Articles
Why are you called The Scalability Coach? – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
What is the SCALE Model and SCALE Operating System? – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
How to choose the right business mentor or coach for you and your business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
How to set-up Alerts and Alarms in your business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
How to run effective meetings – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
6 ways to avoid premature scaling (growing broke) – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
Getting the most out of your Apprentice (or team member) – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
5 Mistakes Business Owners Make That Prevent Them from Scaling Their Business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
The importance of checklists in business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
Connect the Dots – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
The importance of GREAT service – by Jim Smith, Shoppers Anonymous
The importance of planned daily habits – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
The importance of Follow Up in business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
Five ways to learn from your business and avoid repeating the same mistakes – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
What to look for in a business mentor / business coach – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
10 top tips on scaling your business – Start Up Donut interviews Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
5 ways to increase productivity in your business by more than 50%
Entrepreneurs & SMEs must systemise or risk ‘Growing Broke’
Do I really need to know my numbers?
The Four-Day Week: Entrepreneurs are Most at Risk
Why are you called The Scalability Coach? – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
I set-up Advocate Business Services over five years ago to help business owners choose what they do with their tomorrow. My passion to help entrepreneurs achieve their success was the ultimate driver behind my #1 Amazon Bestselling book, I don’t work Fridays.
I went from small time entrepreneur, to SME business owner and finally onto Senior Executive in a multi-million-pound corporation in just ten years – all without a single official business management qualification to my name.
Impressive right? Well, yes, I set-up my own business in 1991 using a little bit of office space lent to me by some friends, which despite not having a purpose, went on to successfully exit. And many years later I generated some impressive results as CEO at a multinational corporation, turning a loss of £250k per month to celebrating its first £1 of profit in just a matter of months.
BUT it took a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Literally. I’ve lived through the lows, the struggles, pains, long-hours and sleepless nights. And I’ve experienced the empowerment, pride, liberation and wealth that personal development and business transformation can bring. So, whatever stage you and your business are at, chances are I might understand, and certainly help.
Like many owners, I was having trouble describing what I did. I didn’t want to box myself in a generic term such as “Business Coach” or “Mentor” and it was at one of the masterminds I belonged to where a client of mine, also in the same Mastermind said: “Martin, you’re like my Scalability Coach. You help my business grow and scale.” And it was born from there.
I’ve developed a series of SCALE programs, systems, frameworks, products, Clubs, (and soon to be published book) to enable super-ambitious business owners translate “big business” thinking and apply it to small and medium-sized companies.
I have created my own unique SCALE Model to openly share and transfer to others. This model is a framework for how to rapidly grow your business enabling an exit and it has earned companies hundreds of millions and is applicable from start-ups to corporate giants.
I am now a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) Qualified Practitioner which means I can help you understand your personality type and introduce it to your business to support many functions and situations including: managing others, development of leadership skills, conflict resolution, executive coaching and change management.
What is the SCALE Model and SCALE Operating System? – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
Despite over 600,000 new start-ups in the UK last year*, half will fail within their first five years**. Working with hundreds of business owners we boil it down to:
• Entrepreneurs feel overwhelmed and adrift in a business fog at some point; not knowing who to turn to or which way to go next.
• You’ll feel anxious and have many sleepless nights worrying about your business.
• All too often, you’ll be running around like a headless chicken in a panic, reacting to ‘surprises’.
• You and the team around you will be really frustrated time and time again as you repeat the same mistakes. It’s at this stage where self-doubt creeps in and you lose confidence in yourself and your business. Your second fear as a business owner (after going bankrupt) will be to look like a big fat failure.
• Eventually, you get bored, dis-engaged, fall out of love with your business and become stuck in a rut.
• In business we’re always faced with new challenges, and we simply don’t know what the future holds. We know how we feel the way we do, but not necessarily always why.
The SCALE Operating System tells you WHY you feel the way you do:
• Without a clear Set-up of Strategy, you won’t know where you’re going, you’ll feel lost, you’ll be creating a culture of confusion. We refer to this as the Fog.
• If you’re not congruent; you don’t have the right people in the right seats, no clear systems or processes in place, no alignment, you’ll be worried and anxious. We know when clients are at this stage as they admit to sleepless nights.
• In our experience, you’ll have alarms and alerts going off in your business, but you don’t know why or what’s causing them, often when it’s too late. You’ll be in a panic, running around out of control. We call this stage headless chickens.
• Even if you have the above in place, are you learning any lessons? If you’re not learning from your mistakes time and time again you’ll be getting frustrated, you’ll be losing confidence in yourself and your business, and you’ll inevitably feel a failure.
• And finally, without an Execution Plan to ultimately Exit you won’t even progress, you’ll start getting bored and disengaged from your business, and on track to completely fall out of love with it. This we refer to as stuck in a rut.
The SCALE Model™:
The SCALE Operating System (SOS) is based on the SCALE Model™, designed by Scalability Coach Martin Norbury. The SCALE Model was originally developed for business owners who are very serious and committed to growth. It is made up of five key elements that a company needs to successfully position their business to rapidly grow without relying on the owner.
S is for Set up of Strategy:
You need to start with the end score in mind so that you can measure the results. Getting absolute clarity and why is so important. Your vision, your values, your brand promise.
C is for Congruence:
Ensuring that everything and everyone who needs to be involved understands their role (and the goal), and there are systems and processes in place that support the business so it can run without you.
A is for Alerts & Alarms:
The importance of measuring the activity that creates the result and highlighting when it is not met. The “business” needs to tell us if it is not working; it’s too late to change things at the end.
L is for Lessons Learned:
A growing business is an evolving business – if you want to scale-up and exit then you need to be dedicated to continuous improvement.
E is for Execution to Exit, Experiment, Expand:
Is all about focussing on the execution strategies to expand or exit; releasing your involvement and giving you the freedom to do anything you want.
* Centre for Entrepreneurs, Maximilan Yoshioka, 11 Jan 2016
** The Telegraph, Elizabeth Anderson, 21 Oct 2014
How to choose the right business mentor or coach for you and your business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
The quickest way to learn any business is to study someone who has already been successful at it; they have lived through the sleepless nights and fear if failure, made mistakes…BUT have also seen and celebrated success be it exit of time or money. This is why business coaches and mentors are so popular with entrepreneurs and start-ups, as well as large corporates looking for a quicker way to exit or re-structure.
One of our mottos on our SCALE Manifesto is: “Always look for Learning” and finding the right business mentor and coach will save you time and money in the long term.
There are so many people out there right now pitching themselves as a business coach or mentor, and it goes without saying that some coaches are better than others. Some clients I work with jumped at the chance to work with me really quickly based on a gut reaction and referrals, whilst others took a good 12 months of research to find the right one for them. Whatever your approach, here’s my top tips:
1. Experience. What exactly have they accomplished and how does this fit in with you and your ambitions. You don’t want a good talker to then find out they cannot walk the walk. You want someone honest about their background – their challenges, their failures, lessons learned, personal triumphs and failures. All of this insight will help you avoid making costly mistakes and accelerate the rate of your success. Look for positive reviews and testimonials as well as complaints / negative ones.
