Accelerating Your Business Towards Bigger Profits

We’ve reached that typical point, halfway through the year where many start to look back at the plans they made at the start of the year and question what went wrong? Why have those plans fallen by the wayside? 

When running a business, it’s all too easy to get stuck in the doing. The day to day workload, to please your customers. Of course, that’s very important. But how do you move pass that and grow the business? To step away from the day to day, which just makes it feel like a job, to actually thriving in your role of business owner?

Our recent webinar, ” Accelerating Your Business Towards Bigger Profits’ explores how to make that a reality. If you missed out on attending, then you’re in luck. We recorded the webinar, so if you’re interested in seeing it, simply fill out the form below for instant access.

 

 

You can also get a feel for the type of things we talked about, in the webinar transcript below.

Webinar Transcript

Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today’s workshop on Accelerating Your Business Towards Bigger Profits.

I hope everybody is okay.

I see some of you have found the chat functionality already so hello to everybody who’s

joined us already and is on there and if you can either give me a hello in the chat box or a thumbs up just to let me know you can hear me and that you can see the slides on screen that would be amazing.

So can you all hear me? We’re all good.. brilliant. Thank you very much everybody.

Superb. Thank you.

Well it’s lovely to have you all with us on a sunny Friday afternoon!

The plan for today is to look at how we can take the opportunity to break that cycle of being always working, how we’re going to increase profits without increasing hours.

Having a think about our mindset and what our mindset is doing for us and what’s working and what’s not working, looking at the power of marginal gains, what happens if we do some small stuff that’s going to make a big difference and then building a successful business that makes you happy.

And that’s actually where we’re going to start. So in terms of our agenda today

what we are looking at is –

I’ll do a bit of introductory stuff, so i’ll tell you a bit about me and who i am, get you all to pop me a message in the chat box just letting me know who you are as well and then we’re going to start with that point about building a strong successful business that makes you happy because the bit about me making you happy is really important and often what i find is when I talk to business owners, we get so tied up in the doing the work that we forget about the fact we set it up for a reason and we set it up to make us happy!

Then we’re going to talk about what’s getting in your way so if that’s not where you’re at at the minute then what are the things that might be getting in the way and then we’re going to wrap up with what your actions are.

As part of those actions, most of you will know this already but if you’re not already aware and haven’t got it booked in, the offer’s there of a free one to one coaching session off the back of this so it’ll either be with me or with somebody else in the team and we would love to get you booked in for that. So if you’ve not already got it in your diary, as you’re going through today listen out for things you want to talk about in that session and get it booked in with us at the start of next week.

We want to give you that time to get you to the point where you’re going to have that strong successful business that’s making you really happy.

So just to give you an introduction.. so my name is Jenni Morgan, i run ActionCOACH in Wakefield. I’ve been doing that for about three years. I’ve been coaching for about 20 something years and i’ve spent 20 odd years working in business – I love it, I absolutely love what I do – I love getting to see business owners achieve success, getting what they want from their business and ultimately that’s my objective – whether you want a great self-employed job, you want a business with 100 people in it, you want to move your turnover from 3 million to 10 million like one of our clients, or you’re just starting out and you want to know how to get your plan in order and what those first steps are.

Ultimately my passion is about helping you to succeed in getting that business where you want to be so as i said i own and i’m the lead business coach for ActionCOACH Wakefield. We do have a team of people who work with businesses as well and work with all sorts of business owners really from start-up through to multi-million pound turnover and i love getting to see the insights of the different types of customers that i work with, different kinds of clients and the, different stages people are at in that, journey so, whatever you’re doing and wherever you’re at in your business – listen out as you’re going through today for things that are going to help you.

Either things you can take away and action straight after this or things you can bring to that free one-to-one coaching session that we can work through because my role and the team’s roles if they’re working with you as a coach is to help you to learn some stuff help you to move forward and realize what you

need to do and get those actions in place so we’re actually delivering results and you’ll have gathered from the fact that we’re ActionCOACH we’re all about action.

We’re all about moving things forward, but ultimately it’s also all about making sure you get results from that work otherwise all we’re doing in coaching is having a nice chat and it’s not really achieving something so we need those actions in there and we need the results from it.

So that’s me in terms of introduction. Really short and sharp today so that we can get onto the meat of the content. Just a quick word on what i need from you: So this is your role for the next sort of hour/50 minutes or so. Really participate in this.

We have a saying at ActionCOACH about participation –

“If you put 100% in you’ll get 100% out.”

So this is your chance to have sort of an hour out from your day-to-day and actually focus on your business. Where you want to take it. What’s happening for you.

Taking notes always helps. It’s a really good idea. It means you’re much more likely to remember stuff because it engages both sides of your brain as you’re taking notes and particularly noting down those things that you want to bring to your one-to-one coaching session.

Interact with me. I can see the chat box up there, bear with me if i’m looking sideways there’s a separate monitor that the chat box is on so that’s why i’m looking at it and there’s a Q&A box as well if you want to flag anything in there.

What would be really great is if you can pop your names and your business name into the chat box now for me just so I get a bit of an introduction that would be brilliant.

Your other role today is to have an open mind and be ready to learn and from learning pull out the things

that you know that you need to be working on and then ultimately to get to the end of this and take some action so ideally for us that’s book that free one-to-one coaching session let us help you a little more but it could be an action that you go actually i need to do that in my business that’s what i’m going to go and do next week but work out what your actions are because if we’ve got an action from you then that shows us that we’re being successful.

So if you can pop things into the chat box for me that would be lovely so we’ve got with us:

Ian from Willow and Flow – lovely, welcome.

Stephen from Sovereign Connections Limited – superb. Lovely to meet you both.

