BEING INTENTIONAL WITH YOUR BUSINESS

Being Intentional with your Business 

I think we can all look back on times in our lives where we wonder “how did I get here?” What grouping of decisions (good or bad) led me to this exact situation? I know I have and typically for me, this question arises when I don’t necessarily love the place I’ve arrived at. And yet, only after I’ve arrived do I ask myself that retrospective question.  

It’s taken a few of those moments in my life, one of which was losing a business I worked tirelessly at for seven years, for the epiphany to set in… okay I guess the epiphany was also triggered by some heavy coaching, extensive deep dives into business and self-development material, and a lot of introspective thinking. But the epiphany came no less.  

I realized if you move along through life, in business and/or relationships, without acting intentionally, you leave the future to chance. You don’t have a guiding light to help you make necessary decisions that move you forward in a meaningful and purposeful direction. In fact, some of those decisions could move you backwards, sideways, or maybe someplace different entirely that you would not have outright picked if you had actually taken a minute and thought about the end goal.  

Setting clear intentions about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there can help you actually get to where you want to go. You may think, oh, I want to grow my solopreneur business into a team of ten and be the “Apple” in the small business segment of your industry. Well, that’s great and all but if you don’t have a clear roadmap of what that looks like and how you’re actually going to achieve it. Good luck.  

Looking at the business I decided to close after a long, tiresome seven years, I can see where this happened. In my head, we were easily growing from a $1M business to a $10M business in just a few short years. And yes, we’d occasionally map out a budget, and we’d update our cashflow and see that we weren’t where we wanted to be, but that was it. There was no plan, no pivot, no critical analysis that cued a change. I just assumed that it was bad luck, bad timing, or that it would get better the next time around. And guess what? It didn’t.  

In my mind, I just thought one day we’d magically achieve our goals. There was just one problem: there was no intention going into our day-to-day actions that pointed us towards that goal. I think this scenario can be especially true in small 1-3 people companies. You think “there aren’t that many of us, we don’t need a mission, a vision, core values, a weekly meeting…” the list goes on. But when you think about a $10M business or a team of 10, you would definitely think of these things being in place, right? So why wait? Why wait until they "maybe" fit with the “norm” of where you are? Instead, think about putting those intentional tools into place now, before you need them to help set the intention for the future.  

Being intentional with your time, with your business, and with your team can help to ensure that you’re steering the right course. That you get to where you intended to go. So how do we be intentional in these areas?  

It may feel a little funny starting out, to be honest. I feel this way when being intentional with setting goals in my personal life – it’s a little awkward. But the more you do it, the more habitual it becomes and the less awkward it will start to feel. And the things you start to become intentional about start to carry more weight and validity. They start to become habits. 

The best example of this I have to share is when we started to become intentional about Accounting Therapy’s company culture. We were in hiring/growth mode (still are), and we wanted to get very clear about who we were as a company. For those of you who are familiar with our company and have been for quite some time, you may not have noticed a shift, which is good. We, thankfully, had a great culture to start with. Alexis, the company’s CEO, had done an excellent job channeling her bright, sunshine-y, tie-dye-centric, down-to-earth, happy attitude into Accounting Therapy’s culture. Our small team of 4 could feel it and most importantly our clients could feel it. But how could we continue to replicate it?  

We actually went through a short phase of hiring (and interviewing and almost hiring again) people who did not fit our company culture. They were super nice people and all, but they ultimately did not fit with the culture of our team. And at the time, we didn’t have the language to say why they didn’t fit our team. AKA, we weren’t being intentional with our culture because there was nothing to circle it back to, just Alexis and her vision. 

So, we got intentional.  

We started brainstorming core values, a mission, vision, and purpose. We even were intentional about the language used, making sure it sounded like something we’d say. And yes, it totally felt awkward at the time. Like these are just silly things that are living on paper for a team of four. We don’t need this right now. We need sales! We need to work! We need all the other million things on our to-do list checked off. Why are we wasting time on this stuff that just lives on a webpage?  

But I think there in-lies the difference between just doing something and doing something with intention. We weren’t just doing these things because someone said we needed them. We were doing them because we wanted them in place while we grew. We wanted them to act as that guiding light that we could fall back on during a challenging decision and say, does this align with our mission? Does this align with our purpose? Does this person align with our core values?  

We gave the company culture intention, instead of just letting it happen. 

And fast forward three years, our company culture is now a habit. Our team knows where we are headed, they know the core values by heart, they exercise our culture in all that they do. We even go as far as to incorporate our core values as part of our team’s annual reviews. But had we not done this initially as a team of four and started itbefore we actually needed it, we may have ended up with a group of eight humans who didn’t fit the culture because we had no guideline as to what kind of person (besides skilled & smart) we were hiring. 

I think a great first step to being more intentional is to step back and assess, which if you haven’t read our blog on Clarity Breaks yet, I encourage you to do so. Taking a Clarity Break, or simply stepping back to assess, gives you a chance to check in with yourself and reflect on where you are, where you’re headed, and ask yourself, is that where I am intentionally trying to go? One of the biggest challenges of the Clarity Break is allowing yourself the time to take one and then taking action with the realizations that they yield. And a lot of times, that taking action part is the most uncomfortable of all because it requires you to make a change to how you’re currently doing something. 

But that intentional action is what can change the course. It can be the catalyst to move you intentionally toward that long term goal, instead of just continuing to make the same decisions that have kept you from achieving it.  

So, as you move forward through the rest of your week, your month, your quarter, we challenge you to start to make your decisions with an intentional lens of “does this support the end-goal.” Strive to start shifting the mindset to letting the goals guide how and what you do today vs. letting the needs and wants of today decide for you.  

And that, my friends, is where we will leave you. A bit more philosophical today, but hopefully a message we can all benefit from hearing! What will you be intentional about today?  

Until next time!