2. Sharing. Is this coach / mentor willing to share all their experiences in an open manner. How transparent will they be? The value is in them sharing all of this – after all, that is what you’re signing up to!
3. Key Person of Influence: what credibility and positioning do they have in the business circles and your sectors? A Key Person of Influence will be well connected and have the ability to open up doors for your business be it through new clients, acquisitions
4. The Numbers. Knowing your numbers – and relating these to your business – is a huge part of running any business – and one that cannot be ignored. Too many entrepreneurs leave it to their accountant and never ask them the right questions, meaning potential savings are lost, and there can be nasty surprises such as not saving for VAT. Numbers are also an essential part of forming your alerts and alarms within your business and too many owners are using the wrong numbers as a benchmark and therefore their perceived success isn’t really what it is. You coach /mentor should have a strong financial background (not be an accountant but demonstrate how they’ve used numbers on the [past), and look for financials as part of their program.
5. Accessibility: You must be able to reach your coach. They’r not going to be available all of the time – as a good coach will be in high demand, but you should have ways to get hold of them in a crisis situation, and have visibility of – and access to – their diary. A good coach won’t hide this.
6. Expectations: You want a coach that can hold you accountable and who is there for the growth of your business. They should spell out what they expect from you in terms of commitment. Whilst they will be sympathetic to personal issues outside of your business, a good coach and mentor will still focus on your business to ensure it is stable during any times of personal difficulty such as death, relationship break ups. And it’s important for you to understand what you can expect from them.
7. Always look for Learning: A decent coach and mentor will love what they do and get a kick out of getting results with you – this should be their underlying passion. They are always looking for learning themselves to make sure they are on their A-Game and ask them how they learn and develop. Good coaches will have mentors and coaches themselves and will invest in time and money to develop. This in turn will add huge value they bring to you.
How to set-up Alerts and Alarms in your business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
The idea of having alerts or alarms operating within the business is that they are activated in real time. It amazes me that most business owners, even lots of really sizeable companies, do not know how they are performing until their accountant presents them with a set of year-end figures. Often this can be 12 to18 months later. How can you possibly deal with a problem that far in the past? My mind boggles at the thought.
The starting point for setting up alerts and alarms is to ensure that each member of staff knows what 100% looks like for them, in their role. This should not be a hardship or a ‘ruling with a rod of iron’ scenario, but simply an employee delivering exactly what is reasonably expected of them (100%) in return for 100% of their salary. A fair deal! When you add to this the precursor that they no longer see their role as merely a job, but as an important part of a joint vision which they have entered into, this is fairly straightforward. In fact, they will appreciate the support. The key here is the willingness to do it, not the having to do it.
If you have identified everybody’s 100% and you set up real-time (preferably daily) measurements to check that the target is being achieved, then you can see if there is an issue before it becomes a problem. It might just be a blip or a bad day, that you can choose to ignore or monitor for a while, but if you ‘don’t know’ then you are running blind. Things go wrong from time to time, the unexpected or unfortunate does happen, but if you have a robust system you can either work through it or make the necessary adjustments – instantly.
This isn’t simply a case of watching the financials either. It is far more powerful than that. Let’s look at some scenarios:
• Your sales and marketing team is now tasked with 150 calls per day, resulting in twelve meetings, resulting in five new orders. The Alarm: you know that if only 130 calls are made that you will not get your five orders and will miss your turnover target.
• Your delivery team with its apprentices and smoother operation, needs to deliver the right number of completed new products. The Alarm: you know that your invoice team cannot ask for payment without having a delivery date – this will affect cash flow and hold up investment – so you need to identify early if there is a problem with the delivery targets.
• Your finance team: with a clear invoice and payment collection strategy, the team must be diligent about the process or they will adversely affect the cash flow. The Alarm: you need to be alerted early if the process is not adhered to because cash flow shortages have a knock-on effect across the entire business.
Your customer service team: your service expert has to send enough marketing and make enough calls to deliver their new 80% repeat order target and double the orders from those who didn’t order the first time. The Alarm: this will affect the whole new sales and ongoing revenue stream if it is not met – and mean that you cannot hit your turnover target.
In all of the scenarios above, you can set up systems to measure an individual’s performance and alert you to any shortfalls – instantly. With that information to hand, you have the power to decide: if it is a problem, if you are going to let it run for a few days, if there are extenuating circumstances, or if you need to take immediate action.
Without it you may be missing a massive pothole which could eventually destroy your business. Or you could simply wait for the missed targets, missed deliveries and lack of cash flow, then hold an inquest and make some redundancies.
Think of these measures as the dashboard of your car. You don’t need to shine a torch into the petrol tank to visually see how much fuel you have – you look at the little dial in front of you. Likewise, if a light comes on shaped like a bulb, it is likely that an indicator has stopped working, or worse still, one of your headlights. The warning light means you can go and investigate the problem. The alerts and alarms fitted to modern cars mean that you do not need to be an expert mechanic to identify what the problems are.
But here is the key point. The petrol and the lights on your car are all just playing their part in the delivery of the bigger picture. Each of the hundreds of functions in your car are all there for the same purpose – to aid you in getting you to the place that you are going, safely and comfortably. Some parts are more important than others at different times, in fact some are essential and others are mere luxuries, but they all have a role. Ignoring or removing vital measurements, like the petrol gauge, oil lights or tyre pressure alerts could cause you to arrive late – or not at all – ever.
That is why alerts are so important in your business. But they are also intrinsically linked to the actions which you take when the alarms go off….an article for another day!
How to run effective meetings – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
In a recent study, it was reported that over a third of scheduled meetings are unproductive, equating to over 2½ working weeks wasted every year*. Not only is this unproductive and costly, poorly run meetings can be demotivational and lead to disengagement.
I’m not surprised by these stats; I’ve been victim of them many a time in my former corporate life. And this is why I’ve taken the lessons learned and focused a major part of our SCALE Operating System (SOS) on Meetings. Why….?
- Focussed and consistent meetings are efficient and effective. Everyone is aware of what their 100% looks like. And your business can tell you when it’s not working before it’s too late.
- A structured approach ensures meetings become the routine and rhythm of your business.
- Ultimately this means you can free up more of your time to focus ON your business and your big Exit, rather than being stuck IN the business doing a job.
My top tips on running effective meetings:
- Set meetings on the same day, at the same time and with the same agenda.
- Always start on time. A 9am start doesn’t mean you’re making a brew and chatting about last night’s Top Gear at 9am. It means you’re all settled and tackling the first agenda AT 9am.
- Never cancel or postpone (unless there’s a real emergency).
