Playing Hookey Can Help- How To Increase Profits and Reduce
Overwhelm
Playing Hookey Can Help! A Surprising Secret To Small
Business Success Would you like to increase your chances of
business success by 350%? The good news is that you can! Before
you start working harder or learning the latest business
theories so you can work smarter, try something different. You
can increase your chances of success by as much as 350% by being
more innovative and uncovering dramatically different ways to
look at your business and develop your product or service.
(***footnote #1)
This is good news.
Even better news is that one highly effective way to increase
your innovation ability is by playing hooky from your normal
business activities and learning how to have a Visioning Day.
A Visioning Day is a time you set aside to remove yourself from
your normal work and home life and expand your personal
experiences and your thinking. It is a time where you
specifically do not try to answer the challenges you face in
building a great business and instead focus solely on developing
your ability to listen and engage and innovate.
The best Visioning Days are those where you stretch yourself and
do something entirely new and different. Taking the time to get
new perspective and input, while giving up conscious focus on
your business projects, allows your creative mind the input and
uninterrupted time necessary to generate new and innovative
solutions.
Visioning days can help all business people at all stages of
business. Sometimes they are even the impetus for starting a
successful business.
When Frank, a franchise product manager for a major food chain,
was layed off, he did not know what his next step would be. His
wife, a day spa buff, suggested he take a Visioning Day at a
local spa.
Although Frank liked the relaxing services at the spa, he was
bothered by the lack of business organization and consistent
service. The experience got him thinking and he discovered a
need within the salon and day spa industry for the kind of
pre-formulated manuals and systems he was familar with from
worked in franchising.
What Frank was able to create was dramatically different for
that industry: a computer program and set of manuals that
capitalized on the best franchising had to offer, while still
allowing individual business owners to remain independent and
unique in their vision.
Although the content was not particularly different from the
franchising manuals that exist in other industries, marketing it
to an emerging industry that had little exposure to the ideas
was different--different enough to make Frank a wealthy business
man in a short period of time.
Visioning Days work for small scale operations that are
struggling as well as they work for new ventures. Sometimes the
worse a situation looks, and the less time and energy you feel
you have to spare for a Visioning Day, the more you need one.
A few years ago, Edna, a dog breeder and owner of a successful
boarding kennel, found herself in a difficult position. Her love
of people and of animals had long since been buried under a
mountain of work and details to manage.
Work that was once a joy had become tedious, a venture that
originally provided a sense of freedom had turned into a burden
and a trap. Her at home business had turned into an at home
monster that was eating away her freedom and her enthusiasm.
To make matters worse, business was no longer booming, and in
fact, profits and opportunities were starting to decline.
Serious financial hardship loomed on the horizon and everything
Edna was doing to reenergize sales and save her business was
failing. The harder she worked to solve the problem, the worse
things seemed to get.
What Edna didn