Is Your Business Overrun?
I don’t like to weed. There are a few things that I can say I truly dislike, but weeding is one of them. It always seems like there are so many weeds and that once I pull them, the next day there are just as many back. So I had a plan. I told my husband I wanted to plant a natural perennial garden.
The garden was going well. If something was green and growing, I let it grow. Most of them were pretty in their own way. There were tall stalks and bushy ground cover with blooms. I told my husband, who knows less about greenery than I do, that they were all natural wild flowers. He bought it for a while. Then the some of the “natural wild flowers” took over. One became two. Two became twenty. Twenty became sixty. My well planned garden became overrun by these natural beauties.
At first I embraced my new garden. At least they were green and most of them had flowers of one sort or another. But my garden began to look overrun and mangled, not naturally composed. So I started to pull out some of the less desirables. What I discovered was there were beautiful black-eyed susans and daisies barely breathing underneath. So I cleared out more of the plants that got out of control. I started to remember the plan from the year before. As I pulled more of these intruders out, I found more and more of the beautiful perennials I had intended to watch bloom this year. The original plan for my garden was slowly revealed with each pull. By the end of the day, I had cleared the infiltrators from the entire garden except one corner. That is where they will stay and be monitored.
As I often do, this experience made me think of my own life and business. You see just like these unplanned wild flowers, there have been some aspects of my business which have become overgrown. They were not really planned, but I left them to grow to see what they would become. Unfortunately over time they have gotten out of hand. Just like in my garden, these little projects took on a life of their own. They moved from being a little side interest into a nuisance. They became distracting projects keeping me from focusing on my planned core business. These projects became the 80 of my focus, but produced only the 20 of my success.
Take a look at your own business. What weeds have taken a stronghold? What projects have your focus but are not benefitting your bottom line? What needs to be removed so that you can go back to your original plan and foundation? What did you intend and how are things actually looking?