- Meetings don’t need to be marathons. A 15-minute Daily Huddle first thing will answer all you need to know, and focus your team by simply asking: What happened yesterday? What are we going to do today?
- Embed how you run meetings into your culture – collaboration and accountability are key.
So, don’t let your employees be one of the 828,000 who spend time on Tinder during meetings.
6 ways to avoid premature scaling (growing broke) – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
Premature scaling can be the worst possible thing for a small business, it is best described as ‘growing broke’. Either the business drives the growth, or the growth drives the business. Both might sound OK, but the latter can be very dangerous and unstable.
When a company starts out, or is very small, it is possible to run reasonably well without much planning; dealing with each new piece of work or challenge as it arrives and simply getting by. That is because the business only has short term goals. If you wanted it to expand, however, it would have to systemise or risk ‘growing broke’. Haphazard processes simply aren’t robust enough to cope with additional activity, and the growth would only serve to amplify all of the problems or gaps in the existing model.
Martin Norbury’s 6 tips to help prevent premature scaling and growing broke:
1) Set a clear path and end goal: It’s so important to set up your strategy and have it in place before you start to grow. Too many entrepreneurs make the mistake of starting a business without even considering how they’ll expand or ultimately exit. You don’t need to become a corporate, impersonal machine to be able to scale, you simply need a map and a very clear direction or you will never get to where you want to be.
I come across many businesses that are making money, or even growing and giving a reasonably good service, but they are simply not going which means that they are in serious danger of falling down suddenly and very hard. If a business has no visible ‘guiding principle’ or clear ‘targeted destination’ directing it, then every decision its owners make will be an emotional one, based on the short-sighted information at hand.
2) Systemise your processes: in order to grow efficiently and scale, you must work out exactly what makes your business work and document the method. Ensuring that everything and everyone who needs to be involved understands their role (and the goal), and there are systems and processes in place that support the business so it can run without you. If your business is always bespoke, always requires you to be involved, and is never systemised, then you have a job, not an exit-able business.
3) Set and monitor key performance indicators (alerts and alarms) that let you know if what you’re doing is getting you closer to your end game. I am not suggesting, by any means, that you take all of the flair and innovation out of your business by making everything run in line with performance targets, but it pays to have a way to track progress and alert you to potential problems well before they happen.
4) Learn from your mistakes: A growing business is an evolving business. If you want to scale up and exit, then you need to be dedicated to continuous improvement. Getting stuck in a “we’ve always done it this way” mind-set is a sure way to block growth and limit learning potential.
5) Create the right environment, give the tools, get out of the way! Entrepreneurs are amazing business starters, idea generators and motivators who enjoy being creative and coming up with new ideas. For many scaling is boring at best and impossible at worst. If you’re a big picture person, the details, tweaking, fine tuning and systemisation of a scale up can lead to frustration. Knowing when to get help to reach the next stage is the sign of an enlightened and experienced entrepreneur.
6) Develop a financial strategy – this sounds grander than it is. In essence, there are three key areas to focus on financially – and it is not what you think (i.e. not income statement, balance sheet or cash flow). Yes, these are important, but there are three levers you can pull to have a bigger impact:
- How quickly does one pound that you spend in the business come back in? (Clue: the quicker the better).
- How much of that pound is actually the business, and how much is it other people’s money e.g. HMRC, staff etc.
- What working capital do you need to grow our business, and how will this be funded?
Getting the most out of your Apprentice (or team member) – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
Our Apprentice, Stuart, was recently awarded Apprentice of the Month, beating 80 other nominations. Stuart is just six months into his apprenticeship with us, and we’re of course naturally proud of his achievements.
When we drill down into why Stuart has become such an important asset to our business, two things stand out: his attitude/will to perform, along with the system we’ve created to get the best from this vital resource.
Time is the most precious commodity for us business owners. We’re visionaries who love shiny new things and getting stuck into the next project often before the last one is finished. Doing the detail isn’t our strongest point, and our constant changing of priorities, and inability to delegate effectively, gets in the way and leaves us frustrated.
So, to help you get the best from your Apprentice, (or latest team member), and manage their individual scalability to allow you to focus ON your business, here’s the top 5 tips from our proven system:
1) Leadership through expectancy: if you expect success from your team, it’s likely that your confidence and trust is passed onto others by your attitude. Expectancy creates an environment where people grow because they know they are expected to, and will be allowed to. Have you set-out, and discussed, what 100% looks like for your Apprentice? Do you constantly review and measure this?
2) Rhythm and routine: just like anything in life, your business and team members will thrive when you get into a structured rhythm and routine. Having daily huddles and weekly check-ins at the same time, with the same agenda, will ensure momentum, clarity and accountability.
3) The bigger picture: your Apprentice may just be starting out in their new career, and are busy executing the ‘doing’, but it’s vital they are aware of, and involved in, your bigger picture. You’ll be amazed at their desire to engage with this once you involve them in your regular strategy and planning sessions.
4) Matching skills with interests: Lionel Messi is a world-class footballer constantly netting goals for club and country, but you wouldn’t put him in central defence. The same goes for business. If your Apprentice is helping out with marketing, you’re expecting them to tweet and post in your voice, design stuff, write copy, send emails, edit videos, create brochures, approach your clients for testimonials etc. etc. This is a big ask for even an experienced marketer as the skills involved are vast: technical and creative, mass media and attention to detail, written and spoken communications.
Compounded to this is the growth of marketing tools and systems to enable them to reach and engage with your clients: in 2011 there were 100 vendors; just four years later this increased to nearly 2,000.
Our experience is to match your Apprentice’s skills (which are ever-changing), with their interests. If your Apprentice is more technically minded, then focus them on those jobs (make a list – there’s loads). Do get them writing copy (maybe via tweets rather than articles), but do accept that you’re going to get frustrated if you’re relying on them to solely generate weekly, topical blogs up to your standard.
5) You only get out what you put in: Implementing the above in your business, and being consistent with your Apprentice, will mean you investing a little time, but it will produce an effective resource for your business today, and for the future. As one of the finest business leaders, Branson, said: “Train people well enough to they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”
5 Mistakes Business Owners Make That Prevent Them from Scaling Their Business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
“For every entrepreneur dreaming of a big pay-day, selling their business or attracting investment, there are 5 fundamental mistakes that often get in the way.”
This is the conclusion of Martin Norbury, an award-winning business mentor and author of the #1 Amazon Bestseller, I don’t work Fridays. Martin, who has earned the badge The Scalability Coach, has first-hand-experience in growing businesses, and has advised companies across 30 different industry sectors. His SCALE Model was ultimately developed to help business owners choose what they do with their tomorrow.
Here, Martin explains the 5 fundamental mistakes that get in the way of business growth:
1) Lack of clarity about what the end goal of the business is and why it’s so important. Too many entrepreneurs make the mistake of starting a business without even considering how they’ll expand or exit. You may feel you’ll love your business forever and never want to do anything else, but the entrepreneurial urge that got you this far is likely to leave you yearning for something new.
