How to Focus On Your Top Profit Opportunities and Get Your Team On Board
Well, Q1 came and went. If you are like me, you may measure progress at the end of each quarter. But do you stay focused on the most important tasks? You have no shortage of “good ideas” I am sure. If fact, the list is probably overwhelming. So how do you get your arms around all of these “good ideas” and organize them so that you are working on your most important ideas first, and at the same time not lose track of the ones you really want to get to sometime this year?
Tons of Great Ideas, But How To Stay Focused on The RIGHT Ones?
I created a workshop called the Hierarchy of Opportunities to achieve just that. And at several 2, 3, and 4 day seminars, I have guided participants through this process to help them prioritize all the great ideas they just digested in 30-40 jammed packed hours. In summary, you rank your opportunities (projects) A, B, C and then prioritize the “A’s” 1, 2, 3 etc., using you own set of criteria (i.e. Cost to implement, risk etc.).
Can I Immediately Recall My Best Ideas?
As I created my Hierarchy list, it got me thinking about how I could organize these opportunities to ensure that we stayed on track and focused on the things that we had deemed as priorities, as well as realistically implementable. Plus, I did not want to forget about several ideas that I just had no time to get to in the near future.
This led me to create this simple but incredibly powerful tool, The ProfitMap. The ProfitMap is a graphic display of your business opportunities – all on one single page. Personally I like to create one for each of the three primary business areas: Maximizing the Transactional Value of Every Customer/Client/Patient, Developing a SYSTEMATIC New Client Acquisition Process, Management – Mastering Implementation & Execution
To create your ProfitMap, you simply make a circle on the center of a page and then draw a branch for each “opportunity” off the circle. I use a MindMap by www.mindjet.com to create my maps. Then you make a few branches off each of these primary branches (like a tree) to capture any key thoughts about that opportunity. And then you label the priority i.e. A-1. I like to put the expected profit impact there as well. So create your ProfitMap now and you’ll never lose your great ideas again!
