How to Identify and Prioritize the Right Opportunities for Your Business

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. Right now as I sit here today, we are moving quickly through October. It's my daughter's birthday month. She's reminding me of that every single day and we're creeping up on Halloween. We're also creeping into a busy conference season.

Some of us are winding down our work if we live in seasonal climates, but we're going to keep talking about the things that we need to be working on if we do have that offseason and the things that we try to be thinking about in our businesses. We're trying to make decisions about how do we move forward, what things really made this year tough.

As you are in the middle of quarter four, you’re probably still focused on reaching some goals and some objectives, you're starting to get a feel for how this part of the year is going to wrap up, but you're also thinking about the things that didn't work, what you didn't like about it, what you wish was better, and how are you going to fix those things so that next year looks different or better, or get you a better ROI on the tactics and the things that you're doing in your business to grow and really flourish that business.

This is part two of a three-part series where we're really talking about the Strategic Growth Wheel, which is a framework or a model that I use to help people think through “How am I going to decide what are the best opportunities that I should be pursuing in my business? How do I pick the right one and then how do I implement successfully?”

We're talking about the second part of that equation: Identify. We always start with investigate, but now we're talking about identifying because when you do investigate, you're probably going to find more than one thing that really kind of shakes you to the core or makes you go, “Oof, I don't like this. I don't like what I'm learning here,” or, “Oh, I'm super excited about this opportunity, something that my customers are saying that they need or a pain point that I didn't realize they had,” some kind of opportunity.

I love to say that when we find bottlenecks or problems, those are always opportunities as well. But let's talk a little bit about identification because this is where we can screw everything up. Prioritizing the opportunities and the bottlenecks is critical because not all of these opportunities and bottlenecks are created equal.

Some of them have a bigger impact on our business. Some of them need to be addressed first because if we can fix certain things, they're probably going to impact other problems that we're seeing and having down the line so it's absolutely essential that we understand this and we have a way and a model to really think through which one is the one that needs my attention first or needs the most of my intention.

This all comes down to making that critical decision. You've probably learned a lot from doing some research if you are using this model and you're thinking about that first one, the investigation. Right now, we have a lot of clients that are winding down the year but they're already thinking about when they're going to have to hire again. They're wanting to talk about workforce and they know they need to figure out a better system. We're having a lot of those conversations right now.

But there's a lot of things they could be doing and they have to pick the right one and there are so many decisions. We've talked about the reality of decision fatigue, all the decisions that are placed on business owners, managers, even the everyday person that's just going through life, it's just buried in it.

What about the impact of business owners to make that critical decision of what is the one thing that I should be focused on now to get the most momentum for my business?

Here are some interesting facts for you: 85% of business leaders have suffered from decision distress, regretting decisions, feeling guilty about decisions they've made, questioning decisions that they've made in the past year. This is some research that was done and there's a couple more I think where this information came from.

But here are a couple more steps that came from this study: 72% of these leaders admit to sheer volume of data and their lack of trust in data has stopped them from making any decisions. Now, that's not to say that we shouldn't have data. But when we're doing that investigation phase, we need to have a way to prioritize that data.

We want to make better decisions based on data, based on facts, based on research but which data should we focus on? Sometimes the things that feel like they're screaming the loudest at us aren’t really what we need to be focused on. We have to have some clear filters to do that.

Let's talk about this. There are great models to do this. One of the models that I love and a book that I absolutely recommend is this Business Hierarchy of Needs by Mike Michalowicz. I've actually studied this content, been certified in that content because growing up in business, I think it's this very simplistic way to think about your business almost like as a living thing that has to survive and all the things that it needs.

We won't go too deep into that but think about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and we've translated it into business. I think when you think about different types or categories of businesses, there might be some nuances in this. But for a quick, dirty reference, if you have a list of problems or obstacles that you're facing or opportunities that you think you want to pursue, you can align these directly onto the Business Hierarchy of Needs to get a really quick idea of where you want to focus in and it's going to quickly eliminate a huge part of all those things that popped up in your data as things that you could be pursuing and it's going to help you get laser focused.

For example, the bottom tier of the Business Hierarchy of Needs is sales and marketing whereas organization, processes, and systems come up higher in that. If you think about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, it completely makes sense. We need air and oxygen to breathe, and our businesses need sales.

That's why when you start a business, if you're the owner, you are in sales, you're doing all the things and sales is a priority. If there's a problem that you identify, and it falls into that category, it's probably something you want to fix.

When we talk about implementation, I'm going to talk about how I like the Strategy Growth Wheel because it also helps you build processes and systems as you're solving even those lower-tier problems, but we can talk about that later. But that's one of the models that we can use.

If you can get these models and layer them over all of the data that you've got from investigating, doing some research, it's going to help you pinpoint the one thing that you need to be focused on.

Also, sometimes you need to bring in outside advisors, people that can look at what you've gathered, all the information that you've got through interviewing customers, partners, looking at how you're perceived in the marketplace, researching the pain points of your prospects, of your current clients, all of those types of things, bringing somebody in that can have an objective opinion and has a good understanding of the priorities of the business and how business functions can be very, very helpful.

