Why The Fourth Quarter is Really the Launching Pad for Next Year’s Opportunities
By Andrew Levine − October 21, 2009
At The Opportunity Show we’re all about reframing the way you see the important components of your business world. The fourth quarter of any business cycle is a perfect platform to see how changing the way you think about challenges and altering what you focus on can reveal opportunities that are there for you every day.
Spend More Time in the Second Quadrant
Being productive with the way your business uses time is a critical component of your operations. The work of master business consultant and best selling author, Stephen Covey, presents an opportunity to ramp up where a business spends its time. Covey breaks Time up into four quadrants:
1- those things that are urgent and important
2- those activities that are important but not urgent
3- those things that are urgent but not important
4- those things that are neither urgent nor important
To maximize your productivity, the two quadrants where you want to spend most of your time are Quadrants 1 & 2. In those two quadrants, productivity is enhanced by working on activities that have great importance to your business. But because the pressures of operating our businesses often lead us to spend more time in putting out fires and living in Quadrants 1 and 3- urgent and important (think that next advertising deadline), or urgent and not important (think getting lost in email responses)- we can neglect to focus on areas that are extremely important to our company’s growth yet are not urgent. What if you used the last quarter of the year to emphasize quadrant 2 activities like strategic planning, with a careful analysis and review of the year’s successes and disappointments? Or, how about focusing on research and development and training, to stay ahead of your businesses upcoming needs? Have the discipline to know that time spent in this quadrant will be well rewarded in the months and years to follow.
Find New Ways to Reward Your Most Valuable Resource- Your Employees
Whether the recession is technically over or not, most businesses continue to strive to keep their costs as low as possible in these uncertain times. Bonuses and raises have both been affected and in many cases there is no alternative but to cut back on things like contributions to 401K plans, and even holiday parties. How then can businesses continue to reward their most productive employees? Listen harder and think longer about what make your employees unique. As Allen Schoer, CEO of TAI Resources recently wrote in The Huffington Post, in an article entitled “Are All Bosses Delusional,”
“Find out their values and principles. Ask how they’re doing in these tough times, and what they need from you. Encourage them to reconnect with why they’re working for you and what they bring to the business. Ask them about their deeper motivations. Find out what they want to create and the impact they’d like to have”. Read more.
And when it comes to gift giving, when you really know what’s important to your employees, you can give gifts that make your most valuable people feel truly seen and appreciated. Don’t have the time to shop for that very personal gift? Don’t let that stop you. Leverage your to-do list by using a personal shopping service like Your Shopper.
Ring Out Every Last Tax Break You Can
Making smart fiscal decisions in 2009 is more important than ever. Use the remaining months of the year to make sure your bookkeeping is in good shape and set up a strategic meeting or phone call with your accountant designed to take a long hard strategic look at how to maximize your tax position for both the current and upcoming year and to assess the fiscal health of your company. For a detailed article on what you can do to get ready for end of the year, visit this link.
Remember, Opportunity is always there for you, but you have to know how to refocus your field of vision so that what’s there all the time can become obvious. Instead of panicking about how fast the year is flying by and looking at your ever growing to-do list, step back and reframe the way you think about the fourth quarter. You just may find that there are key activities, performed in these remaining months of 2009, that have the power to serve as the launching pad for next year’s successes.
