While in business, drifting away from your business goals can be very costly. Entrepreneurs sometimes stray from their vision due to fear of failure and sometimes end up lacking a strategic business advantage or direction.
Big picture thinking is how entrepreneurs look at problems, opportunities, and situations. Focusing on the big picture as an entrepreneur gives you a sense of purpose and creates a desire to improve and grow. Here are a few reasons why big picture thinking is crucial to the success of every business.
Recognizing the Link between Specific Projects and Broad Company Goals
Each project should fulfill the company’s mission, vision, and client expectations. Aligning your projects with your vision increases the project success rates. Projects aligned to strategy are 50 percent likely to finish on time and 45 percent likely to operate within budget.
When a project fails, it can be a source of frustration and financial waste. Apart from failing to align projects to the overall vision, projects can fail due to insufficient resources, poor risk control, poor executive sponsorship, and poor governance.
Linking specific projects and broad company goals is how well your projects support your strategic goals. It’s not a magic bullet, neither is it a net present value but what you use to make decisions and to maintain focus. You can achieve strategic alignment through project prioritization, resource allocation, and scheduling. Strategic alignment also involves implementing health checks at every governance meeting, ensuring executive engagement, and change management.
Recognizing Areas for Improvement
Focusing on the bigger picture helps you identify areas that need improvement. Knowing where to improve enables you to achieve your full potential and grow your capabilities to meet your overall goals. It also helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses in areas such as financial performance, policies, and procedures.
If you deal with lots of dial-in customers, you may consider switching to a virtual phone service to improve business efficiency. Virtual phone service allows you to work from anywhere with the flexibility to go on sales calls, meet vendors while still being connected to your business.
But how does a virtual phone service work? Virtual phone calls are made using a broadband internet connection and are powered by VoIP technology. The VoIP technology enables a multimedia communication system to manage calls as effectively as traditional phone lines.
Spot Business Opportunities
Going beyond immediate problems and focusing on company goals can help you spot business opportunities whenever they arise. Business opportunities can be initiators of business ideas that can turn a simple idea into a business venture when properly cultivated.
Identifying and exploiting opportunities are better ways to help your business survive, thrive, and remain competitive in the market. In the long run, opportunities lead to sustainable development that the entire economy can enjoy.
Listening to your potential customers can help you find opportunities to create more tailor-made products and overcome common objections. Other factors that can help you spot opportunities include; looking at what your competitors do, understanding industry trends and insights, and listening to your past clients.
Plan for Sustained Growth
Business grows based on one idea. However, expanding on an idea and maintaining profitability takes thoughtful strategies that can only be achieved through focusing on the bigger picture. Sustainability increases the bottom line, reduces business costs, improves reputation, and brings more new customers who value sustainability.
Companies are obsessed with growth hacking like never before. However, forcing growth in this manner can cause more harm than good. It’s essential to look for ways to achieve sustainable growth, and this can only be achieved through combining strategy and foresight.
Sustainable growth doesn’t have to take time to happen. Focusing on delivering value to secure present and future customers can give you instant growth. Other growth strategies include ensuring client satisfaction by delivering a better experience, innovating new products, and managing employee satisfaction.
Put the Big Picture into Play
The big picture helps you determine why you do what you do and what you need to focus on at all times. It’s all about perspectives and mindset and is the foundation of success for your business. The big picture will help you stay on course and drive growth even when things get tough. By focusing on the bigger picture, you’ll understand connections and collaborations between basic tasks and long-term goals.
