I'm Busy

A relative always answers the same when asked how he’s doing -  “I’m busy.” Sound familiar - it is a theme I am hearing today from many small and mid-sized business CEOs. I had lunch recently with Mary, a CEO of a professional service firm serving senior executives at large firms often with extremely tight deadlines. During our lunch meeting, she took a phone call related to a technology issue and then immediately sent an email to a colleague related to the issue. Of course, Mary apologized for the interruption in our conversation which was talking about valuation growth (my favorite topic with CEOs). Mary then went on to complain about what a time suck it was and couldn’t the firm’s outsourced IT provider just take care of it? I asked of all things on her plate, how this particular issue made it to the top. Mary agreed that this was not strategic and did nothing to create long-term value for her firm but it had to get done – it was urgent. I find that Mary is not alone in taking care of the daily “urgent” operations of running a business. In fact, Richard another NY area CEO who serves hundreds of small businesses, showed me his to-do list in a notepad which had close to 50 “urgent” items on it. Richard had no idea which one to tackle first and which ones to ignore. He started to rattle off the list to me and both of us just started to laugh. Any CEO can continually fill their day with daily “urgent” issues, which in the long term, will have little impact on enhancing the value of their business, but it will definitely keep them busy. Perhaps “I’m busy” is not the best way to grow the value of your business?

This is my inaugural blog for The New York Enterprise Report which is intended to give New York area CEOs and their employees my thoughts on what small and mid-sized business CEOs are doing or not doing to grow the value of their business.