Getting help, Business Life Coaching, external support
Building a Beautiful Business starts at home…
What does it take to build your own Beautiful Business and Life? What is Business-Life Coaching anyway? What are the Principles of Business-Life Coaching? How is Business-Life Coaching different from any other form of business support or guidance. And above all, why should that matter to you at all?
Business-Life Coaching… It’s about everything
When thinking about building a Beautiful Business, we tend to think about:
And possibly a bunch of others I’ve yet forgotten.
When did you last look in the mirror?
Which of those are the most important, do you think? Which of these matter more than any others?
They’re all important, no doubt, but the key factor in developing a Beautiful Business and Life isn’t in the list above. The aspect of business that “Rules them all”, in the words of Gandalf in The Lord of The Rings, is looking at you in the mirror… That’s right, You… Little Old You.
More money, more time, more balance, more life…
The Principles of Business-Life Coaching can be expressed in this statement:
If you want something you’ve never had before,
First, you’ve got to be someone you’ve never been before.
As you’re reading this page, I imagine you want the future of your business and your life to be different than it is now. You want to grow, make more money, find more time, have greater work-life-balance, retire (with a bunch of cash), make the world a better place, be proud of the stuff your business produces, and make a difference.
And that’s great, I love supporting people that have exciting dreams and want to make a splash. It’s what I get out of bed for every day.
Are you the kind of person?
But none of us can have any of those dreams, unless we’re prepared to become the kind of person who builds the kind of business that makes the kind of profit you dream of, or that makes the kind of difference we dream of, or that is sold for the kind of dollars we dream of. Would you like to Discover what’s possible for you and your business?
Hence my focus on Business and Life Coaching. The “hard” skills as well as the “soft” skills of developing your business. I will teach you about the latest business management thinking, and we’ll design new systems customised to your business. We’ll create business and marketing plans that work and implement them. We’ll get clear about the Purpose of your business, you’ll implement controls and get good at numbers so that you have your fingers on the Pulse every day. We’ll get your staff firing on all cylinders. We may develop new products and come up with innovative solutions to bust past the hurdles that have held your business back.
You’ve Got All Da Moves…
We’ll do all that and much more besides, but at the same time we’ll be working on what it takes to be a great business owner who builds a Beautiful Business and Life. We’ll work on leadership skills, self management skills, developing your vision, prioritising what’s most important in your life, goal setting, strategic thinking, planning, communication, people management, how to get out of crisis management, and above all we’ll work on how to look after yourself.
Building a Beautiful Business and Life, is a journey out of your comfort zone. It means you have to be prepared to look at yourself, acknowledge that you’re the bottleneck that holds your business back and say:
This is the tenth post in the series of The Ten Priorities: Laying the Foundations for a Great Business and Life. The tenth Priority is about Managing the marketing. The introduction to this series on The Ten Priorities is here.
The second rule of Seth Godin is to make sure lots of people know about your great product or service.
It may seem obvious. No matter how great your products, your people, your systems, your visions and your plans are, if nobody knows how great they, there will be no business.
Many business owners will go out of their way to build a great product, but forget the second Rule. (BTW, the inverse is also true, more about the two different types of entrepreneurs here)
But both rules are equally important.
A business owner who wants to build a great business must learn that in business:
Marketing is everything, and everything is marketing.
A great business owner asks himself about the marketing dimension of every aspect of the business. Marketing is as much about the way the business goes about collecting its debts, or about the way people answer the telephones, or about its product warranty, as it is about the Facebook advertising campaign it’s running.
In fact, it can be said, that any activity in the business that does not have a marketing dimension to it, is a waste and should be stopped immediately. (more about the basics of marketing here)
When you learn to ask yourself about the marketing aspect to every decision you make, every system you develop and every action you take, every day, your business will flourish… I promise you.
Now that you’ve finished Ten Priorities, find out more about yourself and take “The Entrepreneur Type Survey”
This is the eighth post in the series of The Ten Priorities: Laying the Foundations for a Great Business and Life. The eighth Priority is about Managing your People. The introduction to this series on The Ten Priorities is here.
Great businesses employ great people that deliver great work.
Business owners who want to build great businesses must get good at managing people. There is no way around that.
