Tag: business growth

Is there a magical formula that makes one business successful while another fails? There are many ingredients that go into a winning business including a great idea, a great team, perseverance, a unique value proposition, and great leadership. You’ve likely witnessed this in your own company. All of these elements are important, but the ultimate weapon that truly fuels success is the ability to leverage all of the key activities that you perform for your business, and you can only do this with the right attitude.

Perseverance, a great winning attitude and a true passion for your business’s value can spark other flames and become contagious, igniting the passion of investors, business partners, customers and employees. When this passion and energy are controlled, directed and focused, they can truly boost a business’s chance for success.

Combine these with performing the right business activities, as discussed in this Bloginar and in my book, Lucky By Design, and you’ll put yourself in a better position to control the destiny of your company.

Weekly Lesson Thirteen (Try this…)

Ready for more? You can get more in depth lessons in my book, Lucky By Design, along with the 5-hour webinar training program designed to truly improve your odds of success!

We hope that the 90-Day Bloginar Series has been a powerful tool for you to grow your business. In the fall, we will begin another series to help you create a Business Action Plan for 2013. In the interim, I will be offering a video series online where I answer your business questions. This series, entitled Biz-Edge, provides answers to your questions about business growth. Feel free to submit questions directly to me at beth@m-edge.com.

Have a Business Challenge or Question?
Visit the BizEdge site on my website and let us answer it for you!

Forming solid partnerships can be very valuable and important for businesses, both large and small. However, good partnerships take time to develop, and require significant effort to sustain. A true partnership is a serious relationship between two parties that share common goals and have mutually agreed to join forces together to achieve something specific. Having the right partner – and the right partnership arrangement – can provide a very powerful boost for your business and can lead to some lucky opportunities being uncovered.

However, partnerships are a double-edged sword. They require significant effort, a great deal of mutual trust, and a champion on each side to manage the relationship in order to work. Therefore, having the right partner – and the right partnership arrangement – can provide a very powerful boost for your business and can lead to some lucky opportunities being uncovered by you and your partner organization. However, partnerships are not something that you should enter into casually because the wrong partnership can defeat morale and in the worst-case scenarios, destroy a business.

Weekly Lesson Twelve (Try this…)

Before committing to a new business partnership address the questions below. If you aren’t pleased with your response, think about what changes you need to make to improve the opportunity for success with current or future partnerships, for your benefit as well as the benefit of your company.

1. Have you clearly defined your most important goals, and made sure that your prospective partner shares those same goals and vision?

2. Have you assessed what specific gaps – in skills, in relationships, or in any other assets – this partner needs to fill in order to help you succeed?

3. Have you determined how you will help him/her succeed based on the skills or assets you bring to the relationship?

4. Is it clear that both parties stand to benefit more from being partners in this arrangement than working separately? Is this a win-win arrangement or is the scale unbalanced?

What’s the difference between a leader and a manager? A leader sets the tone and inspires as well as empowers his/her team to achieve the goal. A manager is often a key player in ensuring the plan is organized, coordinated and followed through and ideally shares the vision… but often doesn’t establish the vision for the rest of the team.

Which are you? Are you inspiring your team to carry through a vision that you hold? Are you motivating them to achieve greatness where 1 + 1 truly exceeds 2?

I’ve heard others say that a leader does the ‘right things’ while a manager ‘does things right.’ You need both of these roles in achieving greatness for an organization. Check your leadership skills below!

Weekly Lesson Eleven (Take this assessment …)

There are numerous ways to assess your leadership style. I found an interesting one online called the Leadership Legacy Assessment Test, written by Robert Galford and Regina Fazio Maruca. Check it out – it might give you some great insight into your leadership style. I’d love to hear your results!

http://www.yourleadershiplegacy.com/assessment.html 

I am thrilled to share my interview on creating your own lucky opportunities with JJ Ramberg of MSNBC’s Your Business! Please watch it then continue with the weekly bloginar lesson: Getting Out of Your Own Way!

If you have specific questions that I can address – please visit my newly redesigned website m-edge.com and click on the link for Biz-Edge where we answer YOUR business questions!

Are you frustrated with the rate of growth your firm is achieving or have you hit the kind of plateau that emerging firms often experience? Perhaps you’re struggling to enter new markets, drive more revenue or increase profits, yet you’re stuck. Well, that plateau is much more common than you might expect, and the reason for it is often the same.