We’ve got a few more messages coming in, so as and when, i’ll try and pick up with people and i know sometimes we end up with people in positions where they can’t type in these sessions so…

Jane from Via Interiors

Jamie from Avail superb

Lovely to have all of you with us, interact in the chat box with me as we’re going through the next session if you’ve got questions pop them in there, i’ll try and deal with them as we are going through,okay so lots of questions for you..

oh and hi Joanne from Pink Spaghetti – lovely to have you with us as well.

So my first question for you today is this and i want you to write it down – but why did you start your business in the first place?

So that might be going back some years for some of you it might actually be last week for some

people who are on this call you might even be thinking you want to start a business – but why did you start it?

What did you want to get from it was it about money was it about time was it enjoyment what was it for

you that was that driver? Why did you start your business what goals did you set yourself?

Just take a couple of minutes and have a think back to that and i’ll try not to talk too much because i hate it when people talk over the fact that i’ve just set a challenge to think about because i find it really hard to think and listen. so i’m gonna sit here in silence for a minute or so – you jot down why did you start your business in the first place?

okay and then my next question is: now you know why you started, you thought back to that time and you were full of the hopes and inspirations and passion of it – are you achieving it? and i want you to score yourself between one and ten on this. okay so one is no i’m not, i don’t know – i did it to spend time with my family and actually what i’m doing is working 60, 70, 80 hours a week or i did it to make more money than I was earning when i was employed and i’m just not.. it’s not working for me.

10 is i’m absolutely getting everything that i wanted when i started my business so whatever your reasons for setting it up were and what you wanted out of it you’re hitting all of it. it’s absolutely superb and amazing. okay so give yourself a score between one and ten and then pop your score in the chat box for me so if you’re sitting somewhere where you can talk to me just pop your score into that chat box and let me know where you are out of ten just so we can get a feel for it.

i’m not gonna ask you loads of details because we’ve only got an hour in this session but bring this to your coaching session. okay if your score is 10 out of 10 – you’re doing amazingly well, well done! we’ve got a challenge for you coming up next.

If you’re scoring lower than that, then we need to look at what can we do to help plug those gaps that are going to help you transition to something that is delivering what you wanted.

Okay so if we can get you typing away so we’ve got a four coming in, a six or seven, so we’ve got a few people, who are kind of there or thereabouts. somebody else is struggling a little more with that four down there. Okay.. we’ve got an eight that’s really good well done.

okay so yeah so a nice mixture of people. yeah somebody’s saying it’s too early literally just started

but wants to make sure they’re heading in the right direction. so yeah absolutely, that’s the first question of the day.

so if you’re not a 10 out of 10 here what are the things you need to be doing and that’s what we’re going to work through and give you some ideas on over the next sort of 45 minutes or so – but before we do that, if you set your business up a little while ago what do you want now because obviously you know the person who said i started in april, what you want now and what you wanted in april are probably going to be

pretty similar. but if you started your business 12 months ago, two years ago, 10 years ago…

whatever that time frame is like, what’s the difference between what you wanted in the first place and what you want now?

is it the same thing or is it something different okay so get that jotted down for you what are you aiming to achieve okay and then, i’m going to ask you the same question about scoring it are you there or is this the next phase of your journey? maybe you’ve done a cracking job on the thing you wanted in the first place.

you’re our person who rated themselves eight, nine out of ten.. great fantastic what do you want now

then? do you want mor?e do you want something different? okay and how close are you to that?

so you can pop your scores out of 10 in the box for that one.

so yeah we’ve got a five coming through, a four, okay so definitely a desire for some change coming through in here. something that we want it’s either more than we’ve got today or something that we wanted originally and we’ve not quite got there with yet.

okay so really, really interesting. superb thank you all for doing that for me. start to think through now

what it is that you need to work on so either to get to that thing you wanted in the first place if that’s still true or the thing that you want now.

What’s stopping you from achieving it?

What’s getting in the way?

Okay and the next bit of the session is going to take you through some stuff like that. Just a quick one for anybody who’s sitting there who put a 9 or 10 out of 10. It’s just a bit of reflection really but often we talk about businesses are like trees okay.

And it sounds like a really strange analogy but if you think about a tree. A tree is either living or it’s dying. there isn’t a space in the middle. so it’s either living and growing or it’s dying. There isn’t an.. it’s going to stay the same size and just stay there.. it’s doing one of those two things and the challenge is that businesses tend to do that as well businesses… don’t stay the same size exactly particularly well, with all the same stuff going on and working in exactly the same way.

What tends to happen is that the market around us changes if that’s us and then suddenly we realize we’re a bit smaller or we’ve lost a couple of clients or type of work we’re getting is a bit different than what we got previously maybe it’s not worth quite so much for us or we’re actively working on our business and we’re looking at growth and how do we grow that business or whatever speed you think is right for you but how do we move that business forward and how do we get that growth in there.

So if you’re sitting there and going – hey my world’s great, i’ve achieved everything i wanted when i started i’ve got a plan for what i want to achieve next and i’m well on track for it, that’s fantastic. just make sure we’ve not got this issue well if we’re not growing we might be dying okay. And when i talk about growth in this it might be financial growth, but it can also be growth in terms of our systems, our processes, the skill sets of our teams, our own skill sets, what we’re aiming to get from the business. So it’s not necessarily a straightforward financial growth you’re thinking about but they definitely need some sort of growth and shift in business in there.

So when i talk with business owners around understanding where you are today and where you want to be or where you want it to be when you were started then what we find typically is there’s three common frustrations in business okay. And the three that come up time after time after time when we summarize them at least..  TIME, TEAM and MONEY.

Okay, so from a TIME point of view – i set my business up to have time with my family to be able to go and pick the kids up from school or do not have to work as many hours as i was working for somebody else but actually what’s happening is that the business is taking up all their time. it’s making you really busy – it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good busy – it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re bad busy, but it’s using all of your hours. you’re working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. you don’t get there to pick the kids up, suddenly somebody else is doing that for you. you don’t get saturday mornings to go out and walk the dog or whatever your thing was that you wanted to do, you’re not getting it. So sometimes the issues are in TIME.

