The Business Owners Success Conference in Denver two weeks ago was amazing. For all of you who were there, it was great spending the three days with you focused on taking your business to the next level.
The feedback we got really meant so much to our entire team. One participant Max shared how over his 30 years in business he’s attended over 400 business workshops and he learned more in the three days with us than in all the other workshops combined.
Another participant Christine put it this way: “It was an INCREDIBLE weekend! I’m very new to the whole concept of a business because I’ve always worked in Corporate America. I left the conference this weekend feeling so empowered! It’s only the beginning!”
Now I want to walk you through the Level Three Roadmap™.
Too many business owners never reach their business goals because they are following the wrong map. They know what they want, but they don’t know how to get there. I created the Level Three Roadmap based on my personal experiences building Level Three businesses, and my work with the other Maui Advisors and clients.
Level One: Planning Your Business and Proving It’s Viable
At Level One you’re designing and planning your new start-up. You’re gathering your initial team, raising any required start-up capital, and executing your launch plan. Your focus at Level One is to plan out your new business and get immediate market feedback as to whether your business concept and model is economically viable. This is just a fancy way to say that you will be testing your product or service to see if you can sell it at a price at which you can be profitable.
Action Steps:
1. Create your business plan.
2. Test market your product or service to prove it will sell.
3. Raise your start-up capital (if outside funding is even needed which usually it isn’t).
4. Launch!
Early Stage Level Two Business: Making Your Business Sustainable Focus: Securing Your Early Clients and Becoming Profitable.
An Early Stage Level Two business is fresh in the marketplace. It’s just started actively marketing and selling its products or services. This is the time to learn your business and market, and discover and cure any fatal flaws in the way the market perceives the value you are creating, or in your business model.
Action Steps:
1. Sell! Sell! Sell! (without early sales you have no cash flow and hence no business)
2. Fulfill on your client promises (this will be a bit of a scramble).
3. As you are able, systematize your core selling and fulfillment processes into written systems.
Middle Stage Level Two Business: Establishing Your Business Core Focus: Establishing your business’s foundation; building your business’s core systems and structure
At Middle Stage Level Two it’s time that you start the process of building your core systems, controls, and scalable solutions. The challenge is that you have to do that while balancing your business’s need for you to continue to lead your business’s the daily operation. This is a delicate balance between what you business needs today, and what it will need tomorrow. Thankfully you don’t have to figure this all out yourself, the Level Three Road Map tells you that at Middle Stage Level Two you have to build out the baseline systems for the following 5 areas:
1. Your “Master System” – the system of all your systems. This Master System is how you organize, store, access, and update the bulk of your business systems. 2.Your “Core Systems” to generate leads, close sales, fulfill on customer orders, and deliver on client promises. 3. Your most pressing business controls, especially those around the financial area of your business. These include your accounts receivable, accounts payable, and your financial record keeping and reporting, all of which help you manage your cash flow and protect against any financial abuses. You also want to design your first rough dashboard showing how your business as a whole is performing at any given moment. 4. Your big picture strategic plan. This includes your business priorities, plan of action, and clarified branding and market positioning. 5. Solidifying your initial team. These are the early team members you’ll lean on as you grow your business. You’ve still got to hire cautiously both due to cash flow concerns and also your business’s immaturity, but now is the time to begin to hire on—slowly and deliberately—higher order talent.
Level Two Advanced Stage: Building a Systems Reliant Company with a Winning Management Team Focus: Increasing your capacity and scaling your business.
One of the essential pieces in building a Level Three business is for you to enroll your team in building the business systems, controls, and scalable solutions with you. Rather than see the team around you merely as a form of leverage that magnifies your personal reach and production, instead see them as partners in taking the business to the next level. As management guru Peter Drucker once said, “The founder has to learn to become the leader of a team rather than a “star” with “helpers”.”
Level Three: Owning a Business that Gives You Freedom and Control Focus: To determine your desired exit strategy clarify your personal role
Are you going to sell the business? Scale the business much larger? Or transition into owning your business in a much more passive role for yourself?
I hope this rough outline of the Level Three Roadmap sparked you to look at your business differently.
I’d like to share with you some thoughts on growing your business.
Quick Thoughts on Scaling up Your Marketing Winners
One of the clear leverage points in a business is to scale up your winning sales and marketing systems. Before you rush off and take action, this simple statement requires further comment.
Notice I said scale up your winning sales and marketing systems. The two key words here are “winning” and “systems”. It does you no good to scale up your mediocre efforts. But this requires that you have accurate numbers to track your sales and marketing efforts. If you don’t, this process of creating tracking systems and a meaningful sales and marketing scorecard is the place to start.
Also, you can only effectively scale a repeatable process, hence the emphasis on SYSTEMS.
Assuming you know which selling and marketing systems are your clear winners, brainstorm 10 ways you could scale them up.
Could you send a winning direct mail letter to more people? Could you bring on more commissioned sales team members? Could you increase your key word add buy? Could you focus on scaling up your affiliate program? You get the idea.
Take the energy that you invest in your poorest performing 50% of sales and marketing systems and redirect that considerable time, money, and focus on your best winners.
I’ve been hard at work on our newest book (ebook version due out in early March with bookstore version available in May). The theme of the book is how to build a business, not a job. To this end, systems is a huge sub-focus in the book. That’s why I wanted to share with you some ideas on making your business more systems-reliant.