But for many business owners, people are a source of great stress and anxiety. They spend their days hoping things will go ok, and practice the ancient art of:
Management by keeping your fingers crossed
And that’s because they Abdicate, instead of Delegate to their employees.
Abdicating is giving someone a job and hoping they’ll somehow get it done right.
Most people feel good when they have an opportunity to do good work. Human beings (and employees are in fact human beings, I promise you) get a lot of satisfaction from doing good work, but the problem is, they often don’t know what constitutes good work. They’ve not been given clear outcomes, and they’re given conflicting priorities and feedback. And so, they flounder, they make it up themselves, they disengage, and the job does not get done right.
Delegating, on the other hand, is about discussing the job with the employee; explaining to them what the required outcomes of the job are; making it clear what good work looks like; asking for input and buy-in on the job; asking what the person needs to be able to deliver the required outcomes; agreeing on time frames and check-in points, and finally, agreeing on reporting and KPI’s for the work. (More about engaging your staff here)
When you learn how to delegate while keeping your fingers on the pulse as opposed to keeping them crossed, you will start to build a great business… I promise you.
This is the seventh post in the series of The Ten Priorities: Laying the Foundations for a Great Business and Life. The seventh Priority is about Managing the Money. The introduction to this series on The Ten Priorities is here.
I’ve said before (in priority #3), that a business must make profit, or it’s a hobby.
But in Priority #7 we’re not talking about profit, we’re talking about financial management.
Most business owners outsource the bookkeeping and accounting functions of their business. That’s great, but there are two problems with that:
Business owners often misunderstand what accounting is.
Reporting arrangements are often inadequate
The misunderstanding is that business owners generally don’t appreciate that there are two different types of accounting:
Compliance accounting
Financial management accounting
Compliance accounting is simply about how much tax the business must pay. What matters about that, is that it is done properly and timely. But compliance accounting is only the tip of the iceberg.
The most interesting part of the iceberg
The rest of the iceberg, the most interesting part of the iceberg is Financial Management accounting. Accounting that answers questions such as: “Last month, what percentage of our income went to wages?” Or, “In the last six months, which have been our 10 most profitable products?”
And that leads to the second of the problems I mentioned before:
You must get regular reports that give you the answers to the financial management questions that matter to you. And those reports must arrive promptly. I tell my clients to insist that the financial management reports about last month arrive on their desk no later than the fifth day of the new month.
When you sit down with your accountant and bookkeeper and explore with them the financial management questions you need answers to, to build a great business, and insist they give you those answers, every month, your business and your life will never be the same again… I promise you
This is the sixth post in the series of The Ten Priorities: Laying the Foundations for a Great Business and Life. The sixth Priority is about not doing it all on your own. The introduction to this series on The Ten Priorities is here.
Do you have a little voice on your shoulder, that whispers in your ear?
Most of us do.
And a lot of what the little voice whispers in our ears is not very nice, is it?
The basic message from the little voice, is that we suck.
We’re not good enough. We’re not cutting it as parents, as lovers, as friends and especially we’re not cutting it as business owners.
And for most business owners that little voice goes from whispering to yelling, the moment we even consider committing the heinous crime of asking for help.
Asking for support in business, is almost guaranteed to get the little voice on our shoulder extremely excited.
Deep down we all believe that being a great business owner, an inspiration to our staff and customers alike, means we must do it all ourselves. We seem to think that business success is only meaningful if we’ve done it all alone.
Hogwash… Utter nonsense.
It takes a village to build a great business. One of my most successful and oldest clients has built a whole team of specialist advisers, coaches and mentors around him. (more about getting external help here)
I guarantee that no matter which inspiring business role model you interview, they’ll all tell you their success is due partly to the support of one or more mentors, coaches or advisers.
No-one can do it all alone.
You need other people to:
Hold you accountable to your plans and goals.
Brainstorm with you and be a sounding board.
Support you when you stumble.
Give you honest opinions, advice and feedback.
There are many ways to get outside support. You can join a business support group, get a business coach, or mentor, start your own advisory board, or all of the above. But whatever you do, dropkick your little voice…Forget trying to do it all on your own… You can’t … I promise you.
More about the various forms of business support, guidance and advice that are available to small business owners here
What’s the most important question to ask yourself every day?
This is the fifth post in the series of The Ten Priorities: Laying the Foundations for a Great Business and Life. The fifth Priority is about Planning. The introduction to this series on The Ten Priorities is here.
