During Halloween, many people pay to go to made-up haunted houses to experience fear and get scared. The Halloween industry experts are always working to find new ways to startle their customers. In business, scary things are always lurking around you and if you do not have a good grip on your business operations, they raise their ugly head at the most critical time. In a business setup, experts are hired to do a SWOT analysis, (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) to identify those scary things, whether they are part of internal weaknesses or external threats.

Running a successful organization requires periodic operational review and at times, imagined business transactional scenarios to test the organizational tenacity. This is the only way to reduce the scary moments in one’s business. A laxed approach towards the happening of such possibilities can make a business experience “Halloween” every other day. So how do you know if your business is suffering from Halloween days and nights?

If you find yourself spending most of the time in your business operations or workplace putting out fires and in putting out those fires, you are constantly engaged in nonproductive activities that don’t generate direct revenue, you are living through Halloween. This is probably because of one of the following three reasons:

1. Capacity deficit

2. Procedural flaws

3. Communication breakdown

The best strategy to counter such scares is to sit down with the stakeholders and come up with a plan in writing, that is subjected to review but hold all stakeholders accountable.

By: Faizan Haq, President & CEO, Manage Your Business LLC