The 5 Business Fundamental Challenges
Introduction
Welcome to March, I hope you’ve had a strong January and February.
Business is going great.
First time in a while I’ve got my suit back on today.
Shirt and tie, board meetings.
I’m working with a company that was looking to get back to three million.
Now, if you’re serious about growing your business, I don’t know what that number looks like to you, three million, maybe you’re already at four or five, and that’s awesome.
Maybe you’re at half a million and you want to get to three million
Do You Want To Achieve Your Business Target?
So my challenge to you today is:
What exactly are you doing seriously about achieving that target?
Do you actually have a financial forecast in your business that you could measure, track performance against, and grow against, and make corrective actions should you wander off course?
It’s inevitable that you’ll do that.
The path to success is never A to Z.
You’ve got detours around every letter in the alphabet.
For me, I’ve checked out the board papers last night.
A couple of days ago when I was just asking the board members what their questions were, and their concerns were.
The only thing that we ever went back to was:
Where should we be?
- What does the forecast say?
- What do the numbers say?
Yeah, sure the sales group might be saying it’s hard out there, or the operations director’s got challenges his own, customer service or fulfilment or manufacturing.
But in reality, if you don’t have a set of cast iron numbers in your business, you should say by the 27th of June, 2017, I’m going to be here or there, then literally it’s like driving a car with the windscreen blacked out.
So if you’re absolutely fed up with driving a car with your windscreen blacked out, then you need a serious strategy, a serious growth strategy.
What Is Your Strong Business Plan?
You need a strong business plan, and you need to grow
Find a coach, a mentor, join a mastermind, it doesn’t matter what they are called.
Now, I want to review a couple of other solid tips and guidance today.
If you are struggling to get started, even starting with your accountant.
Get him to run some forecast based on your predictions.
If you’ve got somebody internal in your office who does that, even better.
But finance is the number one discipline of running a business.
Here’s why:
Without finance, operations and systems cannot be purchased or implemented.
Without systems, you cannot put people into your business to run them, and for those who still think that people run businesses, I’m sorry, they don’t.
It may be a personable business, but systems run businesses, and people run systems.
How can you market without finance?
With no capital go into the market.
How can you employ a sales team or have an online sales team presence?
An online e-commerce presence if you fail finance.
Corporate governance that sits at the end, well, doesn’t matter if you run your business right or wrong if you’re going to be out of business.
The reality is:
Five fundamental steps of the business.
Put a challenge on it today, and here’s what I want to ask you to do:
Get a piece of paper, and mark yourself and your own personal knowledge, and your team’s knowledge if you’ve got one, out of ten, what is my finance knowledge?
Finance
Reading profit and loss accounts?
- Understanding capital?
- Understanding balance sheets?
- Forecasting?
Mark yourself out of 10 on that.
Operations and Systems.
If you do a floor walk in your business, or visually mind-map the process of what your business is, maybe you work from home or whatever it would be.
- Have you got a system in place for finance?
- Have you got a system in place for customer service?
- Have you got a system in place for manufacturing, quality control, same for marketing?
- What’s your marketing system?
- What’s your sales system?
- Do you have one for governance?
Are you finally in the correct regulatory statutes and demands and balancing the shareholders, the stakeholders?
So, recount: Finance, score yourself out of 10.
Operations and systems, score yourself out of 10.
Marketing. Do you have a system in place that is totally aligned?
Our Power Of Alignment
At Mike Midgley Executive we call it the Power of Alignment.
That’s where your business model, your finance model, and your marketing model all just click together and you can really achieve high growth.
Marketing
So, what systems have you got in place for attracting new customers?
Educating them and retaining them?
Sales
From a sales perspective, how is that?
What systems, and score yourself out of 10 on sales.
Are you closing, not every lead, nobody does that.
But are you closing your fair share?
Are you out-competing your competitors?
Score yourself out of 10.
Corporate Governance.
If you’re a limited company, are you holding board meetings?
If you’re partnerships, are you holding partnership meetings?
- Are you documenting the things that you agree, the highs and the lows?
- Are you filing your returns on time?
- Are you operating legally?
So, five disciplines: finance, ops, people, sales and marketing, and corporate governance.
So, mark yourself out of 10 on your finance knowledge, your operations and systems knowledge, your people knowledge, your sales and marketing knowledge, and your corporate governance.
Let’s have a look at that score out of 50.
I really hope that you take some guidance.
Personal Development
Wherever you feel that you’ve got a skill shortage, tap into that personal development.
Stop listening to people who say do this personal development, or do that personal development.
When they’ve got absolutely no idea where you are in your businesses or cycle.
If you’re struggling with finance, doesn’t it make a tonne of sense to plug yourself into a personal development programme?
That’s more than reading books.
You’re studying it in your open university.
College, night school, online courses, training, getting into mastermind groups.
Doesn’t it make a tonne of sense if you’re struggling and you’re down on finance knowledge to plug yourself into some personal development in and around about finance?
Again, if you’re struggling in marketing or sales, or governance, plug yourself into a knowledge stream or a knowledge curve that’s going to help you with that