Nothing of value was ever achieved by humans without a plan.
This is a fact
A business without a plan achieves everything in it
Yet planning is guessing, right? Nobody can know what tomorrow is actually going to look like, all we can do is guess.
That’s planning: We’re at point A, and we want to get to point B by date X. There are many routes to point B, so knowing what we know about today and given what we expect the world to look like tomorrow, what do we guess is the best route to get to point B by X?
Tomorrow the world changes
But tomorrow the world is a different place. Tomorrow it might snow along the route we’d planned to take to point B, and we must change the route.
That’s the secret about planning: Planning is something we must do again every day. When realities change, we must change our plans right along with them. (more about Planning here).
The most effective leaders have already thought about the possibility of snow along the chosen route, long before the snow actually appears, and they’ve already worked out how to change the route to point B in that eventuality.
Business owners who build great businesses, constantly ask themselves:
What if?
They ask themselves: “We’ve got a plan, based on certain assumptions… But… What if… any one of those assumptions turns out to be wrong, what do we do instead?”
When you learn to ask, “What if?”, all the time, you’ll respond quickly and appropriately to the changing realities and keep your business moving forward… I promise you
What is the only measurement that matters in business?
This is the third post in the series of The Ten Priorities: Laying the Foundations for a Great Business and Life. The third Priority is about Having Fun. The introduction to this series on The Ten Priorities is here.
If you could only measure one thing to know how successful your business was at any one moment in time, what would you want to measure?
Most business owners will mention profit. And profit matters a lot of course, if you’re not making profit you’re operating a hobby, not a business, simple as that. But there is something even more important than profit in your business, and that’s Fun.
Fun is all that matters in business
Fun is all that matters in business
You see if Business is Fun, it means everything is working. (read more about Fun in Business here)
It means you’re making money
It means your customers love you
It means your staff are highly engaged
It means you’re proud of the products or services your business provides
It means you have created the kind of balance in work and live that is important for you
And it means you’re engaged in something meaningful, bigger than you.
By focusing solely on money as the indicator of success in business, you are doing yourself and everyone else who is touched by the business a disservice.
Obviously, measuring Fun in Business is not as simple as looking at your bank balance and you have to get creative about how you go about measuring it, but it’s quite doable and it will change the way you think about building a Great Business and Life… I promise you.
12 questions to find the right support guidance advice coach business
No entrepreneur has ever done it all alone. You need help, but what type of help do you need?
No human being has ever achieved anything of note on his or her own. In business and in life humans need other people, for support, guidance and belonging. We are wired that way. A mentor of mine used to say: “Right now there’s a monkey in Africa somewhere, dying because he’s been kicked out of his tribe”. We can not function in isolation. That doesn’t mean we don’t sometimes like being on our own, and some people need more alone time than others, but we all need support.
Powerful 12 Questions Guide and videos
But hiring a coach, a mentor or adviser is a big step. There’s a lot riding on getting it right. Hence I have created the 12 Questions Guide and Cheat Sheet for finding and hiring the right coach for you. You can download the Guide by filling in the forms on this page or you can go straight to the special 12 Questions page on my website and besides the Guide, there is also a second much more comprehensive video to help you through the whole process of finding, inteviewing and selecting the perfect coach for you and your business.
Free Discovery Process
You can also Click here to go straight to my Five Steps to Discovery Process to find the support you need to discover and build your own Beautiful Business and Life
Some of that business support can come from our friends and family, but accountability, holding up a mirror, independent perspectives and honest feedback especially, can’t come from those close to you. You can’t ask your spouse to hold you accountable to your strategic Goals, it leads to divorce (trust me on that). Your friends won’t provide an independent perspective, because they’re not independent. Your brother can’t hold a mirror up to you, because there’s too much baggage in your shared history.
People who build Beautiful Businesses and Lives, know it takes a village and they are always looking for the right support. My oldest and most successful client, has three different coaches, and he cycles between us. He does 6 months with me and then he goes and works with his business coach in New Zealand and then he does a stint with his executive coach and then he comes back to me again. (You can read the story of Narinder Singh from QE foodstores here)
Besides us three coaches Narinder has developed important relationships with his external accountant, his HR consultant, a marketing consultant, an IT consultant and a property adviser. He’s involved all of his advisers in all of his big decisions and planning in the past 10 years, and he credits his team of advisers and coaches with the fact he is so successful. (He’s a humble man, so let me put it on record now that his success is at least equally due to his incredible passion and determination, but the point remains).