2) Failure to make your end goal central to everything you do. Scale is all about congruence yet most entrepreneurs fail to communicate the big goal to the key people or fail to build processes into the business that are required for scale. If your business is always bespoke, always requires you to be involved and never systemised, you have a job not an exit-able business.
3) Not setting or monitoring key performance indicators that let you know if what you’re doing is getting you closer to your end game. You don’t need to have many measures in place but it pays to have a way to track progress and alert you to potential problems before they happen.
4) Not learning from your mistakes. Getting stuck in a “we’ve always done it this way” mind-set is a sure way to block growth and limit learning potential. A growing business is an evolving business. If you want to scale up and exit then you need to be dedicated to continuous improvement.
5) Not knowing when to let go, get help or step aside. Entrepreneurs are amazing business starters, idea generators and motivators who enjoy being creative and coming up with new ideas. For many scaling is boring at best and impossible at worst. If you’re a big picture person, the details, tweaking, fine tuning and systemisation of a scale up can lead to frustration. Knowing when to get help to reach the next stage is the sign of an enlightened and experienced entrepreneur.
Martin’s underlying SCALE philosophy ultimately answers one question: when and how to exit a business. Exit can represent a great many possibilities. Martin explains:
“Your goal could be to exit the business to get your ‘big pay day’, or to retire and pass on your legacy to someone else. Or it could be because you have fallen out of love with the work, have become a manager instead of a doer or simply have the entrepreneurial itch to start something new.
“Even if you intend to stay in your business for now, having a business that is ‘exit-able’ will make it more attractive to investors and will free up your time, so you no longer worry about the day to day work. Maybe you ‘don’t want to work on Fridays’ anymore or you would simply like your evenings and weekends back to spend time with your family. Perhaps there is a hobby or a heart’s desire that you have been putting off for too long and you can’t wait any longer. Whatever the reasons you have for being in business in the first place, being in a position to escape the clutches of business pressure, by scaling up effectively, is a wonderful place to be.”
In his new business book, I don’t work Fridays, Norbury explains why the entrepreneur is the wrong person to grow their business, and reveals a simple 5-step formula to give leaders confidence, a clear structure and process to follow, and a set of simple tools to help business owners achieve growth and realise their ambitions. His process has worked across 30+ industry sectors in the UK, and addresses the 5 errors by giving business owners a practical process for getting their ambition on track.
The importance of checklists in business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
Chances are you eagerly visited this article because you are already a checklist convert and anticipated I was asking for an update on one of the items on your list that we’re working on. Then well done, you passed the test!
Or, maybe you aren’t. Maybe you are in the camp of “checklists are a tedious waste of time”. But bear with me because this practice of checklists WILL save your business by improving efficiency and minimising mistakes.
Our Why work Fridays SCALE Handbook contains a nifty box of tools for business owners to use throughout their scale journey, many of which are checklists. Checklists for people, meetings, marketing, values, issues etc. Why? Because checklists work! They help:
- establish regular patterns for communication
- summarise activities & priorities
- detail accountability & responsibilities
- capture & preserve knowledge
- eliminate errors & improve outcomes before it’s too late.
Still not convinced? Look how checklists have helped…aviators to land planes …hospitals reduce infection with a simple mandate “wash your hands” …London 2012 put on one of the finest Olympic Games and Team GB sealing their greatest ever performance.
If you’re not already using our Why work Fridays SCALE Handbook (don’t worry, we’ll be sharing more about this with you soon), then here are some key steps to help you implement checklists within your business quickly and easily.
A checklist for your checklist:
- Establish a clear simple checklist structure that works for you. This can be anything from written down in Word, a spreadsheet, a PDF, an app or a specific tool.
- Set checklists that strengthen your business. Look at what currently works and currently gets blocked, where issues arise, and create checklists around these.
- Share and enforce your checklists across your teams so that everyone is clear on processes and responsibilities.
- Use in your business every day to establish regular patterns of communication. Using checklists in meetings for example is the most basic form of agreement on what is important and how to communicate it.
- Align your checklists to your goals. If you have big aspirations for your business, especially if those plans involve employing other people, then you will fail if you do not have a clearly defined, step-by-step plan, and checklists to execute these plans.
Connect the Dots – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
Last week London, this week Johannesburg; where I am working with leaders from a FTSE 50 multinational corporation to help them align their strategy across their teams. We’re using the Connect the Dots method to help their people understand how they fit into the overall strategy.
You see, people who are able to “connect the dots” are forward thinkers, innovators, and leaders. They can zoom in and out of the issue at hand to make a logical or implied connection between facts or disparate pieces of information in order to arrive at a solution or conclusion. This massively helps businesses of any size to execute their strategy through aligned vision and teams.
It’s not an easy skill to learn, so whilst I may be a little over 5,000 miles from you, I’d like to “virtually” share with you a few, quick easy pointers that can help you…
- Be in tune to the all interactions you have; everything that is being communicated, not just the spoken word. Digest the words spoken and the facial expressions that accompany them.
- Learn to retain information that is important and keep it front of mind.
- Set aside thinking time to review and analyse how all of the information you’ve received might benefit from other intel that you’ve gathered.
- When faced with a challenge, don’t assume the obvious. Dig through your mental backlog and process whether unrelated intelligence may be more relevant than it seems.
As Steve Jobs prompted Stanford graduates during his inspiring 2005 commencement address, connecting the dots is an important pact of trust with yourself: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.”
The importance of GREAT service – by Jim Smith, Shoppers Anonymous
On 26th January 2016, I presented to Martin Norbury’s group of Swashbucklers at Northcote House, on the importance of great, not average or good, service.
The audience was a diverse mix of businesses, some specialists, services and some retail, but what struck me was how many of the same principles apply.
We know people do not remember ‘okay’ service, but they do remember brilliant or poor service. So to stand out, service has to be brilliant.
We also know people make buying decisions based on their experiences, and how one is treated influences 63% of them.
So here’s what we can we do:
- PMMFS, it means ‘Please Make Me Feel Special’. Challenge your staff to think through and apply phone-599488_1920 (2)a number of measures that wow the customer.
- First Impressions – Shop your business, phone in, walk by, check out the website. See what the first touchpoints look and feel like. We know people make value judgements, not just about people but about premises, within seconds.
- Build rapport – find out what people want, ask good questions – professional curiosity.
- Make sure all team members can talk about the business, your advantages and the value – don’t just make it about price.
So, whatever the business, if you have customers then pay attention to the service you give and make sure it is great, and don’t be afraid to explain why working with you will be beneficial.
The importance of planned daily habits – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
When you mention the word habit, most people immediately think of BAD ones rather than GOOD ones, they can be good or bad but basically are the key to your results and success.
