Making meaningful progress within your business, I believe, depends on three fundamental things, or pieces of understanding, and in my experience of mentoring business owners I have seen one or sometimes two of those things missing.
That’s why I’d like to share my experience on those three fundamental things, with the desire to help you recognise if they’re missing from your business. I hope this article is thought-provoking and helpful.
- A proper understanding of what you want from your business
Are you able to say clearly what your business needs to provide you? If you can identify what you need to get out of your business; money, freedom, growth etc. then you can decide more easily if it is serving you.
One of the most beautiful things about being a business owner is that we get to decide where we take our lives. We’re in control of where our businesses go and of the lifestyles they provide us with. Without clarity on what you want your life to be like you risk your business being taken along with the flow – rather like a car stuck in traffic following each other’s taillights.
The idea is to know very clearly, where you’re going…
2. An accurate understanding of where you are right now
What’s your starting point? To continue the traffic metaphor, let’s say you want to get to Southampton on the south coast. There are an infinite number of ways that journey could be planned out depending on where you are in the country, but for it to be the right route for you Satnav needs to know where you’re starting from!
It’s often the harder of the two things so far to clarify, but as you can see, it’s just as important to know where you are right now as it is to know where you want to get to.
This point depends on you knowing your numbers, knowing your high pay-off activities and knowing the weak points in your conversion funnel.
3. What has to happen in your business to get from point one to point two?
This is the gap – the journey plan… We know where we are, we know where we want to get to, and we know we’re going to be driving for at least two hours. But there are a lot of steps between leaving and arriving that we must pay proper attention to.
To wrap up the metaphor, you’ll need to get the right fuel, the right companions, understand your timings, and most importantly when to take the next junction, when to overtake or when to pull in and ease off the accelerator…
You may want to question at this point whether it will get you to Southampton quicker if you decide to clean your house first – or whether the high pay-off activity would actually be to get your shoes on!
What has to happen in your business to get you where you want to be?
Putting aside the traffic metaphor, but sticking with the journey planning analogy, to get you to the point where your business is serving you, you need to identify the steps that must be taken between point one and point two.
- You might need to know how many sales you need by a given date to give you the cash that allows you to make a purchase such as a new piece of machinery
- It might be that you need a new location for your ever-expanding business, or it may be that holiday that you’ve booked
- It might be getting a defined number of discovery calls each week that then result in a certain number of sales, or it could be committing to take the weekends off
- There’s even a chance it’s a case of you and your team obsessing over one or two numbers in your business that make the biggest difference to all of that.
Whatever it is, whatever your business looks like I promise you the clarity you need to make the step change is in knowledge.
The businesses that are making the big step changes – the most progress, are those that already know the ‘the three things’ and that’s how they get to where they want to be.
If you need to work out where your business is right now – what your numbers are, what your success drivers are, or what you need for the journey, I’d love it if you asked me to help. We’d probably be able to drill down and work out what it is in just a few minutes.
So, let me help you get clarity on finding your destination and working out how to get there, because it can honestly change your life, and you can have the business that your hard work deserves.