Are You in the Big Circle?

“You can’t save time. You can only spend it, but you can spend it wise­ly or fool­ish­ly.” — Ben­jamin Hoff, Author, The Tao of Pooh

Think about the adage ​“pen­ny wise and pound fool­ish”. That’s when we get so excit­ed about chas­ing lit­tle costs that we for­get about the big opportunities.

Brent Par­ent, a great CEO I’ve had the plea­sure of work­ing with in the US, always talks about ​“the big cir­cle and the lit­tle cir­cle” and would ask some­one on his team, ​“Are you in the big cir­cle or in the lit­tle circle?”.

Focus on Opportunities

Big cir­cles are oppor­tu­ni­ty and growth. This is where you should spend 95% of your time — doing some­thing that adds val­ue for a cus­tomer, cre­ates a bet­ter rela­tion­ship, and/​or more busi­ness. A bet­ter rela­tion­ship always leads to more business.

Lit­tle cir­cles are problems

This is where you focus 5% of your time.

Brent’s com­pa­ny was incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful with this approach. They were able to focus on oppor­tu­ni­ties. They were obses­sive­ly focused on growth and cre­at­ing cus­tomer val­ue. Being sol­id and good while grow­ing — and not dis­tract­ed by the lit­tle cir­cle of prob­lems, or try­ing to be per­fect on effi­cien­cy or costs.

(But cost can also be in a big cir­cle – such as nego­ti­at­ing a big con­tract and stick­ing to the prop­er ratios of your SG&A, or even on your gross margin.)

This is about being care­ful that you’re not spend­ing $1000 of time to solve a $20 prob­lem or $10,000 of time to solve a $1000 prob­lem. There are lots of $1000 prob­lems that should­n’t be solved.

The Chal­lenge

• For you and your team: are you in the big cir­cle of oppor­tu­ni­ty or stuck in lit­tle cir­cle problems?
• Where are you spend­ing $1,000 of orga­ni­za­tion­al effort to save $100 or $500? Espe­cial­ly if it’s a one-time deal, it does­n’t make a lot of sense.

For more about this, lis­ten to Episode 76 of The Growth Whisperers.