Address this question to better position your company for a euphoric future exit
Steve Jobs was once asked what he was most proud of doing at Apple. His answer was simply, “I’m most proud of what we didn’t do.”
It’s easy to do things simply because they’ve always been done. A company can fall into an operating comfort zone. But in order to have resources directed toward new company worth creating activities, your team might have to stop doing certain things either temporarily or even permanently. Every company has limited resources so it’s a leaders’ job to determine how best to deploy and even redeploy the resources – are your resources being deployed optimally?
Here are some questions to discuss with your leadership team:
- Do we have any processes today that we designed years ago and perhaps are no longer optimally designed or performed? If we redesigned the process today, would we do it the same way?
- Do we monitor our business costs by major categories to help determine priorities for continuous improvement opportunities?
- Are we investing labor time or investments into an area where we lack key performance metrics to monitor the effective deployment of these resources? In other words, where we spend lots of money, are we effective at monitoring the value what we are deriving from the investments?
- For projects we are currently working on, how are we monitoring whether they are making progress versus letting them linger and draining our resources?
- For development of new products or services, do we have an effective process for putting these projects through stage gates to have Go/No Go decision points along the development process to avoid some products/services from consuming too many resources before determining they don’t further warrant receiving this investment of time, labor and focus?
Don’t assume that your labor, investments and focus are being deployed optimally. Regularly discuss with your leadership team if resources should be redeployed toward activities that will help you grow your company worth. Excite your future acquirer by building a business that is just as good at stopping to do things as it is at doing them.