As I said above, we all need support when developing our businesses. And what’s more, we need different kinds of support at different stages on the journey. I myself have engaged, mentors, coaches, consultants, counsellors and therapists in the past 15 years and I’ve joined various different business support groups at different times as well.
The main forms of business support:
Mentoring:
Mentors are often people who’ve “been there, done that”. They’re usually a bit older, they might even be retired and they often have direct experience in your specific industry or business type. Some mentors do their mentoring on a volunteer basis, others get paid a little or a lot. Mentoring can be really powerful in the early years of developing your business. I believe the most effective method to find a great mentor is to find someone you look up to in your industry and approach him or her and simply ask them.
Many senior business owners really enjoy being asked to “give back”. I have have taken a role of mentor for some young business owners in the past and you can feel free to contact me to discuss a mentoring relationship. There are also a number of small business mentoring organisations you can contact. One of them is the Small Business Mentoring Services, find out more here.
Whether you work with a volunteer mentor or a paid one, there is one thing you must keep in mind to get the most out of the relationship: You have to drive the agenda. When you sit down with your mentor you have to know what specific questions you need to address in the meeting and what input you need from your mentor. If you don’t control the agenda you’ll waste enormous amounts of time and the mentor will start to feel uncomfortable. (More about the secrets of great mentoring relationships here).
Business coaching companies generally have developed a system for growing a business and their coaches will teach you the system and help you implement it. One of the best organisations I’ve come across who do exactly this and don’t stray outside of that model are EOS Worldwide. Their Australian franchisee is contactable here.
I believe it can be very useful to work with the right business coaching company for a while, to learn their systems and get help with it’s implementation into your business. But to build a Beautiful Business that Stands the Test of Time, you can’t ignore the personal side of growing your business: Find an executive or leadership coach or someone like me (see below) to support you in the journey of personal development and leadership that is integral to creating the business you dream of.
Business-Life Coaching:
business support, coaching, guidance, external advice
I am a Business-Life Coach. What that means is that I start from the principle that:
“Your business is what it is today, because of who you are today”.
This means that if you want your business to change, you must be prepared to change first.
So I, and coaches like me, combine the “hard” business systems with the “soft” personal skills. I will teach you about the latest business management systems and techniques, design new systems customised to your business and help you implement them, but at the same time we’ll be working on what it takes to be a great business owner. We’ll work on leadership skills, self management skills, developing your vision, prioritising, goal setting, strategic thinking, planning, communication, people management, and how to get out of crisis management. (More here)
Free Five Step Discovery Process:
Before we engage in any of my coaching programs, I always suggest we follow my Five Steps to Discovery Process, starting with a free 30 minute Discovery Coaching session (Skype) combined with a short business discovery survey and report. You can book a Discovery Business Coaching session and Business Discovery Survey through any one of the forms on The Five Steps page here. In the Discovery session, we’ll get to know each other a little and I’ll get some insight into what stage you and your business are at, allowing me to tailor the next steps in the Five Steps to Discovery Process
More about the difference between business coaching companies and a Business-Life Coach like myself here.
An Executive or Leadership Coach is skilled in helping people develop their leadership skills. Executive coaches are more often engaged with executives of larger organisations than with small business owners, but one of the three coaches that Narinder Singh, who I talk about above, works with is an executive coach. There are many executive coaches to choose from. The best I can suggest is to do an introductory session with 3 different executive coaches and make your assessment based on how you feel at the end of each of the three sessions.
Choosing an executive coach is almost entirely about how you click with him or her. Feel free to send me an email to ask for a referral to a trustworthy executive coach. You might also have a look at the website of the International Coach Federation, it’s the professional body of record for executive coaches worldwide.
Pulling together an advisory board for your business can be a highly effective strategy to get the support you need to drive the development of your business forward. You can create your own board and ask a bunch of people you trust, with varying skills and experience to become part of your board, and maybe meet with them once a month for 2 or 3 hours. You may decide to pay these board members a fee for their time and input or you may ask them to sit on your board on a voluntary basis, and you yourself may in turn do the same for someone else. Advisory boards like this are often really valuable and offer great support, but they can sometimes be short lived, because of time pressure on various board members.