I recently received a very interesting email where the success (and it is substantial in the multi millions) of the individual was attributed to their “daily disciplines” or work habits as I would call them.
Basically this person has created “daily habits” that together delivered immense results. One of the key reasons for building these habits was to stop (I even hate to say the word) procrastination, or the “disease of the poor” as he puts it.
In modern life it is far too easy to start your business day by reading a few emails, “surfing” the internet (even the word surf sounds enticing) and generally putting off until tomorrow what you could do TODAY or even NOW.
Planned daily habits actioned together deliver the numbers in the business that will then deliver your goals, it is difficult to then procrastinate.
To me it is like starting your engine, putting your car into gear, then moving forward. You generally only stop for a needed break (fuel of either kind) or when you reach your destination. I know of very few people that just stop in the middle of the road, get out and wonder aimlessly around. Think about this!
The importance of Follow Up in business – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
At this point some of you will tut, stop reading, move to another section or even hurl your PC/tablet across the room. Why? Because you’ll have heard this time and time again I’m sure, which is great, but is it SYSTEMISED into your business? Do you actually do it? Or, do you just say that you do and carry on kidding yourself? If a tiny fraction of your conscience says: “That might be me”, then read on.
The reason I am so passionate about this is I see everyday people like you, YES YOU, leaving money on the table and walking away from cash being in someone else’s bank account instead of yours. How crazy is that?
During December 2014, I had three situations that reminded me of the importance of follow up; two relating to my own business and the other, business I was looking to place.
Sitting comfortably? Let me explain….
Nearly two years ago, December 10th 2012 to be precise, I met a fellow Entrepreneur at a Mastermind session. Now to protect the innocent guilty I won’t provide too much detail, but they will know that I’m referring to them very soon. It became apparent, due to my situation, that I would be a great customer for them and I suggested they might like to contact me. Remember the date – 10th December 2012 – well, just last week on 5th December 2014 (again, nearly two years later) I paid this Entrepreneur over £3,000 for their products/services! So, what do we take from this?
Firstly, they could have had that money in their bank account TWO years ago. More importantly, the only reason they received it in the first place was that I, yes that’s ME, was very persistent. It would have been so easy to give my money to someone else, meaning that the business owner in question would have lost out. I also know that we’re probably not talking about just that few thousand pounds here – what would be the result if, on a monthly basis, there was someone else who wasn’t as persistent as me and who decided to go elsewhere. The math’s is simple – 24 months at £3,000/month is a whopping £72,000 left on the table!! Oops, just heard a large thump as aforementioned Entrepreneur has just fallen over.
I was recounting this story to a member of our team who immediately came back with this sorry response – “Well, I’m not surprised”. They went on to explain that they were recently conducting a market audit for one of our clients, collecting competitor responses. This basically involves our team getting in touch with our clients’ competitors via multiple methods of contact i.e. a call to their office, an email with an outline brief, submitting a query on their website – basically conducting what we call our MOT (Moments of Truth).
The result of the audit in terms of how they responded, timescale, quality of response, follow up etc. Was alarming – a HUGE 75% did not even bother to respond to a qualified “we want to give you some of our money for your product or service” enquiry, and the ones that did NEVER followed up. So, they got a big FU from us.
We all know how difficult it is to attract potential customers in the first place and these Nontreprenuers (my word for them) could not even be bothered to put in place a process to help their business. I sometimes wonder how they get any business at all. Most are looking for that business magic bullet, when in reality it’s obvious and right in front of them.
My last example of this came a little closer to home, when during a recent meeting a client of ours was talking about follow up and chose to focus on me and our company’s follow up. Now, I know we have systems in place and are pretty rigorous in sticking to them, however I began to wonder – had it worked? Bearing in mind that this person was our customer, I assumed that we must have done OK. Well, the story went that after an informal chat we had made regular contact, over an agreed period of time, with a flow of topical information suggestions and “saw this and thought of you” interactions via our K.I.T (Keep in Touch) system. Our client’s response was: “I had to engage with you just to stop you calling me all the time!” However, all joking aside, her comment simply translated as: I knew you would help me focus on the right things, as you already had that culture ingrained in your business.
There you have it; three examples that all took place in one month, demonstrating the power of follow up in our business, your business and your competitor’s business.
It is a sad indictment that we only have to do a little bit more that our competitors to stand out. The real crying shame is most of the entrepreneurs I have met over the last few years, that are probably reading this right now, are world class at their trade, skills, services or with the products they sell – they are passionate about what they do and spend a huge amount of time getting that part right. Then, along comes a company that is not so passionate, has inferior products and services but outsells our heroes time and time again and starts owning their space.
I am writing this the Thursday before The Entrepreneurs Circle’s National Event, where I will no doubt speak to a lot of you about your business. Some of you will be having a bumper month/year, some of you will be struggling and some of you will not actually know where they are (but that’s for another day). I am also sure the many a conversation will get around to winning and keeping customers and how much we are spending on lead bait, PPC and Facebook ads, the new free YouTube promotion and the… and the… and the… I can also guarantee that at some point I will be asked what I do, and for the fun of it, I might just say F U…
Five ways to learn from your business and avoid repeating the same mistakes – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
SME’s account for at least 99% of the businesses in every main industry,1 yet 55% will fail to make their fifth birthday2. These are depressing statistics, but imagine what the future would look like if the business leadership team could always learn from its mistakes. A business will tell you everything that is going on, but only if you ask the right questions. A growing business is an evolving, dynamic entity that has ALL of the answers; getting stuck in the day-to-day and in a ‘we’ve always done it this way’ mind-set will block growth and limit learning potential.
It’s our experience working with entrepreneurs across 50+ sectors that business owners will feel overwhelmed and adrift in a business fog at some point; not knowing who to turn to or which way to go next. They’ll feel anxious and have many sleepless nights worrying about their business and all too often they’ll be running around like a headless chicken in a panic, reacting to ‘surprises’. Eventually the entire team will become frustrated time and time again as they repeat the same mistakes and it’s at this stage where self-doubt and disengagement creeps in.
Five ways to learn from your business and avoid repeating the same mistakes:
Define your processes: in order to grow efficiently and scale your business, you must work out exactly what makes your business work and document the method. This includes having a clearly defined process that logs all issues (however big or small), and solves them. By noting these down, you can focus on striking them off, learning from each one, improving on it, and removing any barriers to growth.
- Set accountability: once you have a process and system for logging your issues, you need to identify the person who is accountable for each one, and the date they will be solved by. It’s important to ensure that everything and everyone who needs to be involved understands their role (and the goal). A set of progressive leadership behaviours have to be agreed and adhered to.
- Set the questions you want to ask your business and put measures in place; it pays to have a way to track progress against your defined processes and alert you to potential problems well before the alarms go off. We come across too many business owners who expect their business to magically change. They know their sales have plummeted for the third consecutive month, or that their star member is less willing than they were 6 months ago. But they don’t know why. Consider the following: why did you lose that contract? How do your staff really feel? How many of your clients are fans? By asking those questions most important to your business, on a regular basis by introducing simple tools and measures such as the Net Promoter Score®, will mean you are constantly learning and evolving and not making the same mistakes over and over again. To achieve this the business needs to follow the next step.