Sometimes, our issues are in TEAM and that could be from the point of view if you’ve got so much work on now you need to grow a team but you don’t know about recruitment you don’t know about how to get the right people into your business or even you don’t know what role you want them to do.

So i had a really interesting conversation with a client where we set off going yeah you need another person who does the doing and then we thought about it a bit harder and said well no actually what you need is somebody who is going to do the admin because you hate doing the admin so let’s give the admin to somebody else and you can do the doing because you love doing that.

So sometimes, it’s about working out what the roles are you’re needing. Sometime’s it’s.. you’ve got people but those people aren’t in the right place, they’re not sat in the right role or they joined your business and they were right for you at that time but the role they’re doing now bares no relationship to what they did originally or what you need them to do is different than what they came in to do.

So we need that transition in terms of the team either in different people more people or maybe those people focusing in on what they’re really good at or maybe some training to help them get where they want to go. Okay, so we might be thinking about TEAM.

Or it might be MONEY.

MONEY might not be, where we want it to be, the business isn’t as big as you’d like it to be or, you’ve got the turnover but you don’t have the profit. It’s just not making you the money that you want and you don’t really understand why. You need to do something different. all the cash flow is not there, so on paper it’s profitable, we’ve got the sales, we’ve got the profit coming out at the bottom but actually the cash flow’s all over the place and what we’re finding is we’re constantly running out of money in the bank. And it’s a really difficult challenge and really stressful.

Or like one of my clients, maybe you’re looking at your three and a half million pound business and going ‘it could be a 10 million pound business but i don’t know how to get it there’.

‘i don’t know how to get from where i am today to where i know it could be..’

So if any of these things are resonating for you we’re going to look at some solutions for some of them today but also in addition to that, what we are going to do is in your free one to

one coaching session bring the one that’s the priority, make a note now on your piece of paper

is my issue time, is it team, is it money or what order are they prioritized in because you might be going oh my god i’ve got all three! i’ve got all three of those issues well that’s fine but which one do we have to solve first for you okay so start to think it through so one of the things we know is when we look at how are we going to be successful, it links to a couple of things and

the first thing for me is, well actually we have one…

We need to know what success looks like..

What do you want to have, okay and having success doesn’t necessarily mean a

million pounds in a bank or a ferrari or a big house or it doesn’t have to be tangible in that

sense it might be about you want the feeling of success, it might be about you want this much

money it might be about spending time with your children or with your family and your friends or being able to do a hobby.

All of those sorts of things but actually before we can look at whether we’re successful or not we need to know what our measure of success is, so what are the things we want to have?

Go back to that list you wrote at the start about what you want from your business now and what you wanted at the start. okay what are your things you want to have and then most people get the connection of well if i want to have this stuff I need to do some things.

yeah if i want to have..  a bigger business where i pull in more money, i’ve probably got to do some sales and marketing activity in some shape or form.. okay but the bit that makes this formula really, really powerful and that we’re going to come back to later on is it’s not just about what we do but it’s about the way we are, it’s about who we need to be when we’re

doing that stuff … what are our beliefs, what are our behaviors, okay, who are we as the business owner. who do we need to be because if we can get that bit right as well and this is where a lot of the mindset stuff comes in and if we’re getting that right and we’ve got the right actions in place and those things multiplied together to help us get to the thing we want or

have an awful lot quicker than if we’re just doing the day yeah if you think about when you’ve worked with people or you’ve had people working for you and you’ve got i’ve got a rubbish

attitude their attitude is terrible they can do the work but if only they had a good attitude that’s about the bee okay attitude to be thing so they know how to do the skills they know what they need to do time after time.

Time to get what you want from them they, just don’t give it the right way.

Their attitude is just not there, well think about what your attitude needs to be who do you need to be in order to get where you want to go okay so when i work with clients probably 40 to 50 of what i spend time on doing is actually focused on that be.

okay and we’re going to talk a little bit more about that later on, so first off is knowing what our habits so we’re going to look at that now we’re going to talk about what you need to do

okay so this is the practical skills stuff related to business and i’m just going to give you an overview of our six steps to great business results model and then i’m going to talk you through

our five ways formula which is all about all about how to get business growth okay so we’re gonna go through that as well and those two things combined are really underpinning what we do in terms of doing with clients okay so our six steps to clearly it’s friday afternoon start that

again our six steps to massive results formula underpins the coaching we do around what you’re going to do in your business it’s going to make a difference okay.

So understandably what you see in here is six levels these levels are all about getting you to how we would define a successful business okay so a successful business for us is a commercial profitable enterprise that can work without you okay the reason behind that is it gives you freedom of choice then if your business can work without you in it you’re not essential okay. that means you can go and do something else somebody else can cover all the stuff you do in your business and you can take a passive income. You can go and set up another business, set

up a charity, go travel the world, spend the time with your friends and family,  spend the time doing your hobbies.. whatever you want to do.

Alternatively, you can pick your favorite role in the business and do all the stuff you enjoy

and not do all the stuff that’s a hassle, okay but the other really big benefit of when we get to

that definition of successful business is if you want to sell your business it’s now worth four or five times the amount than a business that you’re essential to, because if you think about what there is if you’re essential in your business is there’s either a client list that somebody’s buying and that’s it okay or they’re going to have to buy you to come and do the work but you probably don’t want to be doing it because if you wanted to be doing it you’d still keep your business so when you sell your business and then you get this right you have to work for

them for two years on this inflated salary piece that’s because you’re getting less in

business in the first place alternatively if we can get it all setup right to work without you at start and then you sell it then it’s going to be worth much more and you don’t have the two years worth of hassle of working for somebody else so these are the steps on that journey

okay for some other business owners that i work with who want a really great self-employed job they won’t go all the way up those steps and that’s okay or you could have a business that can work without you and take all of those steps over a period of time so our first step is all

about mastery and mastery is about eliminating chaos from the business, okay it’s about getting the business stable, it’s so when we look to grow the business we know we’re growing something that makes sense, okay so we’re growing something that’s going to make you more money.

