Making choices is the stock in trade of any manager, so following are a few questions you can reasonably ask yourself that will force you to consider some of the basic choices every business needs to ask itself.

  1. Which markets and products are we focused on?
  2. What is it that will motivate customers in that market to buy our products?
  3. What are the things we need to be good at to deliver “2” over the long term, and how do we improve our current performance on those things?
  4.  Pretty simple really, but how often are you doing something not connected in any way to the answers to any of these questions?

    Business is simple, produce something and sell it at greater than your cost, and you will make a profit, the complication is when you add people who do not buy into the answers to the three questions to the mix.