- Create the right environment, give the tools, get out of the way. The above will only happen if you have created the right culture and environment in your business. Those businesses that we work with who have successfully achieved this are constantly learning and refining because their teams have the will and the attitude to give and receive constructive feedback. In some ways they celebrate mistakes! These business owners aren’t constantly mopping the floor because of a leaky roof; they’ve mended the roof and moved onto the next challenge. If you don’t set the right environment then every decision you make will be an emotional one, based on short-sighted information at hand (at best).
- Get into a routine. Now you have set the right environment, you’re asking your business the right questions and you’ve got systems and processes in place, you need to embed a routine into your business. By having regular, structured meetings (same day, time, agenda) to capture, review and tick off issues, allows you to constantly learn from your business. It’s important to remember that these type of meetings are problem-solving meetings.
Sources:
1 Business Population Estimates for the UK and Regions in 2015. The FSB. November 2015. http://www.fsb.org.uk/media-centre/small-business-statistics
2 The Business of Numbers. Fair Finance. February 16, 2016. https://www.fairfinance.org.uk/blog/the-business-of-numbers/
What to look for in a business mentor / business coach – by Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
I often get asked “Martin, why do only you work with driven business owners?” Well, the answer is simple. You see we’re very selective and we don’t work with just anyone. We look to work with people who look for learning themselves, are 100% comfortable with the uncomfortable, are fast implementers and love what they do (they may have fallen out of love with their business right now, but they jump out of bed every single morning ready for the day because they love what they do).
And my advice for anyone looking for a business coach and mentor is that you need to look for key things that are important to you. It’s your investment in time and money so getting the right fit is paramount.
So, when you’re at the research and screening stage, as The Scalability Coach, here’s my top tips:
- What experience do they have? I attract a lot of clients because I have set-up two businesses from scratch, I’ve exited businesses and I’ve ran a multinational company as a CEO, which means I can also bring big business thinking to the SME world.
- What assets do they own – or are they using someone else’s?
- Is the mentor / coach asking you the right questions?
- What values does the business mentor / business coach have? This will determine the way he/she thinks, acts and behaves.
- What is their availability like? If they are clear and free now, then I’d worry they had few – if any – clients. And if they are so over-subscribed will you ever see them?
- Do they have a referral scheme in place and can you speak to any of the current and past clients?
- Do you actually get on? Would you go down the pub for a pint with your business coach / business mentor?
- Who else is the business coach / mentor working with – what types of industries, sectors, countries, size of businesses, types of business owners, any competitors of yours etc.?
- Are they part of accredited / recognised schemes of affiliations in the coaching and mentoring arena?
- Have they won any business awards?
10 top tips on scaling your business – Start Up Donut interviews Martin Norbury, The Scalability Coach
How to scale your business
Award-winning business mentor, Martin Norbury – aka “The Scalability Coach” – has advised many businesses on how to boost their performance and scale up. So what key advice does he offer?
Many clients come to us because they’re stuck. Some have achieved reasonable growth, but hit a glass ceiling. Others lack knowledge of scaling up, some even feeling slightly scared by the prospect. So, what guidance do I usually provide?
1 Focus on what you want to be – not what you are
Don’t base decisions on where you are – base them on what you want to become. One of the first things I ask clients is what type of company they want to become – £1m a year turnover? £2m? £5m? £10m? You must have definite objectives. The decisions you make as a £200k a year turnover business are different to one that turns over £10m. And if you want to become a £10m business – start thinking like one.
2 Make sure you’re ready and fully prepared to scale
When your business starts to scale, things can start to creak. Weaknesses can be exposed, and you can’t always fix them once the journey’s started. Pretty soon, everything can fall apart. Could be your IT system, processes, cash flow, team or all of the above. Think very carefully how scaling will affect your business – you must be ready. Your processes must be robust.
3 Learn from successful competitors who’ve scaled
Think about how they’ve done it. How have they succeeded? For example, finding out how many staff they now have could give you a rough idea how many you’ll need. Where are they selling and how? Understand their business model and learn lessons.
4 Protect your business values when scaling up
Things can change massively when your business is scaling and many things will compete for your time and attention. Be prepared for that. Also realise the importance of safeguarding your business values – which must not be allowed to suffer. They’ve helped you to be successful up to that point.
5 Build a great team of likeminded people
As you scale you’re likely to need to more staff, of course. Your relationship with them might not be as close as with previous team members, but everyone must realise the importance of your business values. Consistency and quality are paramount. Create the right culture and an environment where people want to be and excel – then get out of the way and let them get on with it. All team members must be properly engaged, motivated, recognised and rewarded.
6 Have rules for your people to follow
I’m not talking about a strict regime, just something that guides. My business has a manifesto detailing 20 things we believe. It’s up on the wall, should anyone ever need reminding. Having objectives and a strategy enables you to work out what talent you need. Recruiting the right people at all levels is essential to scaling up, and attitude is as important as skills and experience. People should be hardworking and ambitious. Everyone must pull in the same direction. You people should feel able to suggest improvements where possible. This can help your business to get better, stay current and grow.
7 Access outside expertise when required
Recruiting might not always be the answer. Often it can be better to outsource tasks and functions to ensure the best outcomes. Also realise when you need to delegate responsibility. Free up your time so you don’t get caught up in day-to-day matters, when your time could be devoted to scaling your business. Stay focussed on the ‘big picture’. Operate at your pay grade.
8 Never compromise on quality or consistency
They both enable growth. There’s no point growing if your products or customer service deteriorates, because customers will go elsewhere. Having the right processes, culture and staff is key to maintaining quality throughout. You’ll still make some mistakes when scaling, but understand why they happen, learn from them, get better and don’t repeat them.
9 Identify your barriers to growth
Once you have objectives, part of developing a strategy to scale involves thinking about possible barriers to growth. Be honest and pragmatic in this. What factors could thwart your ambitions? What can you do to address your weaknesses and the threats they could pose?
10 Try to predict the future
Setting your business up to scale, by having the right products, processes and people, doesn’t always guarantee a smooth ride. You can still experience difficulties on your journey, which you need to spot well in advance, before they damage your business. Having alerts provides a solution – simple numbers that help you to spot that something isn’t quite working. Then you can fix things or take evasive action. When things go wrong, often it’s because people haven’t recognised the signs, which can be evident months in advance. Stay particularly close to your finances, and measure your performance daily, because that will give you 261 opportunities a year to put things right, not just 12 times because you’re only measuring performance every month.
