Look at your business for a moment.  How can you increase your viability?  Even in the largest companies, there are areas where we are “flying by the seat of our pants”, as my mother used to say. 

• Are you measuring what your competitors are measuring? What ratios are they looking at, that perhaps you are not? How do you stack up against your competition?  Is it time to acquire one of your competitors to grow your company without having to do more hiring?
• How closely are you watching the trends in your industry?  Are you so busy putting out fires every day that you don’t find the time to do the reading and learning you need to do to really stay on top of it?  You can imporve viability by being the thought leader in your industry.  Don’t just be on the cutting edge: be the curring edge.  What do you have to know to be the “guru” of your industry?
• What are you doing to increase your credit worthiness?  Even the most conservative of us want to have as much borrowing power as possible.  It allows us to jump on those rare opportunities that pop up quickly and are perfect.  Not being ready for a great opportunity lets your competitor strike while the iron is hot, while you sit and wait for answers. The question is, with whom do you need to be building or improving a relationship in order to maximize your available credit? Are you going beyond your traditional lenders and have some “hip pocket partners” who are in your sphere of influence and would support you? 
• What work is being done in-house that can be outsourced or done in the “cloud” ?  We referred to this in Part One.  What ideas can you see to streamline the critical path and get rid of bog-downs and redundancies.  Sometimes you are so close you can’t see them, so it’s a good idea to bring in a systems person.
• What are you doing to leverage your social capital? Are you stuck in a routine just seeing the same business colleagues and not expanding your sphere of influence in the business world?  News flash: Your competition is out there shaking hands with new people every week. 

Hopefully, these 5 questions will help you think about, and increase your viability.  Your marketing department has the company “out there” already, but you are still the leader and the viability of the company depends a lot on your strategic leadership.  Likely no one else can do what you can do, as well as you do it.  Delegate whatever you have to, to allow yourself time and energy to get out there, shake the right hands and get your thumb on the pulse of what’s happening on your mountain, and you will likely claim it as your own.

Tags: CEO tips, Cloud Computing, executive coaching, Influence, Leadership, profitability, social capital, Viability

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