Not less money, we’re growing something, that’s going to give you time back not take your time away not add to the 60 70 80 90 hours a week you’re already working okay so when

we’re looking in mastery the sorts of things that we’re looking at is we’re looking at well do you know, where you’re going, what’s your destination, what’s your end in mind what do you want

to have the end of this, are we clear on it and how do we work, that back from that long-term goal to the shorter term goals back down to actually right what do we need in the next 12 months what do we need in the next 90 days what does that mean we need to be doing?

Week on week what activities have to be in there to get the business on track from the targets you want to achieve so that’s our destination piece. We then want to look at time mastery,

Where does your time go? Where do the people in your business’ time go? is it on the right activities? where are the things that steal time? where are the things that not efficient

because if we can increase those efficiencies then we can get more done in the same amount of time or we can get people working on the right work and they’ll level their jobs out and the money you’re investing in them or in yourself which then means that you’ve got more capacity to do more when we put the grade in place.

Okay so we’re going to work on destination, we’re going to work on time, we’re also going to focus on delivery mastery and delivery mastery is where we think about clients, okay or customers and that is about making sure we deliver consistently so if you think about a world-class example of delivery mastery, you’re up there with the likes of Mcdonald’s – totally systemized business, does the same thing every time and delivers the same. it doesn’t matter which Mcdonald’s restaurant in the UK you go into. If you order a big mac you get the same

thing it’s going to taste the same, it’s going to come out with the ingredients in the same order on the bun every single time, if you order five of them all five will be the same. it’s a completely systemized process, in fact you probably go to the till and have the same conversation with the person behind the counter everytime when you place your order and that’s really important because whilst Mcdonald’s is never going to be the best burger you’re going to eat, what it absolutely is is something that delivers consistently on the expectations you’ve got when you walk through the door.

Okay, so what we want to make sure you’ve got in your business is consistent delivery for your clients or your customers, so that when you grow your client on your customer base and you start asking people for referrals and you’re doing some lead generation and you’re pulling

in more customers that experience is still true what you’ve gone out and talked about and

said you’re all about still works okay so we’re going to focus on that as well and then the last piece of our puzzle in mastery is all about financial mastery.

Do you understand the numbers of your business okay and this starts with do you understand your profit and loss do you know whether you’re making money do you know where you make money in your business which are the things that you sell the services or the products that are really driving your business forward. Are there any in there that hold me back, what sort of customers do you want to, deal with what does that do with you or are some of those holding you back okay so we want you to understand your profit and loss we want you to understand the cash flow forecast do you know what the cash is looking like coming into the business is it predictable which is partly where we’re gonna get to the next line which is niche okay

we want you to understand those key numbers we want you to understand what

drives your business from a numerical standpoint so we can look at right if we did twice as much of that what happens what’s the impact of that how does it benefit us if it doesn’t benefit us why are we doing it let’s understand it okay and oftentimes when i meet business owners

they don’t understand the finances and that’s okay because if nobody’s ever taught it to you it’s okay to not understand, it what’s not okay is to continue to not understand it okay so we need to get to grips with those finances because if you don’t think your business is making money then who will probably your accountant but they do everything at the end of the year for you which is often a bit too late for your business.

So let’s get you understanding this stuff in a nice simple way so you, understand your business you know what, you want to achieve, then you can start to work out what the steps are to achieve it okay so our second level once we’ve got through mastery we’ve got those basics

covered we’ve got a stable business that is making you some money is then how do we grow it how do we move it forward how do we grow it in a predictable way though so we want to understand how are you going to market it what are you going to do to drive leads.

What are you going to do to make sure your conversion rate’s really good what’s the average sales value for your customers how often do they come back and buy your products or service again and how much profit are you making on each one and we want to test and measure

those marketing activities and the sales process so that we know eventually what each thing is going to deliver for us if we invest 10 pounds in this activity are we going to get 20 pounds back or 15 or 11 or worryingly five okay so we want to understand that so then you can build a marketing strategy and approach that says yes we’re going to grow our business. We want to double the turnover and we want to double the profits. Brilliant. So what things are we going to invest in that’s going to help us do that okay so our niche line or our sales and marketing line is all about how do we do that.

What that does is generates cash because, we’ve now grown the business it’s bigger but we’ve done it in a way that’s profitable and so we’re generating cash and that lets us move on to our next step and our next step is all about leverage and leverage is all about systems it’s about driving efficiency. okay that doesn’t necessarily mean IT systems but about driving the efficiency of your business and the efficiency of the processes people in your business are using in order to help you do it more effectively.

okay and more efficiently so if you use less of the time that your business has got then actually what we can do is free up some time freeing up time means you can do more work or you can do different work working on your business and moving it forward okay and then step four is where we think strategically about team now that doesn’t mean you’ve not got a team in place at any of these other three levels you may well have okay, but this at this point when we think about team what we’re looking for is what’s that future structure what do we need from a growth point of view okay.

How are we going to move forward with that what do we need or do we want a general manager what’s our role as the business owner going to be in the long term do we want a role or do we want that passive income if we want a role what is it and what are other people going to do in our business have we got the right people sat on the right seats now or do we need something a little different do we need a bit of a restructuring there to make it work for the long-term future and then we do lots of coaching around leadership and management under this team piece because now you’ve got a team of people you need to take them on that same

journey with you okay. so we might be looking at leadership which is all about how do you win their hearts and management which is the tools and processes you need to make sure everybody can do their role and do it effectively and efficiently as possible so once we’ve done that we’re starting to think about well do we need a general manager in the team and then what happens with synergy well, synergy is where we’ve got a well-oiled machine –  so you’ve got your business, where there’s no chaos, it’s generating new money in a predictable

way so you can start to grow it. The systems are there so we’re doing that efficiently and we’re making a decent profit we’ve got the right team in place starting the right roles doing the right stuff and everybody’s engaged and motivated passionate about moving us forward so we’ve got this well-oiled machine so what happens then and synergy is often the time when we’re starting to look at well do you open another branch. Do you open in a different country do

you find a totally different sales channel, than you’ve got today to sell through, well maybe you franchise your business, maybe you license it so what different ways have you got of replicating what you’ve now got to work really well in another fashion maybe it’s a different type of product range but the same systems are all going to apply.

