Short Term Strategies.. A Business Self Sabotage..
In today’s world, there is something very important that many businesses worldwide are forgetting, Long Term Strategies.
Running for short-term business goals is a good thing, it gives you money quickly, you become rich quicker than most and you become successful. But, what happens after the implementation of a short-term strategy? Do you build a new short-term strategy after every strategy? Do you like to keep going back to square one? I am not surprised why most people won’t have a flourished business when they are older, because they waste important time in going back and restarting from square one.
It’s this ‘coming back to square one’ tactic that hampers a lot of businesses and most of them, due to this reason, have no essence or direction of any kind. Businesses fail to realize this, they only see definite returns in short-term strategies. While implementing them, Every 6 – 12 months, your business changes its goals, which simply means, its changing it’s course whether you like it or not.
I have joined and quit so many organizations because they refuse to open up to long-term strategies. They are narrow-minded and accustomed to short-term strategies. Needless to say, the environment within the organization is something like: “quick, don’t waste your time. think and implement an idea to make more money quickly”. The environment is full of heavy sales pressure, dissatisfied employees, angry bosses and ‘stupid’ strategies that will definitely end the business sometime soon.
‘End’ of a business leaves the owner with two choices, either rebuild or look for a job in another organization. They are demoted from a successful business man to a failed one or an employee!
Short term strategies are business killers. They generate unwanted pressure, loss of direction, employee attrition and most of the time they don’t work out the way you intended. A victim of short-term thinking is always caught up heavily in coming up with more short-term ideas that will bring him out from the blunders caused by the earlier ones while falling victim to newer blunders and thinking of more short-term strategies to come out of those new blunders and fall into newer ones again. It’s called a Business Self Sabotage Strategy (BS2). Everybody uses BS3 technique to do business and I am not surprised when I see them pack up and leave.
If you’ve opened a business, I am pretty sure, you want to stay in the market for as long as you can, and be able to pass it on to your successors. You don’t want to shut down and come up with a new business plan all over again! This is what’s happening to most businesses, they enter, survive for a while and die, just like a fish out of water. You don’t want to die like the fish but you want to evolve. You want to evolve form a single-celled organism to a fully grown and well-functioning human being.
Long term strategies have always been, and will always be, the best plan for a well flourished business. Long term strategy helps in deciding your direction, defining your process, aligning your goals and constructing a business road map. Aren’t these things important for a business? Do you think a ‘short-term’ strategy offers these?
While building a long-term strategy, think beyond 25 years. Where will you be 25 years from now? If your business is dead, you will be too old to restart and will have to give up on your dream of building a flourished business.
Knowing where you want to be 25 years from now, aids in defining a process, expenses, micro level strategies and a better road map design. The returns are long-term but in bigger quantities, which makes up for the time spent. Over a long period, the brand becomes well established, business is well flourished and the base to take a higher leap becomes stronger.
So, what do you implement?
