Many times, people describe successful business people as “excellent visionaries” or “skilled tacticians.”  Those are interesting descriptions because they allude to the way individuals see business.

 Visionaries

Visionaries, of course, are big picture thinkers.  They begin with blue skies and green fields, then overlay that scene with their grand ideas.  They have a knack for seeing the future before it comes into being.

These individuals, if they can turn their vivid pictures into reality, are highly successful.  Names like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs are perhaps some of the greatest visionaries in our century

Because of the mile high view that visionaries have on business, many visionaries aren’t able to convert their dreams to reality.  For every visionary success story, there are many more business failures.  Perhaps the reason for this is because visionaries tend to have a condition called hyperopia, more commonly known as far-sightedness.

 Tacticians

Tacticians almost naturally know how to get to the finish line in the fastest, cheapest, and most efficient way possible.  They can instinctively identify risk and devise plans on how to avoid them.  They set goals and they can be intensely focused on getting to the next objective.

Tacticians also can be highly successful people.  In fact, President Obama’s former Chief of Staff has been described as a “master tactician.” His role: is to manage people while navigating issues through highly sensitive political waters.

As with visionaries, there are many tacticians who aren’t nearly as successful as others.  This is because tacticians tend to be myopic, or near-sighted.  You know, the type who, to use a an old adage, “can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Is it possible that an individual can be both?  Can a person have perfect business “vision?” Someone who can think big, plot the best route to get there, and have the discipline to follow that route.  I believe the answer to that is yes, but only for a very small number of gifted people.  Out of (six) seven billion people, surely there must be some out of that sample!  I believe some of those people are in the list of people I mentioned above.

If only a small minority of these 20/20 vision business people, then what are we to do?  Fortunately, just as glasses help correct myopia and hyperopia, there are ways to adjust our business vision.

 Build a trusted team of advisors

When considering important business decisions, It’s always a good idea to get advice.  The advice given could provide direction and insight into situations that would expose you to less risk.

Proverbs 11:14 “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.

This verse provides good guidance When seeking advice by suggesting two principles for reducing risk (safety): multiplicity and ability.

 Multiplicity

Get more than one person’s advice.  Whether intentional or not, a person’s prior experience and your relationship to them will affect the advice their provide to you.  In addition, their predisposition towards strategic or tactical thinking will influence their thinking.  In any case, their advice may provide insight on particular aspects of what you are considering.  The more people you ask, the more aspects you may reveal.

 Ability

From whom you get that advice is perhaps a more important point to consider.  Don’t just ask a friend simply because they’re you’re friend.  Ask a counsellor, someone who can provide reliable, relevant insight on the matter you’re considering.  You wouldn’t necessarily want to ask a mechanic the best farming techniques, nor would you want to ask a surgeon about how to optimize your site for a search engine.  While they may have opinions, it is the ones who have enlightened opinions that you wish to seek.

 Take time to exercise your eyes

Anyone who has had to sit in front of a computer for hours knows how tiring it is to stare in one place for a long time.  Whether you’re focused on something far, or something near, it is always a good idea to look around and focus on other things.

Refocusing can help the visionaries from being blindsided by unforeseen challenges and keep the tacticians from being “stuck in the weeds.”  It can also help to get dreams aligned with reality and provide an opportunity to adjust tactics to adapt to changing environments.

It’s a worthwhile activity to get our “business eyes” checked to evaluate how we see business.  Whether we are visionaries or tacticians, it is important to be aware of our visual limitations and take actions to help correct our vision.

Small businesses seem to have a ridiculously high burn rate, quickly eating up any revenue that comes in.  Startup capital costs, coupled with ongoing expenses will strain budgets and cause headaches, to be sure.  Surely that’s what people mean by “growing pains” of business!  But, hey, no pain, no gain, right?  With good planning and execution, hopefully, the balance between expenses and revenues will quickly shift to a more favorable position.

So, how does that balance get shifted?  I know there really isn’t an easy answer to that.  Entire books, businesses, and academic programs have been created to address that very question!  Unfortunately, most of the solutions that they present cost money, and many times, lots of it.

The reality is that for most small businesses, including mine, money is a very limited resource!  What’s a small business to do?  Well, I believe the beginning of that answer can be found by remembering two principles:

Challenge Your Thinking

I opened this article by posing two questions:

1. How do I get more clients?
2. How am I going to pay for that?

I often find that to challenging someone’s thinking is as simple as changing the question.  The answers to questions are quite different when the questions are reframed.  Let’s apply that to our first question:

• How do clients choose my business?
  This changes the question by shifting the point of view to something more client-centric.  Instead of finding new ways to reach people, we’re begin finding ways to become more attractive to our people.  People who find your business attractive will be more likely to choose your business.  People who find your business attractive will also be more likely to tell others to choose your business.Of course, this idea is not new.  In fact, there is a big push in large companies today to “enhance the customer experience.”  And, of course, large companies put their much larger wallets behind this thinking.  This is where I belive the agility of small businesses can help.  Small business owners generally have more ideas than cash, and because of their organization’s size, those ideas are much cheaper to implement and much faster to deploy.  It’s a powerful thought, but as always, with much power comes much responsibility.  This brings us to the second question.

• How do I not pay for it?
  Perhaps the answer is as simple as not doing it! Sometimes what you think is worth investing in, isn’t the best place to spend your money, because, quite frankly, your potential clients just won’t care about it.A logo change, for a small business is a relatively small cost, and while we may care a lot about the deep symbolism in our new logo, unless we can get people to care enough to learn about it, maybe not doing it is the best decision when trying to gain more customers. However, if you’re trying to shift existing negative perceptions, maybe that’s a great thing to do, and well worth the cost, because it may increase your attractiveness to more people in the long run.The alternative is, of course, doing it differently.  Inc Magazine recently wrote an article titled, “How Lack of Capital Can Drive Innovation,” where the author gave an example of how a cash-strapped company found success by some creative thinking and using non-traditional selling methods.As an example from the photography world is a change in the way I process my photos.  This change has little to no cost, but If I begin leaning towards a particular color or change the way my black and white photos look, I can be sure that those changes will affect my attractiveness to potential clients.  It will attract some and repel some.These examples are powerful because the thought processes behind them force you to relieve the money pressure by exercising your creativity.  There are many ways to become more attractive to clients, and our job is to find the best approach, with the best results, at a reasonable cost.  To me, that’s an encouraging thought, because creativity is free!  I can afford free!

Creativity Before Capital

So, putting on that creative genius mindset that will save you some money, ask yourself:

• What simple changes can I make to make my product/service more appealing…
• in positioning
  Do I want to position myself as a price leader, a value leader, or a status leader?
• in quality
  Everybody wants better quality.  How do I improve on the quality of my products and services?  Do I need to do that now, or later?
• in appearance
  In the photography business, appearance is everything.  How do I present my products in a better light? Does my product exude beauty? When people think about my work or my business, how do they feel?  If they feel nothing, you’re not trying hard enough!
• What are the specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable steps that I need to take to
• make the improvement
  To improve, you need a plan to get you through to the end
• communicate the improvement
  …and once you get there, you need to figure out how to tell your potential clients that you’re the one!

In the end, the decision to change or to revert is up to the business owner.  It’s empowering, though, to know that making your business more attractive can be possible with more creativity and less cash.