Are you left uncertain and unsure because of the overwhelmingly negative news you’ve been reading and watching over the past year?
It seems like all the Wall Street Journal and Fox Business and other financial media giants have been talking about is how to “survive”.
Well I have a radically different view point for you. I strongly believe that now is a time when you can GROW your business.
The Quality of Your Question Determines the Results You Generate
If your focus is survival, you’re in for a tough time… Instead, I am coaching you to lift up your eyes and set your sites on growing your business.
Now maybe you’re saying, “David you’re crazy… my business is struggling just to survive these tough times… and now you are talking with me about growing?”
Yes! I am doing just that. And the reason I am is that the next 24-36 months are going to be pass no matter what you do. The real question is how will you use this time to grow and expand your business, increase your revenue and boost your cash flow.
And now is a real opportunity for you to do just this. But it’s up to you to grab it.
In this eletter I’m going to be talking directly to you as a business owner about how you use the current economic climate as the chance to grow your business and bottom-line. This is very fresh in my mind because I’ve been totally redesigning our Level Three Business Blueprint™ to take these factors into account. (I’m actually teaching this in two weeks to 50-60 business owners will be flying out to join me and Stephen in my hometown of Charlottesville to spend 3 focused days redesigning their businesses for maximum growth and maximum profit.)
Key Number One: You must focus on the opportunity.
If you constantly are focused on “survival”, how many opportunities do you think you will miss out on? How inspired will your team be? How about your customers?
Here are three power questions for you to answer to help shift your thinking (we’ll be going through 24 more at the Level Three Business Workshop.)
1. Which prospective customers who once wouldn’t have even looked to work with you are now open to switching vendors to use your company if you can give them better value for their money?
2. Which talent in the marketplace who once wouldn’t have dreamed of making a switch to your team is now open to the possibility of working with you?
3. Which of your vendors is more motivated than ever to help see you succeed? How could you leverage that relationship to lower your costs? Increase your sales? Improve your value proposition?
Can you see from the questions that there is a silver lining to the current market if you focus your energies on leveraging things to grow your business?
There has never been a better time to win over valuable business from clients who two years ago were too settled and comfortable to give you the time of day. (With the right approach I promise you they’ll listen now!)
There has never been a better time to pick up talent—cheaply! This could mean hiring or this could mean contracting out.
And there has never been a better time to get your key vendors fully vested in helping your business grow.
The current market has shaken things up—and you can use this to your advantage, if you act fast and keep your team focused on the possibilities.
Key Number Two: You must take care of your current business.
Now is a time when you must really focus your company on the best and highest uses of your current resources. You can’t afford to spread yourself too thin. (I know this makes for a delicate balance considering key number one, but you can walk this fine line and do it very profitably.)
In fact, I think the most dangerous thing you can do right now is to panic and try to go in too many directions all at once. Now is the time for you to clarify and focus your team and business on the highest value activities.
The enemy of the best is not the worst… it’s the good.
I can promise you that I will be making this point very clear in two weeks at the Level Three Business workshop. In fact, I’ve already designed a brand new process called the “Level Three Focus Audit™”to help business owners like you uncover, evaluate, and implement exactly this type of extreme focus so that you can double or triple your business over the next 36 months or less.
I want you and your leadership team to take a good hard look at the key resources of time, money, and assets you have and cut out 30-40% of the losing efforts you’ve got and reinvest that time in your core winners. This one step, if done right, will help you boost your business’s cash flow by 20% or more in 90 days or less.
Which brings me to the final key…
Key Number Three: Focus on profitable growth.
You need to grow, but you also need the right type of growth—growth that is richly profitable.
This requires careful thought and planning… and it requires systematic tracking of your efforts and what they produce.
I call this process the quantification and optimization of your business. And it can literally mean the difference between increasing your margins by hundreds of thousands of dollars or more this year!
What do your company’s operational and financial systems look like? What are your communication systems for sale and marketing to interface with operations?
In order to build your systems reliant Level Three business you need to build out your core business infrastructure. The good thing is that it’s never been cheaper or easier to do this. The challenge is that most business owners simply don’t have a clue on how to build a Level Three business. They know how to operate their current business to keep it going, but they don’t know how to build the business so that it functions smoothly and profitably without needing them to be there every day to run it.
Remember, Level Two businesses rarely have much of a value beyond their tangible assets such as their inventory or client relationships. But a Level Three business has a real value beyond these things. And it’s this intangible value that exists in the business systems, the business’s stability and future earnings potential, that makes it so much more valuable.
So my advice to all your entrepreneurs out there?
Simple, don’t aim to build a successful business—aim to build a successful Level Three business. This means you’ve got to invest the time and energy in building a business that is more than just an extension of you, but rather is systems reliant and has key team members who lead it.
This requires that you balance your needs to maintain your current business (cash flow, fulfillment, sales, etc) with your need to build something more than you currently have (future capacity, business systems, key team members, etc.)
This is a process that takes time, but the final reward is a 10-folding or more of your net worth in 5 years or less! (Not to mention dramatically increasing your income and time off too!)
