As incoming president-elect of my Rotary Club I’m realizing, again, how much a 120-person club is like a business. We have to watch costs, generate funds, put together teams, have leaders, etc. It takes a combination of vision and execution.
You can control expenses to save money and do so up to a point. At that point you start hurting your business because it takes investment to grow. That investment may be in marketing, people or equipment. However, if you market, buy equipment or hire indiscriminately you’ll run out of money and not be able to do much of anything.
Not having vision means that in a few years you’re in the same place you are now. Having a great vision but not executing may put you behind where you are now. As tempting as it is, I have to step back and not do everything I want to do (in my Rotary Club). I think I’m getting the hang of it. At our recent district conference a friend who will be his club’s president the same year as me told me he wanted to get working on a new project we had just heard about. I replied that it’s a good idea and I’ll mention to the appropriate committee chair to investigate. He told me, “You’re already acting like a president and delegating.”
That’s good news to me and I wish it were that easy to get business owners to delegate more. Especially when they are planning to exit. One of the things a buyer likes to see is a management team in place that gets things done without having the bottleneck be a dependency on the owner.