So how do you do that and ultimately what we’re looking for is the results from the business

and the results are where your personal growth comes in so you as a person growing developing and getting what you want but also it can oftentimes be one business owner’s day do you know what i’m gonna set something new up, this thing’s great i’m either going to sell

it and make my money, i’m going to take a passive income from that and do something else

okay. So we’re looking at the passive income or sale of the business at the resort stage in order to get the massive results now like i said earlier on. I meet business owners all the time and

you’ll be sitting there hopefully going ah i get this i know where i am on there. so a really great action for you particularly to bring to your free coaching session is where do you think you need work on these six steps where are you sitting at currently? Are there areas all over the place that need work or is it a particular piece of this that you need to discuss okay so on your piece of paper..make a note..work out whereabouts in the six steps you think you’re sitting at the minute or which area you really need to focus in on to move you forward okay,  and you can just pop where you think you are into the chat box for me that would be really handy for me.

okay so if you can get your typing fingers out and type on your keyboard or on your phones however you’re watching this.. and just pop me a note in saying i think i’m here or i think i need to work on….. that would be brilliant….

so joanne   mastery.. yeah absolutely you talked about being right at the start of your business journey it makes perfect sense.

other people may well be saying well i’ve been doing this for years but actually there’s a bit in mastery you talked about i need to do and that’s okay when we do one-to-one coaching with clients we’re able to dip and choose between these areas we might be spending most of our time in leverage or team or well-oiled machine but actually there’s something fundamentally

mastery that we need to drop back to and just understand and then move forward.

so we’ve got somebody saying need to work on well-oiled machine, predictable cash flow, efficiency.. absolutely brilliant topics for us to work on jamie so we’ll look forward to

having that one-to-one conversation and get into detail on the actions of how do you move forward with those things…

start a business journey working in mastery working in all areas yeah absolutely so lots of people sitting in different places on here and that’s great because it’s your journey typically what i say to people is if when we start working together we’re talking at a mastery level for the first few months often what we’ll find is this is a three to five year journey to get your business from where you are today to where you want it to be and up at that results level and well-oiled machine type level.

If you’re starting higher up because you’ve done a cracking job of those base levels that’s

great we can work from there and obviously that journey is going to potentially be a bit shorter okay. so but definitely areas to work on, bring those notes about where you see yourself sitting into that one-to-one session and talk about the things in detail that are relevant for your business then underneath each area so you’ve got some same marketing sales yeah

absolutely so again bring that to that one-to-one session we can work out the detail of what’s relevant and right for you and how to get you moving forward with that length so this next little bit that i want to share with you again if we go back to our formula of be x do equals have is still in the world of doing and this is particularly related to that sales and marketing lines a couple of people we call it’s going to be really, really relevant for okay, but we often talk to people about our five ways of how do you grow your business and this comes from the fact that generally speaking when i meet business owners, they can tell me things about their

business they can usually tell me things like, how many customers they’ve got or how

many clients they’ve got they can normally tell me things like what their sales turnover or their

revenue in the business is and they might be able to tell me their profit, not always – depends how recently the accountants looked at it for some people or you might be hot on it and know exactly what your profit is okay the interesting thing about those three things for me is they’re all outputs and what i mean by that is you can’t just go and get more customers you have to do

activities to get more customers what we have to do is generate leads we have to convert those leads into being customers with us.

 

So we can’t just go out and get it. we can’t just go out and get more revenue what we need to have more revenue is more customers or customers who spend more with us more often

okay and ultimately if we think about the profit line which is the piece that’s really important in the business we can’t just go out and get more profit in order to get more profit we need to

have a better profit margin or we need to have more customers who are buying more often from us so we need to have done the previous activities so when we put that into a formula it

looks like this so the number of leads or inquiries we get multiplied by our conversion rate

gives us an idea of customers when we times that by the number of transactions an average customer does in a year and the average value of the sale that they do with us in a year then we get the net sales value of our customers and if we multiply that by the profit margin,

that we’ve got then we get our profit, that we could expect out of the business now this is really important because getting into groups with these numbers tells you how your business is

performing today but also this is the piece where marginal gains comes in…so let me just show you an example of how these numbers work…

So if we have a business where we’re getting 4 000 enquiries of course per year and we currently convert 25 percent we’re gonna have a thousand customers if each of those customers does two transactions every year with an average sales value of 100 pounds our net sales value is going to be 200 000 pounds and if we had a 25 gross profit margin on that we’d be making 50 000 pound profit out of this business so sounds pretty good okay but if we

want to make this business better then what do we need to look at well first off we need to understand what good looks like for each of these and whether it’s where we want it but then we want to dig into each of those blue lines so we want to focus in on things like well actually can we get a 10% increase in each of those areas okay and this is where it comes back to marginal gains.

So marginal gains first came one of those things that i was really conscious of when we were talking about the cycling teams at the London Olympics and the sky team that went on to win Tour de France and things like that and it became a thing that Dave Railsford was really famous for bringing in was marginal gains really truly understanding the intricacies of everything and going if we could get a percent here a fraction of a percent there, a couple of seconds there it all adds together and that theory is really true when we think about our five ways.

