Too many principals and executives spend their days reacting to one fire after another, moving from problems to crises to fires and back again. This leaves little time for strategy, assessment, creativity and even awareness.

If we are to market our value successfully, we must regularly extract ourselves from the day-to-day minutia muck of our work and see the big picture. Who are our happiest customers? What are we selling to them? Why are they happy with us? How did they find us? What did we say to them that convinced them to buy? What are we doing that isn’t working too well? Do we cut those activities out? What do we replace them with?

These kinds of questions need answering, but we can’t even formulate them when we’re running from one crisis to the next.

Here’s how to start: take 15 minutes one morning this week and sit at a clean desk in a quiet office with a pad of paper and a good pen. Give yourself the freedom to think big about important things. You’ll market better. And you’ll make more money.

This piece ran in my Evangelist Marketing Minute short-form newsletter, which you can receive every Monday morning for free by signing up here.