Five Ways To Quickly Increase Your Business Understanding

Can you immediately translate your work to show measurable impact? With specifics, dollar amounts, efficiency gains, market share, customer metrics, meaningful data that matters, and can you share it in a concise manner?

If not try these five ideas:

1. Immerse yourself in the business metrics that your company or division reports on. Create a glossary for your team of metrics that matter to your CEO and leadership team.
2. Read your annual report, earnings report, S1 filing or quarterly financial updates. Ask your finance leader to check your understanding or to answer questions you have. 
3. For every single business and personal goal, extrapolate a financial impact. Connect your work to revenue, profit, market share and customer metrics that have a dollar sign. This exercise alone will help you attract the right attention when you are seeking to influence investment or prioritize decisions.
4. Watch CNBC’s Squawk Box each morning and take note of the global, industry and competitive news stories. Also pay attention to the executives interviewed and observe how they frame their soundbites and answers so that listeners can rapidly absorb their message. 
5. Go back to the floor and shadow every key function, including customer support, supply chain, sales, finance, operations, marketing and so forth, and identify where there are profit, revenue and efficiency gains. 

If you follow each of these five ideas, you will set the context for your work and be able to answer what I call the ‘so what?’ question, which is: “So what is the point of your work in business outcomes?” Master this and you will transform how your message is understood and acted upon. 

If you read this and thought this is just too obvious, then I can relate. But...Please share it with those you work with as it is not as commonly understood as you might assume. 

Last week we looked at how you can unlock your creative understanding and improve relationships with your creatively minded colleagues...Next week we explore how you increase your technical prowess. That will cover the trilingual elements that you need to master if you really want to make rapid growth happen in the right way. Or, if you are as impatient as I am - you can find out more in Chapter Three of Rapid Growth, Done Right.

Finally...did you see how Reddit won the Super Bowl? Simply. Brilliant. Marketing. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Look here. 

To your continuous rapid growth, 

Val

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