So, in this example i’m going to show you what happens if we take a 10% increase okay and most of the time people go well actually yeah 10%  feels pretty reasonable, i could get 10% more leads by doing some activity i could probably increase my conversion rate by 10% by focusing really hard on it, putting the right systems in place the right scripts and the right tools and i could probably do an easy job of committing people to buy a little more and buy a little more frequently with me and if i’ve got my efficiency stuff

going in then i could hit 10 percent profit margin.

So if we can work on all five in those areas what happens is this 10% on 4000 leads makes us thousand four hundred ten percent on our conversion rate twenty five percent takes us to twenty seven and a half percent which gives us one thousand two hundred and ten customers so we’re up twenty one percent already in customer terms. okay when we then get ten percent more on the average transactions we move to 2.2 and 10 more on our average sales value takes us to 110 pounds okay and that gives us a net sales value of just under 300 000 pounds

okay and when we get 10 on the profit margin as well and move that to 27 and a half we move our total profit from 50 000 up to 80 000 or just over okay so what’s happening is because those 10 percent multiplied together what we see is that we’re at 46 in terms of net sales value

okay and we’re up a huge 61 when we get to our gross profit margin so by working on this marginal gains theory really unpicking the different blue the blue lines on here into the

different areas what’s working well for you and what’s not we’re able to put specific activities in place with you and your business that’s going to help you move and get those 10 increases

which ultimately is going to drive more profit to your business  okay so again for your one-to-one coaching session think about do you know these numbers do you know how many leads you converse you make your transactions and your average sales value and your profit margin

and if you don’t go and find them the first step is to understand where we’re at today okay we want to understand that in order to be able to move forward so moving back our formula for life success i said earlier on we started off with the have okay what is it that you want to get

from your business what do you want now we talked a bit about the do what are some of the things you can do that are going to help you get there and hopefully you’ve got some really good notes and some good actions to touch that okay what we’re going to focus in on now is this be our beliefs our behaviours who we are who, we need to be in order to be great at doing the do… to get the results we want out, okay, and the example i’m going to give you or the analogy i’m going to give you for this is this it’s our identity iceberg okay and the reason i’m talking about this is because it really underpins who we are as people and what we believe in and the behaviors and be that comes out.

okay so first question then you can put this in the chat box if you know the answer but why do you think we describe identity as being like an iceberg okay see if anybody gets this is past his

finger first into the chat box and why would you describe this as being like an iceberg. what do we know about icebergs okay, so while i wait for people to type, i’m going to start with the explanation of this but what we know about icebergs is a huge proportion of the iceberg is below the waterline we don’t actually see it okay what we see is the piece on the top

that’s sticking out of the water yeah absolutely so it’s not just what you see on the outside

thank you very much for that jane and yeah other people so most of the time, needs to focus on what the leather world’s like absolutely so when we think about what’s important about and we look at this iceberg what you can see above the waterline is what other people see about

you. so they see your results are you successful at all okay they can see that they can see the

actions you make they can probably see the decisions or certainly the results of the decisions

you make and they’re going to see your behaviours how do you do what you do okay and those things are really interesting because if you think about it the behaviours you’ve got influence the decisions you’re going to make and the decisions you’re going to make result in the actions you’re going to do and the actions you’re going to do are the things that generate the results for you.

So when we start working with clients we start working on that topic but also what we want you to do is think about this bit below the waterline which is really where we start to focus

on who’s you’ll be who do you need to be to do it and this is the stuff that other people don’t

really see and we’re going to work downwards on this so we’re going to start with skills

okay so people generally speaking can’t see your skills they might see the results of those in your behaviours and decisions and the actions but we can’t see the skills so the first question for you is if you rated yourself less than 9 or 10 out of ten on our first piece of where do you want to be, where do you want to take the business, if you’re not there then where are

you?

what skills do you need to help you get there what do you need to learn about what you need to focus in on okay so that’s question number one is what do we need from skills okay then those skills will change what behaviours we’ve got the decisions that we make the actions

and the results we get okay once we’ve got our skills the next bit is our beliefs and beliefs are really important beliefs are things that we currently hold to be true okay they’re not facts

they’re things that we individually hold to be true then the things that you tell yourself the little voice in your head that talks to you about what’s going on, that you repeat time after time okay

and the thing about that is the way that the human brain works is that when you repeat those messages time after time after time what happens is you believe them they suddenly become true in your world this belief is true okay so to give you a really good example of this i was speaking to a new client yesterday and one of the things he said to me was i’m crap at marketing. really crap at marketing,  it’s an area i’ve never worked in out of all the jobs

i’ve ever done i’ve never worked in marketing i’m really crap at it. That’s really interesting isn’t it because that’s a belief that that person’s got they believe that they’re absolutely rubbish at marketing. The actual fact is it’s something they’ve not done very often so do they have to believe their crap at marketing or could they have a different belief actually, could they believe, could they hold to be true.. i don’t currently have the skills in marketing, i’m going to learn them, i don’t know if i’m any good at marketing because i’ve never done it so i’m going to test it and measure my results or i’m learning to be good at marketing, i’m in the process of learning this new skill so i’m going to be good at it that’s a very different message to be repeating in your head and we can change what we believe about these what we hold to be true based on telling ourselves different things so if we can reprogram the voice in your head

to tell you something that’s really positive that’s helping you on that journey instead of something that’s going to hold you back, skills change the behaviours change the

decisions we make and ultimately the actions that give us the results that we want to get out the end.

okay so it becomes really important what we believe and what we believe about ourselves and what we believe about our business, so my challenge for you is to take a minute or two just to have a think around what your beliefs about you and about your business and which ones are holding you back is there anything in there you know the business will never work without me.

it’s quite a limiting belief isn’t it because you’re telling yourself that you’re essential so we can never take you out of that business. it’ll never work if i’ll work less hours or this business is never going to make more money than x. all we can make in our industry is this the industry’s rubbish is going downhill, it’s a race to the bottom they’re all beliefs, they’re all things you’re telling yourself that was one of your things so what are your things you tell yourself that you believe in you hold to be true you treat it as though it’s a fact and actually you could change it and if you changed it, it changed the way you ran the business it changed the decisions you make and the actions that you take and the way you behave.

