Schedule Your Business Emergencies

A major issue for most business owners is the ‘fire’ or emergency. This is a disruption in the normal routine or business process.

Unfortunately, many businesses are plagued by consistent fires or emergencies. The entrepreneur or the management team is so busy working on these urgent fires they are unable to focus on the important aspects of the business. Most business people are not even aware there is a difference between things that are urgent and things that are important.

I once heard a phrase describing this, “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”. It illustrates the idea of the frantic urgent problem someone is trying to resolve that overshadows the important problems that are going unresolved.

As a business leader or as an entrepreneur, it is important to take a deep breath, recognize, and disce
that many of the emergencies that we feverishly attend to will have no meaningful impact on the long-term success of our business. I am not saying that we should not attend to our urgent business problems; I am simply suggesting that of all the problems that are occurring at any given time, it becomes important to assign priorities. It is critical to be able to determine which problem, if solved, has a longer-term effect on business improvement. When you begin to adopt a longer-range perspective on your business, you begin to better define priorities for yourself and your business.

If you are an employee of a business and the leadership team has not given you priorities, then you get to determine priorities that are best for the business. If you are the business owner, then you get to determine those priorities and communicate them to everybody else in that business. Wherever you are in the business, it is your responsibility to recognize that your job is to provide long-range context for all the emergencies. You do not have to run around and solve every problem today. Just because you have sustained emergencies does not mean that the end of the world coming. If you and the business are around for the long-term, these issues can and will be solved. A calm disposition vastly improves your ability to bring long term solutions to the problems that you have.

It is important to cultivate the ability to have some long-range perspective, and recognize that everything will be okay; even though the sky is falling, the trees are burning and everything is going wrong. Your perspective and ability to breathe and focus on the business is what will bring the calm. You add no value if you transfer and perpetuate chaos, and that’s a huge lesson that we can learn as business owners.