what you said you were going to do when you said you would do it in 2014?
2. Are there actions on your action sheet that are long overdue?
3. How did your business perform compared to your plan?  Is it worth more after 12 months of trading?
4. Did you accumulate the wealth you had planned to?
5. And your team, how did they perform – are they growing and developing?
6. What about your time – did you spend 80% of your time doing what you do best?
7. How much time did you have off from your business?  Did you take your 4 weeks annual leave?
8. If I came into your business would I identify you as the leader?
9. What new innovations did you introduce in 2014 and what value did they add?
10. Do you remember why you do what you do?

How did you go?

Now select a team member and ask them to answer these questions and share their answers with you – again listen without judgement – don’t take it personally.  The moment you question the validity of feedback you run the risk of hearing what the team member thinks you want to hear and the exercise becomes worthless.

These 10 questions represent and identify the most common gaps or opportunities for improvement that we have witnessed as we work with business owners and leaders on a daily basis.  The underlying business practices that impact the answers and outcomes are critical to maximising profitability in a sustainable way – from both a financial and an emotional point of view.

These are the questions we ask to enable our clients to evaluate their past performance and to establish a bench mark from which to reset their intentions for the coming year, quarter and month.  It is all about knowing where you are today, where you would like to be and how to bridge that gap.

Our BUSINESS by DESIGN workshops and products are designed to address these key business foundations and provide tools and insights that will enable serious improvement.  We have the formulae to business success.