Thinking time is well spent this month

I hope you’ve all had an enjoyable summer break, and managed to take some well-earned time away from your businesses to rest and recharge. We had an extremely busy summer at Intandem, with new client wins, launching new websites and welcoming new members of the team. However, I was lucky enough to take a couple of weeks off and spend some time in beautiful Yorkshire this August.

Now most of us are back at work, school terms have begun and life is returning to its familiar patterns. With Christmas looming, now is the perfect time to take stock, to think about your business with a renewed perspective. Don’t banish those inspiring thoughts that bobbed to the surface while you were lounging in the sun or hiking through the mountains. Now is the time to capture those thoughts that emerged while your mind was clear – and act on them – before the daily fire-fighting begins.

To give you some food for thought, here are a few ideas you might want to circulate around your little grey cells this month:

•  Where would you like your business to be in one year’s time?
• Are there any new markets you should be exploring?
• Did you miss any opportunities earlier in the year when you were too busy to take advantage? Are those opportunities still available – and could you capitalise on them now?
• The world is changing very quickly. Does anything about your business need to change to keep pace? Is your business and what it offers still relevant to the world outside?
• Do you need to think about new ways of selling or promoting your product or service? Does what you’re saying about your offer match the reality? Or has your actual day-to-day work become misaligned with the way you promote yourself?
• Do you need to readjust your positioning? Could you promote yourself as a problem-solver, for example, rather than a service provider? Subtle shifts in emphasis like this could make your services more appealing to customers.
• In a similar vein, does your brand reflect who you are as a business today? Perhaps your business, and the world around it, has changed since you established the brand. Does it need a refresh to bring it up to date?
• Has your whole team brought in to your business culture and core values? If not, how can you ensure that these values are relevant to everyone?
• Are you maximising the potential of your existing customers? Do they really know what you offer, or understand the full extent of your services. One of the best sources of new work or orders is your current customer base. Could you do more to promote your services to those customers that already know and trust you?
• Are you embracing the potential of the digital marketplace? The opportunities are potentially huge for marketing your business both to consumers and other businesses, using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other relevant social media channels. You just need to think about which channels best suit your business and its customers.
• Is your website content up to date and does it accurately reflect your business? How is it performing in search engine rankings? How could this be improved?

I hope these ideas give you some useful pointers about what you might want to mull over this month. If you’d like a sounding board for your thoughts, or just a chat with an impartial third party, don’t hesitate to gives us a call. We’d be delighted to talk to you about how you might put some of your inspired ideas into practice.