Friday, May 14, 2010

Know What Happened To Know What's Happening

If you make a bad business decision, make sure you fully assess what happened and what went wrong. This will allow you to better understand and deal with the consequences. It will also help you avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

The same goes for making a good business decision. If you do something that produces productive results, make sure you fully assess what you did that worked. This will help you to see what exact you need to continue doing, and it'll help you realize growth in your thinking ability.

Too often, entrepreneurs are blindly making decisions and assuming what works and what doesn't work. As a result, they experience temporary success or no success at all.

Here's a great example: A business owner engages in several marketing efforts all at once - newspaper advertising, search engine advertising, and radio advertising. The campaign is extremely successful, but he doesn't properly dissect it to really determine where the customers came from and why they responded. He just assumes that it was the radio ad campaign that worked best. So, a few months later, he decides to launch another marketing campaign and allocate his entire budget to radio advertising. However, the campaign fails terribly. Obviously, he didn't fully understand what happened the first time - and so he has no idea how to recreate his success.

It's wiser to make business decisions one at a time, so that when the momentum shifts up or down, you'll know exactly what the cause was. You won't be guessing, and you won't be making false assumptions. Even more, you'll have a much clearer idea of what you next step should be.

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