Okay, so have a think about that at a deeper level still the next thing down is we’ve got our values. okay and that’s what do we value in other people in ourselves so they’re likely to be words like integrity honesty timeliness precision all sorts of different words it could be

but are we holding true to our values what are our values what’s important to us as a person are those values serving us are they the right values for our business or do we need to think of some different values and beliefs okay if if we like our values and they’re quite integral to who we are.

so if we like our values then how do we run our business to fit with our values is the business running the way you want it to run to your values but do you need to change some stuff how

do you influence your beliefs you can change your beliefs does that influence what your values are so we want you to think through this but in particular one of the things that’s that’s really

helpful in business is whatever your values are if you decide you’re going to stick with them or you change them whatever you decide on getting those aligned with your business because ultimately if it’s your business you can decide on what the values of the business are. it’s really important because then you’re working in a way that’s congruent okay you’re working on something that makes sense for you you’re working in a way that makes sense to the way you are naturally so we’ll understand your values so that we can understand how they influence your beliefs your skills your behaviours the decisions the actions and ultimately results to make sure that they make sense and that they make sense in your business and then the final piece at the bottom of our iceberg is our identity how we see ourselves who do you see yourself as.

okay and our identity shapes our values which shape our beliefs, shape the skills we go and get which influence behaviours we make and the decisions we take and ultimately the actions and the results so these pieces all layer all together but if we think about our identity we might see ourselves as being a business owner we might see ourselves as being a parent or a child a grandparent.

we might see ourselves as being very charitable so we have an identity that is ours how do we see ourselves okay and this is really important because actually the way you see yourself influences all those things above it in the iceberg.

Okay but it’s not always how other people see you and it doesn’t have to say the same so

if you talk to people who’ve been through life-changing events, their identity tends to shift so if you think about if any of you’ve got children when you had your children did your identity

change and did that influence what your values were and your beliefs and your skills

and that you learned some new skills out there but certainly the behaviours the decisions,

the actions you took and the results you got are going to be different because i

might shift in identity, so we need to think about what identity. do you need to have

in your business are you the person who doesn’t do it or do you need to be the

business owner? do you need a particular role as part of your identity? what will the pieces

outside of your business influence your identity and how does that help okay because as i say that identity that influences the values which influence the beliefs which moves up to the skills

behaviours and the decisions the actions and ultimately the results you’re going to get out of the end so we want you to focus in on who you need to be and then all these different levels of

the puzzle now you might be wondering why we’ve got the word environment at the bottom.

So let’s make sure you’re all still awake and following this so why do you think we’ve got the word environment at the bottom of our identity iceberg..

I’ll let you type into the chat box and while you’re doing that one other question just to have a think around is which areas within this identity iceberg if any do you need to work on or do you

want to talk about because if this is something you need for you then bring it to that one-to-one coaching session.

if this is going to make a big shift for you in your business then bring that with you and let’s talk

about it let’s understand where you’re at today and where you want to be and how to shift that brilliant okay so we’ve got an answer to why have we got the environment there because it affects how you work and how you succeed and that is superb yeah so if you think about an iceberg a real one this time not an identity one think about a real iceberg if we picked it up and put it in the desert instead of it being in the sea.

it’s going to change massively isn’t it. it’s going to get hot it’s going to melt. it’s going to go from being iced to be in water and then that’s going to evaporate and turn into a gas so

when we think about that from a people point of view and an identity point of view our environment is just essential to influencing the results,  we get the actions, decisions

behaviours, skills beliefs values and identity that we see ourselves with okay so the way our environment changes in the environment we choose to put ourselves in influences all of these pieces so if you want to shift something in your identity iceberg if you want to make a change in your being who you need to be to get where you want to be in your business one way of doing that is about changing your environment so you can start to think about what things come into environment when we’re talking from a business point of view. what things would we have in there as part of that environment so that could be what’s the office like? or do you work from home? and if you work from home do you work from a specific location at home?

what does your desk look like how tidy is it if it was time here would that make a difference for you what do you wear to go to work how does that change how you see yourself okay but we can also think about it in terms of what are the things that we’re doing.

what books are we reading? what courses are we studying? who do we hang around with? who do we talk to okay. so there’s an expression about if you take the average of the five people you spend the most time with that’s probably what you’re going to be like so when you think about where your time is who you spending time with then actually you need to shift that environment slightly if you spent more time with different people more time with people who are more business-minded or have bigger businesses than you or could influence how you win your business would that change things okay so think about your environment and what you can do in there that’s going to change the who you are and affect your identity values beliefs , skills,  behaviours, decisions, actions and ultimately your results.

There’s a really good analogy for this one, about the environment. if you’ve got children and you’ve got teenage children in particular think about this one. it’s the thing about who they spend their time with so if you think about your kids and who they’re spending their time with if they’ve got friends that you really like why do you really like their friends I mean you might like them as people but probably what you like is that they’re smart, they’re intelligent, they work hard at school, they have fun but they do it in a safe kind of way. what about if your kids are hanging around with some people you don’t like, what about they’re spending time there

why don’t you like them? well you don’t like them because the influence those people have got over your child you think that they’re going to change them into something you don’t want them to be.

okay maybe they hang around and sit and chat on the street they’re a bit loud or they stay out too late or they party too much or they play the music too loud but they’re doing things that you don’t like and your child’s in that environment those other people are influencing them

into those behaviours and those behaviours are coming from the identity so when they change who they hang around with then actually that would change their identity and help you shift their identity so you translate that into being an adult and in your business who do you need to

hang around with as part of your environment in order to influence you to make the changes you need to make in your identity iceberg in your be to be the person you want to be.

