Are You Sliced Bread? 3 Questions To Ask To Make Your Business Exceptional

In business today, we want to be the best things for our clients since sliced bread.  In an increasingly busy marketplace where there are too many choices and not enough time, how do you make sure that you are exceptional and that you are the one chosen.  There are 3 questions that you can start the conversation with to unlock your exceptional activities and structure your business so that you can focus on those exceptional areas.

Before I get into those questions, first think for a minute about the activities that you do on a day to day basis.  You will have a wide range of things that you do ranging from things that you suck at doing and hate to things that you just knock out of the park because you are so damn good at them.

Finding what those activities are that you are exceptional at can be difficult.  In the book Unique Ability they make the distinction between things that you are very good at and things that you are exceptional at.  The reason they make this distinction is that normally we would think of activities that we are very good at as a good thing.  Unique Ability argues that those activities are deceptive and actually keep is from doing the things that we really should be doing.

Seth Godin talked about that a few years ago in one of my favorite Ted talks.   The talk was on standing out.

In the talk, Seth brought up the fact that there are many things clamoring for attention and that we need to be remarkable now more than ever before.

This means doing things that allow us to create the most impact on society. Doing things that we are very good at is not enough.

So to help you dial this in, here are three initial questions you can ask yourself to help you dial in the activities that are great at and also enable you to spend time on the things that you are exceptional at.

Who can you hire? There are many activities in our lives that we insist on doing even though someone else can do them much better than we can. We see this with business owners who try and set up their own website, do their own bookkeeping, etc. We insist on doing these things even though not only does it take us more time, we are also not nearly as good at it. Hiring people to do things in your business gives you the time to focus on the things that you are exceptional at.

Where can my operation be systematized? Look at your business right now. What activities are you doing that you could eliminate your involvement with technology. Where can you create processes to shorten the amount if time spent on certain activities. Again, the idea here is to get out of the mundane activities or at least shorten the amount of time spent on them. Business owners are notorious for ignoring this aspect of their business.

Where am I spending my time on a daily basis? If you read the book Unique Ability or go through a productivity training, you will likely go through an activity inventory on your day. An activity inventory is a great way to look back and see how you spend your days. You can also use an inventory to start thinking about what activities really give you the most energy and excitement as well.

When it comes to being productive, doing the activities that we are best at gives us the opportunity to have the most impact on society with the least amount of effort.

What has helped you focus on the things that you are exceptional at? What tools have helped you discover these activities?