David A. Fields Consulting Group You’ve set goals, determined strategy and identified initiatives to build a more successful consulting firm. Are you actually propelling your initiatives powerfully enough to achieve your goals?
Any outsider can tell you in a few moments how committed and focused you are and how rapidly your consulting firm will make progress by looking for where you RIDE.
RIDE = Relentless Intentional Daily Effort
Research on neurological adaptation and skill mastery supports what you’ve known all along:
Champions in any field—be it sports, medicine, music, cookie baking or any other profession, achieve their greatness thanks to persistent, directed hard work. Usually, hard work every day.
Therefore, to gauge whether you and your consulting firm are on a RIDE in the fast lane to success on your various high-priority initiatives, ask three questions:
- What concrete action did you take yesterday specifically to advance the initiative?
- What concrete action did you take/are you taking today specifically to advance the initiative?
- What concrete action do you have planned for tomorrow specifically to advance the initiative?
If you can’t point to something you did yesterday, something you’re doing today, and your specific plan for tomorrow, then you’re not truly focused on rapid progress.
Objections:
My consulting firm’s focus is to improve in areas that don’t occur frequently, such as monthly forecasting or conducting Context Discussions. Does RIDE still apply?
Even low-frequency events require high-frequency practice. For example, orchestras and sports teams practice every day, despite infrequent performances.
Set up scenarios, role plays, case studies, historical reviews, and other mechanisms to practice and advance your firm’s results.
It’s not realistic to work on our initiatives every day. We’re busy delivering projects.
Whether or not you commit to Relentless, Intentional Daily Effort is a choice.
Picture a consulting firm just like yours that is also tackling the same initiatives. The only difference is the other firm is committed to RIDE. Now, imagine the change in each firm’s performance and results at the end of a month, six months, and a year.
If that comparison doesn’t rev your engine to RIDE, then your initiative isn’t really a priority. Set it aside.
Relentless, Intentional Daily Effort applies to virtually every aspect of your consulting firm’s success: upgrading skill sets, refining processes, turbocharging marketing, accelerating business development, streamlining delivery, and enhancing offerings, among others.
Of course, your consulting firm’s resources, energy and attention are finite. Spreading your efforts thinly across many initiatives may led to broad-based progress; however, your most meaningful goals will cruise to the finish line more slowly.
The RIDE strategy forces you to choose.
Highlight the one initiative so important to your consulting firm’s success that you’re willing to sideline other initiatives to make your chosen initiative move faster. That’s the initiative you need to advance every day.
Have you found Relentless, Intentional Daily Effort fuels your progress, or does a different route to success work better for you?
Text and images are © 2024 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.
100 percent – my team and I have been implementing RIDE (we didn’t know about this pithy and cool acronym) since the beginning of the year and it’s yielding RESULTS
That’s outstanding, Agnes! Only one month in and the strategy is already bearing fruit. Well done!
Good on you for for implementing this strategy, and thank you for sharing the impact with me and other readers, Agnes.
I have been using a transition plan for SPOT – Strategy, Process, Organization and Technology. There are many elements to each of these four main pillars.
I use a step-by-step plan to go from current environment to world class.
I seek to first simplify, streamline and standardize current environment.
Then optimize what we’re doing so that we can expand into new domains and create a competitive advantage.
As long as I’m moving one or more of my SPOT objectives forward, I feel good.
Too much firefighting is not good.
Of course, some things work better than others. Then I use the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop to adapt to what I’ve learned.
SPOT-RIDE-OODA (or something like that).
The good news is that we can start today; the bad news is that we’re never finished.
The approaches you’re using sound very complimentary with RIDE, Jay. Action every day without any sort of effort or direction is a good way to spin in circles (and drill a hole). On the flip side, a strategy, process, observation, etc. etc. without daily action is just an idea. A good plan, combined with daily activity will create rapid progress. That’s why the “Intentional” in RIDE is so important.
Thank you for sharing your approach and for highlighting the need for well-directed intentionality, Jay!
Ahhh! David, it’s like you knew exactly where I feel guilty 🙂 I hadn’t known the RIDE acronym previously, and it’s a perfect notion for drawing attention back to the gap that grows between what I said we should be building for the long-term and what we actually focus on day in and day out. Thank you for delivering another extremely useful insight with your usual humor and conciseness.
For the record, Richard, we don’t encourage daily practice of guilt! You hit the nail on the head, though: the gap between our intentions and our daily effort is missed goals. Fortunately, you’re in a perfect position to take corrective action!
I appreciate your chiming in on the conversation, Richard.