okay so if we take a step back from that and let’s have a look at our formula so

BE x DO = HAVE

 

okay so we’ve been through some stuff about what do you want to have, okay, as the leader

of your business, what do you want to have what are the things you said it ought to do for

you or what are the things that you want now.

okay and how good are we at that and if we want something that we’re not getting at the minute what do we need to do differently or who do we need to be that is different

okay and i thought what might be nice is when i look at this formula and it’s actually one that’s on the wall in my office. it’s up there all the time for me to see but what i have paired with it is three quotes I absolutely love that help me to remember it and help me to focus on what

it is so the first one of those is from Stephen Covey and it’s all about beginning with the end in mind so if you think about what health is it’s about understanding where you want to go, what is the end of your journey and if you start with that you can work out what the steps are you need on the way, you can work out what you need to do and who you need to be to get you there.

my second one then is about what you need to do and this comes from Brad who founded ActionCOACH. i’ve heard him speak numerous times but actually the thought behind this is

amazing. so words can inspire us thoughts can provoke but only action brings you truly closer

to your dreams. okay really important one for me because actually when i work with my clients what we need to get to is what’s the action the words can inspire you can come and sit and listen to a presentation like this, great, might go away really inspired if. i’ve done a cracking job today. i want to do something different or I might provoke some thoughts, giving you some things to think about brilliant really good news if we’ve done that but if you never take action on that you’re never going to get any closer to your dream or to your end in mind.

Okay and then my third quote that goes with this is all about the be and this comes from Jim Rowan. so Jim Rowan was one of the first self-made multi-millionaires in the US.

He died when he was quite elderly, I think in his eighties and that was quite a lot of years ago now so multi-millionaire was worth a lot of money at that point in time and he was one of the first people who really went out and spoke about how do you do that and he’s got numerous

fantastic quotes but this particular one – work harder on yourself than you do on your job –

is there for me as a reminder that it’s not all about the do.

So yes absolutely i have to do the actions to get where i want to be but i also have to work on my be. i have to work on who i am as a person. what my beliefs my values are what my identity is who do i need to be in order to do those things to get the business where i want it to be

to get the things i want to have.

okay so i’m gonna run through what the next steps are in a minute but just before i do that let’s get you all typing on the keyboard again.

Can you share with me either a great learning you’ve had something that you’ve realized about you and your business that you need to change or work on or just something that’s come

out today where you’ve gone actually that’s really useful i need to go away and think about it.

so if you can all get typing in the chat box for me it’d be really great to see which things have resonated what you’ve got in your list you want to talk about in your one-to-one coaching session

okay i know there’s a few of you that haven’t been talking awa. that’s to do with where you are and how you’re accessing the webinar today but if you are there and you can tell me in a message then it would be great for you to share those learnings. If you don’t want me to read it out that’s absolutely fine if you’re happy for me to make it out anonymously then i will do.

But it’d be really good to understand what have you got out of today’s workshop, what have you learned, what’s it gonna go away and let you do, what are you gonna take action on okay

because while you’re typing that the next steps for this really is well let’s start with identifying where you want to be what is your end in mind.

okay identify what you need to change what has to be different than happening now either in you as a who you need to be or in terms of the actions you’re doing or both but what do you need to change okay and keep your free one-to-one coaching session booked because all it’s doing is taking some time to invest in you. it’s letting you get into detail on this, we can focus in on your business on what, you need. what are your changes you need to make. what do you need to change about how you work.

okay and then bring that list of the things you want to be where you want to be, what you need to change to your one-to-one coaching session and we’ll get on it and do it.

okay so a couple of inputs from people back so the importance of mastering time and delivery first really okay go away and think about fundamentally where i want to get to yeah that was huge isn’t it because if you don’t know where you want to get to. how do you know how to get there so actually yeah that would be a really great thing to do.

Again really good one for you to bring to your one-to-one coaching session for us to talk around

to understand to get some ideas maybe give you some tools that are going to help you to achieve that okay um we’ve got need to look more closely at the six steps and get a clear understanding of them.

absolutely if that’s what you want from your free session we can do that with we’ll take you through them and get you thinking about where you’re at in detail in your business and what you need to move forward on what needs to change for you and tackling the sales and marketing and the inner voice yeah. our inner voice is massive isn’t it? it’s huge there’s all this stuff that we just tell ourselves over and over and over and actually if we can get in control of it and tell ourselves really positive things, that changes our outlook on life.

yeah and helping break it down clearly rather than it being blurred lines in your head as a business owner.

yeah superb insight well done. A Huge part of what we do actually so when i’m working with clients and coaching a lot of it is about taking that step back and that opportunity to break things down and really understand it and be challenged about it, be supported around doing something different so yeah bring that to you one to one coaching session.

Let’s really understand what we can do to help you get that clear.

So that’s really it in terms of content from me. i hope you’ve really enjoyed it. sounds like there’s been some great insights that people have popped into the chatbox so thank you very much for that. please make sure you’ve got some notes from this session. that you know where you want to be or you start working towards that and identifying what you need to change and

bring it to that one-to-one session and we’ll help you do what you can do with it. we’ll get you moving forward.

I’d love a google review, so we’ve got a short link for it so it’s bitly.. bit.ly/acwreview

so that’s actually coach wakefield review. if you can bob on there and leave me a review for what you’ve got out of the workshop and hopefully you’ve really enjoyed it and got value out of it it’d be great to have that on there.

And please book your  one to one coaching session because we want to work with you. we want to help you with this stuff and help you get moving forward so you get the success you want for your business.

So other than that, i hope everybody has a fantastic rest of the friday afternoon, that you have a really, really, really good weekend. i believe it’s going to be sunny so get out there and enjoy the sunshine while it’s there. Have a lovely time thank you all for being here today. i’ve really enjoyed it. thank you for interacting those of you that have been able to do so in the chat box. it’s been lovely to have you with us and have a fantastic weekend everybody and i look forward to seeing you in your one-to-one session soon. Bye.