Adding by Subtracting

The next time you have a significant business opportunity for your company, or maybe it’s a significant challenge to your business, I would like to suggest that you try this time doing the opposite to make it happen. Rather than piling on the, the knee jerk reaction of jumping in, adding activity, coming up with new programs, bringing the team together, working harder, spending more, do less. I have found that for a lot of businesses, their biggest challenge, the thing that’s in the way for them the most is that they’re trying to do too much and are failing at the things they’re trying to do. And if they dialed that back and focused on what’s most important and executed on those things really, really well, they come out further ahead than the knee jerk normal way to do it. I wanna provide you three areas in your business where you can apply this idea of subtracting to move forward.

Customer Outreach
For your customer outreach, I’m talking about not just how you reach out to your clients, what communications channels you use, or what your sales team says. I’m talking about how you formulate that message in the first place. So your website, your social channels, your collateral, how people talk in your business to the prospects. So many businesses have too many messages or versions of their messages out there, or they’re talking about too many different kinds of capabilities before your client is ready to take that level of detail from you. There’s so much value for you in dialing back the words and the message and focusing them very tightly for early prospects for sure on how you can help make their life better. That means fewer words on your website. It means shorter emails. It means fewer different versions of your message. And for you, that may sound boring. That’s okay because they aren’t hearing it as often as you are.

Your Operations
Another way less is more is in your operations. How many initiatives are actively underway in your business, across your different departments? And how many of them do you feel like you are solidly in control of? You know why they’re being done? You know that the investment that you’re making has been projected to produce the ROI it needs.

That it’s all intentional, right? So often there are a few things that are important that you kno, are the priority, but you aren’t able to spend the time or your team isn’t able to spend the time on, on excelling at them because you are overloaded with all of the spinning plates that you have to keep spinning. And that activity, that steady state activity, is actually a big cost to the most important things you’re doing. So I recommend that you pick at most two or three priority projects for your business across the whole business. And you first every week, maybe every day, you spend time consciously making sure that those projects are on a path to success and that you’re doing what’s necessary to make sure that that happens.

Your Culture
And then finally, your culture. I have a term I call zero culture. And while that doesn’t sound very appealing, it helps me think about culture, a business’s culture in a way that allows it to scale and grow and respond to this crazy world we live in. What I mean by zero culture is look at what your people are doing, the whole team and what they’re focused on, and look for what’s in the way of sharing your value with your clients. I like to say find your truth and get out of the way. Your whole business could be organized around what is in the way of us sharing this good news about what we can do for our clients rather than what else can we add on to try to tell the story more and more, or try to control people more and more.

A zero culture is one that is focused on removal, subtracting the things that are blocking progress. A zero culture also gives you much more agility because it removes a lot of overhead. And these days with the rate of change of society, the economy, technology, you need to be nimble to be successful and having fewer trappings, having only what’s necessary to move things forward and looking for things that are actually in the way will help you be more agile.

B2B Clarity
So I hope you consider at least now and then removing some things from the pile of, of focus that your team has. And I think what you’ll find is it makes you more nimble, it makes people more engaged, and it attracts your clients more.