5 ways to increase productivity in your business by more than 50%
Former plc CEO, author and award-winning Business Mentor Martin Norbury, founder of Advocate Business Services, shares his top tips on how to increase productivity and scale a business based on his learnings from working with SME’s from over 50 different industry sectors.
Norbury advises business owners of all sizes:
1). Focus on the important.
Too many business owners are getting distracted on ‘urgent’ activities that demand immediate attention; the phone ringing is urgent, but it may not be important. ‘Important’ activities get you from A to B based on your goals and vision; if you don’t do this then you will never reach your desired result; but the problem is that these are proactive. Business owners need to simplify, eliminate or delegate those tasks that are urgent but not important.
2). Record and deal with interruptions.
Right now, interruptions are stopping your business from growing. If you’re constantly being interrupted and derailed from running your business, then you need to keep a log – a basic record of the interruptions you experience during a day. You can then see whether they are necessary, or alternatively plan for them in your daily schedule. The three reasons for interruptions are:
- “I don’t know how to”– lack of knowledge is easy to remedy, for example, by producing a manual.
- “I’m not allowed to”– simply give, or up the level of, authority.
- “I need stroking” – team members want interaction and pop in for chats. This cripples a business and you need to find ways to give your team praise and attention, for example, via structured 1:1 feedback, social events, team huddles etc.
I advise owners and their teams to get an A4 piece of paper and fold it 3 times to give 8 boxes each side. Next, write the names of team members, including you and your family, in each box. Instead of constantly interrupting people, jot down what you need to speak to X about, in the relevant box, and then you can forget about it (unless it’s urgent). Then use this in your daily or weekly meetings and eventually meetings will come to an end as people eventually start ticking off or getting answers to these “interruptions” off their own back. This really helps you plan, for example if you always get a last order at the end of the day, then leave half an hour at the end of each day for last minute orders.
3). Be realistic; land one plane at a time.
A key challenge in any business as it scales is to not get bogged down in the detail. The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch outlines that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
As a business, you have access to dramatic improvements in profitability by focusing on the most effective areas and eliminating, ignoring, automating, delegating or retraining the rest, as appropriate. But there is a tendency for most, regardless of size, to solve the immediate problems facing the individual, department or business.
90% of the time the actual issue or challenge will only be solved forever if something else is fixed. Invariably the cause of the problem is something else that is bigger than the symptom, hence the 80/20. As a leadership team, it is key to identify the 20% of things that are causing the 80% of issues. By solving this you solve lots of issues.
Most business try to land too much. The key is to land one plane at a time. Heathrow is the world’s busiest airline with over 73 million passengers and nearly half a million flights; but it only has two runways!
4). Learn lessons.
The next thing you need to start doing is to imagine your business always learning from its mistakes. By noting lessons down in a log, and allocating who is accountable for solving each one, you can focus on striking them off and remove any barriers to growth.
A business will tell you everything that’s going on, but only if you ask the right questions. And you need to create the right culture to feed this all in. Some examples: How do your staff really feel? What are your numbers telling you? How happy are your customers? Why did you lose that contract?
5). Continuous feedback.
An effective tool that provides continuous feedback is based on three main questions: What do we need to stop doing? What do we need to start doing? What should we continue doing? We all need, and deserve, to give and receive feedback; it helps us perform better and ultimately succeed. Each member of your team should be expected to share a few things that each of their colleagues and clients should stop, start, and continue doing. Once aggregated you can identify trends.
Keith Crockford, owner of Rock & Rapid Adventures, who has been working with Norbury, comments: “Over the last two years, Martin’s tools and tips have helped increase productivity in my business by more than 50%. We’ve moved from ‘firefighting’ into a position where I have been able to grow my business thanks to a focused goal, new services, and of course, increases in efficiencies.”
Entrepreneurs & SMEs must systemise or risk ‘Growing Broke’
This is the warning from Scalability Coach Martin Norbury, an award-winning business mentor and author of #1 Amazon Bestseller I don’t work Fridays. It is his experience of working with hundreds of firms across 60+ industry sectors, that businesses are at risk of failing because they are trying to grow too rapidly, and without simple processes or systems in place.
Norbury explains:
“When a company starts out, or is very small, it is possible to run reasonably well without much planning; dealing with each new piece of work or challenge as it arrives and simply getting by. That is because the business only has short term goals. When you want to expand, however, you have to systemise or risk ‘growing broke’ because haphazard processes simply aren’t robust enough to cope with additional activity, and the growth will only serve to amplify all of the problems or gaps in the existing model.”
This premature scaling can be the worst possible thing, it is best described as ‘growing broke’ where either the business drives the growth, or the growth drives the business. Both might sound OK, but the latter can be very dangerous and unstable.
Martin’s 6 tips to help avoid Growing Broke:
(1) Set a clear path and end goal: it’s vital to set up your strategy and have it in place before you start to grow. Too many make the mistake of starting a business without considering how they’ll expand or ultimately exit. You don’t need to become an impersonal machine to be able to scale, you simply need a map with clear direction.
(2) Systemise your processes: you must work out exactly what makes your business work and document the method, ensuring that everything and everyone understands their role (and the goal), and you have systems and processes in place that support the business so it can run without you. If your business is always bespoke, always requires you to be involved, and is never systemised, then you have a job, not an exit-able business.
(3) Set and monitor alerts and alarms that let you know if what you’re doing is getting you closer to your end game. Don’t take all the flair and innovation out of your business by making everything run in line with performance targets, but it pays to have a way to track progress and alert you to potential problems before they happen.
(4) Learn from your mistakes: a growing business is an evolving business; if you want to scale up and exit then you need to be dedicated to continuous improvement. Getting stuck in a “we’ve always done it this way” mind-set is a sure way to block growth and limit learning potential.
(5) Create the right environment, give the tools, get out of the way! Entrepreneurs are amazing business starters, idea generators and motivators but for many scaling is boring at best and impossible at worst. If you’re a ‘big picture’ person then the details, fine tuning and systemisation of a scale up can lead to frustration. Knowing when to get help to reach the next stage is the sign of an enlightened and experienced entrepreneur.
(6) Develop a financial strategy: this sounds grander than it is, but there are just three key areas to focus on:
- How quickly does £1 you spend in your business come back in?
- How much of that £1 is actually the businesses, and how much is it other people’s money e.g. HMRC, staff etc.
- What working capital do you need to grow your business, and how will this be funded?
Do I really need to know my numbers?
This is one of the most common questions I’m asked.
My answer is plain and simple:
YES!
If you don’t have clarity on the numbers in your business…
- How can you plan – both for your business and your personal life?
- How do you know if there’s a problem?
- How do you know you have enough for when the tax man comes knocking?
- How do you know if what you’re doing, what you’re busting your guts for, is actually working?
Ultimately, how can you sleep at night…?
We understand that you may not be confident with financial numbers; you’re not running a bookkeeping business after all. And, it’s likely you find the numbers dull compared to some of the other aspects of running a business.