You can also join an advisory board program run by specialist organisations. Those programs are usually run by a professional facilitator and there might be anywhere from 5 to maybe 15 members on a board, all of whom are business owners and the members meet every month and support each other. I run a board program like that from time to time called The Business Growth Club and there are various other organisation that do the same thing such as TEC, The CEO Institute and Coraggio. I’ve also written a White Paper about benefits of Advisory Boards that you can download here.
Business study and training:
At different stages on the journey of entrepreneurship it may be important to improve your skill and knowledge levels. When moving from solo-entrepreneur to small business owner and beyond it can simply be beneficial to go back to school and learn about the latest business management techniques and philosophies. You can go to university and take post graduate or summer school courses on specific topics in marketing, innovation, management, leadership etc, or you may enroll in a full MBA program.
Alternatively it may be more relevant for you to engage with the Vocational Education and Training system (VET, via TAFE or via many registered private training organisations in the country, more here) The Business Growth Club program I mentioned above often incorporates a VET training component, leading to the Diploma of Business or to a Diploma of Leadership.
I believe personal development is integral to developing your business. The two always go hand in hand. It’s the reason I refer to myself as a Business – Life Coach, rather than a business coach. It all boils down to one word: Leadership.
Most business owners, in the deepest dark reaches of their mind, are afraid they’re not quite cutting it as entrepreneurs. Oftentimes, as business owners, we start our business on the back of a profession, a trade, or a skill we have learnt (plumber, architect, accountant, software developer, designer, mechanic, chef, retail manager) and we feel confident in that particular skill. Starting a new business is an enormous buzz. But once we start a business based on that profession, we suddenly realise it takes a lot more than being a great plumber to build a great plumbing business.
Time to think, doing nothing
Where’s the toilet paper?
Few business owners have studied to be a business owner, and even those who have attained an MBA or similar qualification, find they’re not prepared for the realities of life as a small business owner. Suddenly everything is down to you, the big decisions about whether or not to bid for that contract, or hire that expensive employee, or sign the lease for the new office, as well as making sure the toilets are stocked with toilet paper and that there’s ink for the printer. To top it off, your people look to you to have Vision, to have the answers and to be the leader.
Three pieces of good news about your leadership
It can be a frightening place to stand in the middle off, but there are three pieces of good news:
You got this far and you’re still standing, so you must be doing something right.
Your people actually want you to be the leader and they’re ready to forgive you just about any stuff up you’re going to make along the way.
Leadership is something you can learn, practice and get better at.
What is leadership then?
Leadership starts with this statement:
Your business is what it is today, because of WHO you ARE today.
That may seem obvious. But what may not be so obvious is what follows.
Because what it means is this:
If you want SOMETHING you’ve never had before,
First, you’ve got to BECOME SOMEONE you’ve never been before.
Systems and knowledge are never enough
Many business coaching companies sell a “system” that will supposedly deliver a business that generates a million dollars of profit every year. Those systems are often well thought through, well presented and well worth looking into, but they rarely work, at least not by themselves. The reason they don’t work is that Change, business Change or personal Change, is never about systems and knowledge. Just like we all know the system for losing weight (eat less, and exercise more), most of us business owners already know most of what we need to know to Change our businesses.
And just like losing weight means becoming the kind of person who commits to a regimen of eating less and exercising more, changing our businesses means having to become the kind of person who commits to a regimen of developing as people, as managers, as communicators, as coaches… As leaders in other words.
We have to become leaders, the kind of people, who do what needs to be done, to build the kind of businesses that make a million dollars net profit (or substitute whatever figure is relevant for you).
Becoming that kind of business owner, that kind of leader, who builds that kind of business, doesn’t happen overnight. You can’t flick a switch and suddenly become that person. Change is a Journey, an adventure, a process of growth. It takes time and commitment, and nobody can know, on forehand, what your adventure is going to look like or what the outcome of your Journey is going to be. Every business owner has his or her own Journey to make, and every Journey is different.
The one thing we can be sure of is this:
Change won’t happen unless you get on the Journey.
