Imagine this scenario: Like 9.5% of the American population, you are unemployed.

You have been looking for work for the past 7 months, but there is nothing out there.  You have been told that you are under-qualified for some positions and over-qualified for the rest.  Seven months of networking and interviews and hustling, and still no dice.

Then one day, you wake up and you are suddenly the most popular, personable, funny, charismatic person on the face of the Earth.

You don’t know how it happened, but you can inexplicably tell jokes like a seasoned stand-up comedian, and you have a clever comeback for every conversation.  As your reputation spreads, you are asked to attend parties and meetings and business functions and get-togethers.  You are invited to weddings and conferences to give speeches.  You’re a publicity phenomenon.

At first, you love the attention and you accept every invitation you are offered.  And why wouldn’t you?  You’ve got nothing else going on.  You get to meet new people every day (some famous, some not), and you are wined and dined every night.  Sure, some of your new acquaintances aren’t people you would normally hang out with, but that’s the price you are willing to pay to see and do things that most others only dream of.  ”Carpe diem!”… “To infinity and beyond!”

But there’s a problem.

Soon, your schedule becomes impossible to manage.  Opportunities of all types keep coming through the door but you physically can’t keep up.  Anything short of cloning yourself means you have to turn people away; you will have to say “no”.

The bigger issue is that you have cultivated relationships with people along the way, and now they expect you to attend everything they invite you to.  You’ve developed a reputation of always saying “yes,” and you’re afraid of what might happen otherwise.

The Real World

This same scenario happens to businesses every day.  The economy takes a nose dive or a key client goes away.  The easy reaction? “Say yes to any opportunity that comes our way!”

In a way, it’s completely understandable.  You can’t just sit around while the ship is sinking beneath you.  Entrepreneurs have to do something (anything!) to stay afloat and ensure your business lives to see another day.  So you take on clients and work that you may have turned away a year or a month prior.

But what happens when you are one of the “lucky” ones who makes it through the storm with a portfolio full of difficult clients or customers?  When times were tough, they were the ones who helped keep the lights on.  But now that things are picking up, you have new, bigger, more interesting opportunities.

So what do you do?  How do you choose?

The answer depends on your values.

It always surprises me how few companies can answer the following question: “What is your primary goal?  What do you want to achieve in the long run?”

The most common answer I hear (“Well… to do more business, I guess.”)  reminds me of a passage from Alice in Wonderland:

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Chesire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.

Without an end goal in mind, it is impossible to be anything but reactionary to the business opportunities that cross your radar each day.  And when that is the case, it really doesn’t matter how or why you choose your clients/projects, because there is no way to decipher the good from the bad.

Question(s) of the Day:
How do you decide what new business opportunities to pursue, or are you just saying “yes” to everything?  And is your decision-making process based around your company’s end goal?