Article by ImpactHub Bucharest
How do you achieve balance between the things that drive you in building your business (your creativity, your passion, your long-term vision) and the practical aspects of running your venture (key performance indicators, supplier management, finances)?
This may seem like a complicated thing to do – but sometimes, in times of crisis and anxiety, both are needed in order to keep your business alive. The most recent example is the Covid-19 pandemic, that fundamentally challenged every single aspect of our lives, business included.
In building stronger projects and business or in rebuilding them, you need to pay attention to a series of concepts that help you navigate through good and bad times with a healthy mindset and enough resources to support you and your team. We have framed them as entrepreneurial wellbeing, digital wellbeing and creativity.
They are all interconnected and very strongly so – when one of them is overlooked, the other two are also affected and most times they cannot support that specific deficiency.
But where do you start? Well, there are many ways to ensure that, however whichever you choose, you must first have clarity.
Why is clarity important?
Well, simply put, because it helps you get closer to your objective, small step by small step.
Finding the right direction in entrepreneurship is sometimes a very complicated process – and that is mostly because you always have at hand a multitude of options and scenarios. The process gets even more complicated in times of crisis. And being able to take action instead of freezing is vital. In other words, clarity helps your business or project become resilient – and, if need be, agile. It can also help increase its impact and it acts as a compass when you have to make tough decisions.
What does clarity actually entail?
Sometimes, clarity can be mistaken for a decision. Other times, it may look like an information or an answer, or maybe like a new idea or a solution. Obviously, they all have a contribution to reaching clarity, but what it actually means is something significantly simpler, but tougher to achieve: clarity is ”I know what to do next”.
Here are some things that can help you to achieve clarity:
- Business Model Canvas is probably the best known instrument you can use for this purpose. The best way to use it is to test and envision multiple scenarios.
- Five Bold Steps is a tool used to define a business or a project’s vision, no matter the stage it’s in. You can use it just as well if you’re just starting your project or if you are an established business that’s looking to reprioritize its activities.
- Incubation or acceleration programs for entrepreneurs – Most programs are actually built around clarity – through testing theories, challenging them in your teams and working with experts and mentors.
- Strategic Learning – the things you must learn are not only inspirational, but also very educational and actionable. They can be about the industry you’re in or about business sustainability overall – the bottom line is that they will allow you discover new opportunities and hacks to scale or improve what you deliver, even when you’d least expect it.
- Mentorship – The purpose of a mentor is to accelerate your learning process and get you more quickly to answers that would have otherwise taken a lot more time to reach. Usually, mentors come from the same (or a similar) industry as the mentees.
All these – and many more – are subjects we’ll be tackling during the Circle program. Regardless of the type of project or business you are a part of, the three components we mentioned earlier are crucial to all the dimensions of what you do:
- Entrepreneurial wellbeing will help you keep your focus on yourself, your team and the impact you produce while you building a lasting venture
- Digital wellbeing will help you have a healthier relationship to all things digital, while taking advantage of the tools and platforms that are most suited for what you do, keeping up with a fast-changing world
- Creativity will help you innovate, build bridges between communities and create thriving partnerships
We can’t wait to get started!
