I am pleased to bring you another of Scott Hallman's TUESDAY PROFIT TIPS™ and this week Scott focuses on helping you to systematically identify your best opportunities for increased profit.
After a brief break, I am back to share the latest Tuesday Profit Tip™.
If you are like me, you may use the end of the year to reflect on your business and set some goals for the coming year. And since you are obviously a "learning" oriented person, you have no shortage of "good ideas". If fact, the list is probably overwhelming.
So how do you get your arms around all of these "good ideas" and organize them so that you are working on your most important ideas first, and at the same time not lose track of the ones you really want to get to sometime this year?
Tons of Great Ideas, But Where to Start?
Well, I created a workshop called the Hierarchy of Opportunities™ to achieve just that. And at several 2, 3, and 4 day seminars, I have guided participants through this process to help them prioritize all the great ideas they just digested in 30-40 jammed packed hours.
In summary, you rank your opportunities (projects) A, B, C and then prioritize the "A's",1, 2, 3 etc., using you own set of criteria (i.e. Cost to implement, risk etc.).
But How Can I Immediately Recall My Best Ideas?
As I created my Hierarchy list, it got me thinking about how I could organize these opportunities to ensure that we stayed on track and focused on the things that we had deemed as priorities, as well as realistically implementable. Plus, I did not want to forget about several ideas that I just had no time to get to in the near future. This led me to create this simple but incredibly powerful tool, The ProfitMap™.
The ProfitMap™ is a graphic display of your business opportunities - all on one single page. Personally I like to create one for each of the three primary business areas.
- Maximizing the Transactional Value of Every Customer/Client/Patient
- Developing a SYSTEMATIC New Client Acquisition Process
- Management - Mastering Implementation & Execution
To create your ProfitMap, you simply make a circle on the center of a page and then draw a branch for each "opportunity" off the circle. I use a MindMap by www.mindjet.com to create my maps.
Click here to see a simple sample of a ProfitMap Download Profit_Map.pdf.
Then you make a few branches off each of these primary branches (like a tree) to capture any keys thoughts about that opportunity. And then you label the priority i.e. A-1. I like to put the expected profit impact there as well.
So create your ProfitMap now and you'll never lose your great ideas again!
To your Success,
Scott
If you are a member of the Small Business Growth Club then you can listen, and participate in the entire workshop of ProfitMaping, complete with examples from real companies like yours.
It's ALL about implementation™! So focus on effectively implementing this procedure this week and watch your performance improve.
© 2008 Business Growth Dynamics, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Thanks Scott.
This is a great idea and I am a big fan of mindmaps.
Anything that helps you to record great ideas (and remember they can come from you, copying or adapting your competitors ideas and from other industries) is greatly appreciated.
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