Getting on the Journey means stepping out of your comfort-zone and then staying there. You have to push off from the shore, get out onto the ocean, set a course for the horizon and not come back, because Change never happens in the safety of the harbour.
And you know this already. Take a look back over your life to date: It’s all been a Journey. Ten years ago you couldn’t have done what you do today.
But sometimes we just get stuck for a while in the safety of the harbour. Stepping out of your comfort-zone, leaving the harbour, is hard. The day-to-day of scrubbing the decks, repairing the sails and polishing the brass work gets in the way. And before you know it, the day-to-day is all there is.
The two questions you need to answer
That leads to two questions:
How do you know you’re ready to get on the Journey?
How do you get on that Journey?
The first question is the easiest as well as the hardest to answer:
You’re ready when you feel you’re ready.
More about the connection between personal and Business Change:
Do take a few minutes to watch this gorgeous TED talk by David Whyte, on past and future and journeys of Change.
There’s nothing wrong with being in the harbour for a while. We need to make sure the ship is seaworthy and safe, we need to make sure we know how to sail the ship, we need to learn to navigate and we need to get clear about the compass course we’re going to set once we get under way. The harbour is a great place to do all those things. But there comes a moment when the pull of the wide open ocean becomes irresistible. That’s when it’s time to go. And when you do: Set the course, hoist the sails, put your gaze on the horizon, and don’t look back.
How do you get on the Journey?
And the second question: How do you get on that Journey?
There are many ways to strike out, but one way to get onto such a Journey of discovery, is with me. I take my clients on inspiring journeys like that all the time. You could think of me like the captain of the ship. I know how to keep the ship safe, I know how to navigate, how not to hit the reefs and how to get safely back into harbour at the other end.
And I’d love to come on your next adventure with you.
Once you’ve decided that it’s time to push off and get under way, the process I will take you through is this:
We’ll get very clear about the state of your business and life as it is at the moment. What are the strengths of the business? What are your strengths as the business owner? Where are the stresses in your life? What are the areas in the business that are falling behind? What are the areas you need to develop in as leader?
We take several small steps first. You’ll get to put your toe in the water, feel what it’s like working with me. It’s called the Five Steps to Discovery Process, and it’s mostly free.
We’ll get equally clear about what we want the other end of the Journey to look like. In 6 – 9 – 12 months what do you want your business and your life to look like, in great detail? We’ll develop an enormous set of Goals and picture of the desired future. The Goals will include tangibles, and intangibles. It will include financial targets, and KPI’s across all areas of the business and your life. It will include your state of mind and your health and wellbeing, and everything else that you need to explore and discover to build the business and the life you dream off.
We’ll develop a strategic plan for the achievement of the Goal, with a wide range of monthly milestones.
We’ll shake hands and commit to the Journey, get on board, set the compass course for The Goal, push off, and not come back.
Ultimately, making the decision to Change, to get on the Journey, is Fun. It may not always appear that way, when looking out onto the vastness of the ocean at first, but it will be the most satisfying decision you’ve taken in a long time… I promise you.
This is the second post in the series of The Ten Priorities: Laying the Foundations for a Great Business and Life. The second Priority is about Doing Nothing. The introduction to this series on The Ten Priorities is here.
Time management, time to think
The other question I sometimes ask my clients is: What do you think is the best use of your time?
And of course, people generally walk into that little trap just as blissfully unaware as the trap I set in Priority #1.
People will mention delegating, sales, customer service, marketing, planning, leadership, quality control, systems, financial management, coaching staff, you name it. Every function in the business has at some time been offered as the answer to my question.
The answers is : No – Thing
But the most important use of your time is: No – Thing… The most valuable thing you can do with your time as a business owner is to put your feet up on the desk and do nothing for an hour. No phone, no email, no interruptions… and THINK.
There is the work of the business, and then there’s the work of the business owner. The work of the business can often be delegated or outsourced. But the work of the business owner can only ever be done by you. And thinking, reflecting, day-dreaming even, is the ultimate work of the business owner. (More about doing nothing here)
When you make the conscious decision to get rid of all other distractions for a while, your brain will blossom, you’ll start to think more clearly, you’ll be creative and resourceful again and you’ll suddenly see opportunities and solutions you never saw before.
Go to a café, go for a walk, go and sit on a bench in a park… and do … nothing … It will transform your business… I promise you