What Are Systems?
Systems are reliable processes and procedures that empower your business to consistently produce an excellent result for your clients or customers. They are the documented expressions of your business’s best practices that increase your company’s efficiencies and reduce costly mistakes.
Systems include things like the checklists your shipping clerks follow to ensure that all orders are shipped correctly; they include the orientation process you take all new clients through at the start of your working together; they are also the standardized contracts you have in place that you use with all your new hires and vendors. Basically, anything that allows your business to get a consistently great result in an area of your business that is captured in a tangible format, versus just locked in the brain of an individual team member, is a business system.
Take the example of Bonnie, one of our Level Three Business Consulting Program Clients. Bonnie owns a successful occupational therapy business. She’s smart and a very talented occupational therapist. After we had been working together for several months it became clear that the office manager she had running the administrative and billing side of her business just wasn’t the right fit for her practice. It is never easy to let a team member go but Bonnie knew that the business needed someone else in that key role.
During the process of letting her go, Bonnie realized that much of the knowledge for how to run the back office in her practice wasn’t formally captured in any systems, but rather was tied up in her and her ex-office manager’s heads. We encouraged and coached Bonnie how best to let her old office manager go, and to use her new hire as an opportunity to systematize the core functions for that role.
This is exactly what she is hard at work doing right now: writing up the step-by-step procedures for bringing on a new client, including collating all the new client documentation templates and filled-out samples so that any team member could walk a new client through the process. She is even redesigning her billing procedures to make sure clients are charged the right amounts at the right times. She’s documenting the therapist scheduling processes and the other key back office functions. In the end she’ll have reduced her business’s reliance on any one specific “Office Manager”, improved the performance from that role through clear systems and training her new hire in the role, and increased her cash flow by over $50,000 by correcting all the mistakes in her practice’s billing which she painfully learned that her old office manager had done in an inconsistent and haphazard manner.
What About Your Business?
How much of your business know-how is locked away in the brains of your team members?
What if you lose one or more of these team members?
What can you do in the next 90 days to reduce your business’s vulnerability to losing any of these key team members, including you?
I wanted to give you three simple sets of questions for you to answer right now that are intended to help you enjoy your business more.
1. What 2 things do I love doing for my business? How can I make the time to do more of these 2 things?
2. What 2 things do I hate doing in my business? How can I hand them off to someone else? How can I design them out of my business? If I can’t get rid of them then at least how can I make them more fun?
3. What one thing can I do different in my week next week that will help me feel more energized and engaged by my business?
1. Turn your email settings to manually send and receive and then only hit the send and receive button at pre-determined times during the day. Don’t have it do it real time. Have it do it on your terms.
2. Turn off any auditory bells or visual alerts that tell you that you have a new email message waiting. Not only are these cues a costly interruption to your workday, but they are also tempting prompts that can lure you into spending too much time in your email program.
3. Train your team, vendors, and clients to understand that you personally will not be on email during your focus day(s). Give them an alternative method of getting help in an emergency situation, and if necessary, define what that emergency is and isn’t.
4. Age your email. The sooner you respond to an email the more email you will get. Sometimes the best thing you can do to reduce your overall email volume is to age your email by a few days to a few weeks before you respond. It’s amazing how effective this is to encourage people to email you less.
5. Use the 1-2-3 email subject line technique to help your company better filter email throughout the company. A “1″ at the start of the subject line means “Urgent and Important Action Required”. A “2″ at the start of the subject line means “action required, but okay if it happens over next few days.” A “3″ at the start of the subject line means “FYI only, no action required”.
E.g. Subject: 1: Parker contract needs to be sent in by 5pm today
E.g. Subject: 2: 5 action steps for Bond St. location
Using these cues to your recipient inside your company lets your team better filter which emails they need to handle and when.
Been working with a client (Brian) in our consulting program. Like most small business owners he’s faced with the challenge of which opportunities to focus on.
Business owners - you have limited resources so you MUST focus them where they will do the maximum good for your business. The enemy of the best is not the worst - it’s the good. It’s easy to drop the worst, but very hard to let go of “good” opportunities to focus your company’s resources on the best. But that’s exactly what you must do if you want to massively grow and scale your business.
Enjoy this 4 min audio post that talks through the finer points of this concept and shares Brian’s example of a business owner who’s making some very critical decisions.
Ever heard that when you start or grow an existing business that you have to give up your life to do it? Well it just isn’t so. Sure it takes focus and commitment to succeed in business, but listen to this short 4 min audio post where I share an example of how when you build your business the right way, growth means MORE freedom. Enjoy!
I wanted to share with you all two great examples of how some of your peers in the Maui Mastermind® community of business owners are stepping up to the challenge of growing their businesses.
I hope this short audio message inspires you in your business.
I had a great day writing today (I’m working on next business book for how to build a Level Three business.)
I wanted to give you a short (2 min) video detailing 2 very important ideas on how to re-energize your business in a tough economy.
Forget all the doom and gloomers out there. You can [...]
This year’s Maui Mastermind Wealth Summit was amazing. Feedback from participants (including several 3 and 4-time participants) called it the “Best Maui Ever!”
I wanted to share my personal top three lessons from Maui with you in the hopes that my insights will spark you to new thoughts about building your business and your wealth.
My Top [...]
