Bowling a Strike to Excel in Business

As many know, when you bowl a strike you knock down all 10 pins with the bowling ball. When you bowl a strike in business, you are excelling in 10 key areas of a business. The 10 key areas that this post will focus on are:

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• Finance/Accounting: understanding and managing how you spend your business funds.
• Marketing/Branding: managing how people see and understand your business’ products or services.
• Communication: using different types of media to share the message of your business.
• Partnering/Joint Venture: connecting with other business owner to cross-market your services or products.
• Social Networking: interacting with potential and current clients along with business associate to build your online network.
• Online/offline presence management (reputation): tracking the information that is reported about you and your business. Ensuring that there is a positive message being communicated.
• Customer service: providing what your customer would need to feel comfortable with your services and/or products.
• Product/Service development: creating and management the products/services that your business is known for.
• Documenting processes: creating a standard way for handling business processes and managing the information through a document portal.
• Team building: encouraging the strengths of your team members so that they excel regardless if they are virtual or local.

As a business owner, focusing on these 10 key areas at all times may be difficult for you to do but I have found that surrounding yourself with a great support team can help you excel in each of these areas. Remember that you should apply yourself where you feel you are naturally strong and then outsource to a support team member or a business partner where you are weak.

Case in point, I love managing and developing web projects and bringing everything together in the final look for a website. My strong points are project management, programming, and functionality whereas my weak point is design (I can do this but my preference is to usually outsource complex projects). In outsourcing complex design projects, I not only free up my time but I am also able to redirect my efforts to the areas where I’m strong.

I want to hear what you have to say. Please feel free to share your own experience of excelling in each of these areas.