But if ignored, any ‘hidden’ issues won’t go away, the overwhelm will build, and you’ll eventually lose control of your business.
In a recent survey we ran, almost a third of business owners have little confidence with their finances right now. And 46% don’t fully understand them so rely on external professionals.
I am SO passionate about this that I’ve put together my top tips to help you. I know you can do this because in this same survey, almost 90% of business owners had a clear view of their personal finances, but only a little more than half had a clear view of their business finances.
#1 – Focus on what you want to be – NOT what you are
Don’t base decisions on where you are – base them on what you want to become. One of the first things I ask clients is what type of company they want to become – £1m a year turnover? £2m? £5m? £10m? You must have definite objectives. The decisions you make as a £200k-a-year business are different to one that turns over £10m. If you want to become a £10m business – start thinking like one.
#2 – Develop a Simple Financial Strategy:
This sounds grander than it is, but there are just three key areas to focus on:
- How quickly does £1 you spend in your business come back in?
- How much of that £1 is actually the businesses, and how much is it other people’s money e.g. HMRC, staff etc.
- What working capital do you need to grow your business, and how will this be funded?
#3 – Access Outside Expertise
Recruiting might not always be the answer. Often, it can be better to outsource your bookkeeping and accounts to ensure the best outcomes.
Free up your time so you don’t get caught up in day-to-day matters, when your time could be devoted to scaling your business. Stay focussed on the ‘big picture’. Operate at your pay grade.
But, this comes with a warning…read the next point carefully.
#4 – Manage your Bookkeeper / Accountant
I am horrified by the lack of care and attention by so many external professionals that we rely on for our finances. In fact, we have fired many of our clients’ providers.
(I know there are some good ones out there, and we’re very lucky to have found ours. It is simply life changing).
But YOU need to take accountability. Don’t just leave it up to them and assume they’re doing everything they should be.
Frustrations encountered with their bookkeepers cited in our survey included: lack of accuracy, little clarity, delays, conflicting advice, and simply “not knowing what’s mine”.
Set-out what you’re looking for them to do, what your expectations are, what set of information you’re expecting on a regular basis. And don’t forget to share what your values are.
Set regular calls and meetings to get up to date information and have the ability to be proactive and to talk through money. Connecting money to your business is essential.
Start asking questions and don’t stop until you have clarity and confidence in your finances.
If you’re using a business coach, then they MUST have strong financial expertise. Everything you are working on with them must ALWAYS come back to the numbers. If not, then how can you make decisions?
#5 – Set Alerts & Try to Predict the Future
The idea of having alerts or alarms operating within the business is that they are activated in real time.
It amazes me that most business owners, even lots of really sizeable companies, do not know how they are performing until their accountant presents them with a set of year-end figures. Often this can be 12 to18 months later than needed. How can you possibly deal with a problem that far in the past?
Having alerts provides a solution – simple numbers that help you to spot that something isn’t quite working. Then you can fix things or take evasive action. When things go wrong, often it’s because people haven’t recognised the signs, which can be evident months in advance.
Always stay very close to your finances, and measure your performance daily, because that will give you 261 opportunities a year to put things right, not just 12 times because you’re only measuring performance every month.
My Final Word…
Start getting EXCITED about your numbers and finances. They’ll give you all the answers you need – you just need to ask the right questions.
You can then start understanding where you are right now and then start planning what else you could be doing. Excited, right?
Finally…if you’re a partnership or family business, then please involve them. Discuss and agree your financial goals – both personally and for the business. See how they all connect. Hop on calls together. Share burdens. Celebrate success.
Ohh final, final word. SHARE THEM WITH THE TEAM. Business is a team game, so your team need to understand where you are so they can help you get to where you want to go. If not they are just passengers.
“The Four-Day Week: Entrepreneurs are Most at Risk” Claims Author of #1 Amazon Bestseller I don’t work Fridays
As a growing number of firms and bodies, including the TUC, are looking to cut the standard working week from five days to four1, Martin Norbury, Britain’s Top 10 Business Adviser and author of #1 Amazon Bestseller I don’t work Fridays warns that it’s Entrepreneurs who are most at risk because they’re the wrong people to lead this change.
Norbury explains: “Entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of the UK economy, yet so many small businesses fail to live up to their full potential because the very skills that make them so valuable at the start-up phase often become a hindrance when it comes to making a significant step-change.”
“It’s our experience working with entrepreneurs across 60+ industries, that the biggest stumbling block is letting go; business owners either let go too early or not quick enough. In order to move to a four-day week, owners will have to stop controlling everything and delegate, accepting that others may have their own ways of doing things. They’ll also need to have the right systems and processes in place to avoid failing altogether.”
Once the business owner has let go, Norbury explains the next challenge of moving to a four-day week: “Entrepreneurs simply don’t know enough about their business; they throw everything at it and hope something sticks. To make the shift to a reduced working week, owners will have to get intimate with their business to understand the impact on productivity and profitability. I’ve met too many entrepreneurs who simply don’t know their numbers or how their business is performing right now, let alone planning for the future.”
One final challenge many entrepreneurs face is a lack of focus. Norbury elaborates: “I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and they’re all fantastic at the start-up phase; their hard work and commitment is incredible. But by nature, many become distracted by shiny new tools or the ‘next big thing’. In order to successfully operate a four-day a week at a sustainable productive level, owners must ensure they’re playing their own game and not everyone else’s. They mustn’t just jump on the bandwagon and its essential they have an end game and a plan to get there. More often than not entrepreneurs start playing everyone else’s game, meaning that they get caught up in a strategy of playing not to lose, rather than playing to win.”
In his #1 Amazon Bestseller I don’t work Fridays, Norbury explains why the entrepreneur is the wrong person to grow their business, and reveals a simple 5-step formula to give leaders confidence, a clear structure and process to follow, and a set of simple tools to help business owners achieve growth and realise their ambitions – without growing broke.
1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48125411
Ends
Martin Norbury is available to provide expert comment on business growth, investment and exit. Please contact media@myadvocatementor.com / 0203 603 1112. See more at www.myadvocatementor.com.
Notes to editors:
Martin Norbury of Advocate Business Services went from small time entrepreneur, to SME business owner and onto CEO of a multi-million-pound corporation in just ten years. His Scale Model™ is used across 60+ industries, earning him the badge of The Scalability Coach. Martin in a multi-award-winning entrepreneur:
- Entrepreneurs’ Champion of the Year Finalist 2019 (NatWest Great British Entrepreneur Awards)
- Britain’s Top 10 Business Adviser 2018 (Enterprise Nation)
- Champion of Entrepreneurship Top 25 (Smith & Williamson Power 100)
- Runner-Up of Profile of the Year Award 2015 (Daniel Priestley, Dent Global)
- Business Mentor of the Year 2015 (APCTC)
- Business Growth Advisor of the Year 2012 (The Entrepreneurs Circle)