Does your business have you "Stuck in the Weeds" or confined to Jail?

Welcome to Back9’s Caddie Corner and Golf Idioms for Business, where we love idioms, especially golf idioms. My name is Al Marquiss I am a Vistage Chair and your Business Caddie from Back9 Consulting. 

Beating around the bush: Today's golf idiom is “Jail”.  In golf being in jail is where a golf ball usually lies after a hacker hits it, although even the best of us can find our golf ball in Jail, a place from which escape is nearly impossible. Deep rough, in a bush, trees/woods, buried lies, “stuck in the weeds”, and other unpleasant places represent Jail for a golf ball.

So, how do we get out of Jail? Well, there is rarely a “Get out of jail free card”. If you’re playing golf, I recommend taking your medicine (take your penalty stroke/s) and pick up your ball to get yourself out of jail and back to the wide-open, otherwise the Golf Gods might just throw the book at you. 

If you find yourself in jail in your business, well you’re not alone. Not by a long shot. Again, even the best of us can feel like we are in jail where escape seems impossible. Often we hear Vistage member candidates saying “I don’t have time, I’m burning the candle at both ends” “I’m completely swamped” and worse, “I am so tired of being stuck in the weeds”. Often micro and small business owners feel they don’t really own a business, they own a job where they have to work major overtime and sometimes, they’re not even getting paid for it. Personal time is almost non-existent. No Bueno (see my article posted January 2, 2021 “6-steps to begin planning for 2021 and Living Your Best Life”). 

So, what do you do if you are stuck in business jail? If you can relate to the business side of this coin let’s get a little serious and get the ball rolling to the cup for you. As a Vistage Chair, I work with high-performing Business Owners and CEOs who join Vistage to connect with their peers to become better leaders and accelerate their company’s growth.  For more than 60 years, and working with more than 100,000 CEOs over that time, our entire business focus has been studying CEO performance. We have clearly identified that the highest performing CEOs - those who are consistently growing faster than their peers—are doing things differently than the rest.

Three things separate them:

1.      They step away from their day-to-day duties regularly to think about and focus and work ON their business, rather than IN their business. They get out of the weeds so they can focus on strategy. We’ve found that once per month is optimal.

2.      They connect with other leaders in like roles and share learnings to help each other make important, more informed decisions. They become better decision-makers and are more confident in the decisions they make.

3.      They are constantly looking for outside perspectives for new and innovative ideas to bring into their businesses.

At Vistage, we help Business Owners and CEOs do these three things, and we know it works because we compared the growth of our member companies to that of similarly sized companies through D&B and our member companies grew, on average, 2.2x faster. Even more telling, during the last great recession, the average D&B company shrunk by over 9% and Vistage member companies grew by almost 6%. 

So, here's your Call to Action: Check out my "Explainer Video" (1 minute 41 seconds) in my Linkedin “Featured” section and if you’re ready to get the show on the road and stay ahead of the curve, send me a message or email me at al@back9.biz or al.marquiss@vistagechair.com.

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