That is what I would recommend is at this point, if you are not very, very clear, or if you think that you might have a bias towards going towards what we would think of as your genius zone or your comfort zone as a key stakeholder owner or leader in a business, we don't want to fall into that trap. You want to make sure that you're using some models to help you focus in on the priority items or/and bring somebody in that's going to have an unbiased higher-level view of your business that you can trust to really help you focus on prioritizing.

I want to go back for just a second to that bias towards our comfort zone or genius zone. As leaders in a company, as business owners in a company, we can very much have an area where we're incredibly great. If I think about my family's business after my dad passed, my mom's skills were absolutely in accounting, bookkeeping, keeping the money really organized, relationships with banks, really leveraging all of those kinds of things.

When my dad passed, she had learned a little bit about relationship building and sales and she even learned how to run the roller and was out on the cruise and stuff like that for a while. She learned how to really build relationships with the team.

She developed some new genius zones or comfort zones but some of them never became comfort zones for her. Doing sales was just never something she enjoyed. She didn't mind building those relationships and being persistent but actually going out boots on the ground, looking at projects, understanding the technicality of the different types of solutions that we had in our toolbox, diagnosing pavements, distresses, all of those kinds of things were not something that she wanted to get into and we needed her genius zone to be in those other areas.

What we want to do though, is be very, very careful. As that key decision maker in your company, you don't want to always focus on the bottlenecks, the obstacles, or the opportunities that are related to the things that you're comfortable with or that you're super good at.

We have a propensity to do that in our business. We have a propensity to also let the other managers and key stakeholders do the same thing. We have to really figure out what is the one right thing at the right time. Identifying the right opportunity at the right time is absolutely essential.

If you find yourself feeling almost too comfortable every single year when you start thinking about what things are we going to upgrade in our business and what's not working, what are we going to work on when work is slower to really try to maximize the business, if you find that you're almost too comfortable and you're too excited every single time, that's probably a red flag that you're always slipping into that comfort zone.

One of the things that is critical to do is think about the different components of your company. If you have leaders in operations, in marketing, in sales, in accounting, in HR, whatever it is, it's great to have a team and have all of those people have a voice, but also make sure they understand some of those models like the Business Hierarchy of Needs that I mentioned, so that you can all agree on what that essential thing is and you can all contribute to that or agree that that's the thing you're going to focus on first.

This doesn't mean that we ignore things that we can quickly address in our own areas but we need to identify what that one thing is that if we can address it or leverage that opportunity, it's going to give us the maximum momentum and potential growth in our businesses.

Do take time when you get to identifying. We've gathered a whole bunch of information in the investigation phase of the Strategic Growth Wheel, now we don't want to skip this step of identifying that one priority thing. If you do this, it's going to make the next step super easy, and like I mentioned and alluded to earlier, you can actually fix some other problems along the way if you do it right.

That's why the next phase that we're going to be talking about is implementation. In the meantime, though, I have a quick about five-minute tools that you can get on and it's actually an assessment. It’s going to walk you through some high-level questions about your business and help you get an idea based on that Business Hierarchy of Needs, what large category of your business you need to be focusing in and narrowing down.

It'll be helpful because it's going to eliminate over half of the things that maybe you're thinking about or you feel like you're drawn to or gravitated to or you want to be working on. Go take that assessment. It'll take five minutes.

Another really great thing to do there is to have some of the other key managers and leaders in your company take that assessment too. When you look at it and you look at the different categories of your company, and how different leaders actually understand, reflect on it, and answer those questions, sometimes it's really interesting to compare side by side how we are answering those questions when we're talking about the different aspects of our company.

But it's going to give you a much more comprehensive view and it's going to help you narrow down in on what it is you should be focusing on and making a priority as you move forward in this process.

You can get access to that assessment at storybuilt.marketing/assessment and you can take that tool. It's going to give you some immediate results and some information about what each one of those levels of that Business Hierarchy of Needs are.

Always, if you have more questions, make sure you're reaching out to me, I'm always hanging out on LinkedIn. We always have a link for you to contact me in the show notes. But take this assessment, I think it's going to be really helpful as you think about “How could I use this growth tool in my business as a recurring process to help me simplify decision-making, use data, but not to get overwhelmed by that data, and focus on that one priority thing?”

Next week, we're going to be talking all about implementation. You will have done the investigation, you will have identified the priority thing, the thing that if you focus on might actually solve some of those other problems or completely eliminate them.

Implementation is critical at this point. Make sure that you are subscribed. Make sure you listen to the whole series and we will see you next week on The Contractor’s Daughter and we're going to get our hands dirty and roll up our sleeves and talk about implementation and what can really set you apart so that you're not going back in dealing with this over and over again.

We want it to be once and done. Once we implement, we want it to stick in our businesses. Make sure that you're subscribed and make sure you grab that assessment at storybuilt.marketing/assessment. Alright, we'll talk to you in a week and we're going to talk about implementation.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.