The bootstrapping skills owners relied on to get to their current level of success are often not the skills that they need to move forward to the next level. Many new business owners find that in the early stages they need to control everything and make sure every “I” is dotted and every “T” crossed. However, by its very nature, growth into a different stage WILL BE UNCOMFORTABLE, because it is different. This actually is a good thing – if you don’t get a few butterflies in your stomach, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. Yet, without systems in place and a willingness and confidence to delegate responsibilities in a different way, your business simply can’t achieve a solid, sustainable growth level.

If you choose to grow your organization, you are also committing to challenging yourself in a new way. It is the rare founder who can do this without feeling a serious degree of discomfort. But, you need to make the choice on whether you can and want to become the kind of leader your company needs you to be in order to successfully lead the organization, or confront your shortcomings and decide if it’s better for somebody else to carry the company forward.

Weekly Lesson Ten (Answer these questions…)

• Are you ready to commit to growth or do you want to remain at your current stage?
  • If growth is a goal, what needs to change in your business?
• How important is delegation of decision-making at your company?
• If you need to control specific decisions, which ones are they and how will you include your team in the process so you don’t become an obstacle?

How often have you wondered, do I have the right team in place to ensure my goals can be achieved? Carefully assessing the talent on your team is the first step in understanding the value of empowering your company to grow as a separate entity… apart and distinguished from you – the founder. That’s a difficult step for many entrepreneurs to make but is critical if you want to grow your organization.  It’s quite similar to letting go with your children…. recognizing that it’s time for them to realize their own goals and dreams separate from yours.

Congratulations if you’ve taken that step and brought on a team to support the growth of your firm. Now, how do you determine if you have the right people on ‘your bus” with the right talents, skills and expertise to support your vision? More importantly, are you allowing them to make decisions and take the relevant level of responsibility so the business becomes less about you – the owner/founder and more about the organization on its own? Is your team heading in the same direction… ideally the direction you want to be going in (you don’t want to find yourselves all going down with the ship…)?

The challenge a growing firm’s managers face as the company achieves success is that the skills that are essential to initial product or company development can be stifling when applied to the management of business teams, or sales and marketing initiatives. There’s a continued struggle to micromanage every detail and be involved with every daily function, but this ends up getting in the way, and frustrating the employees to whom they need to turn over the reins.

Weekly Lesson Nine (Answer these questions honestly…)

Answer the following questions honestly. If you aren’t pleased with your response, think about what changes you need to make to improve the situation, for your benefit as well as the benefit of your company.

• Do you have a team in place that you trust and are able to delegate decisions to?
• If you trust your team, then what processes do you have in place to empower them to make decisions
• If you don’t trust your team, what steps will you take either to train/educate or promote them, or to bring on individuals who are more managerially focused and will help facilitate growth?
• Is bringing on experienced managerial talent (maybe even a CEO) an important option to consider?

One of the biggest dangers for any business is to be too focused on the day-to-day activities (working IN the business) and not thinking about the big-picture, long-term strategy (working ON the business). Below are tips that you can use to ensure you’re working ON the business.

1. Hold yourself accountable by creating a roadmap that has clear and measurable goals (SMART goals) with milestones and targets that you can continually evaluate progress against.
2. Create a dashboard that shows all of the key business drivers that impact your business and keep it front and center – perhaps make it your screensaver (sorry dogs and kids) or a document that you review daily. This should also include benchmarks so you view changes (both positive and negative) over time.
3. Create an advisory board that you commit to reporting to on a quarterly basis. During each meeting, work with them to review your achievement of the SMART goals that you’ve already identified along with the dashboard measures that you use to analyze progress. This should be comprised of respected colleagues who are familiar with your industry and who are also honest and forthright enough to hold you accountable.
4. Conduct an annual business assessment. You can do this internally, with your board, or by hiring an outside expert who will give you a clear and objective view of your business to ensure you stay on track.
5. Join a CEO group and commit to attending it regularly and consistently.
6. Conduct an annual survey to ensure you’re benchmarking your performance each year and measuring positive progress as well as areas where you’ve fallen short of your target.
7. Create incentives to celebrate with your team when benchmarks are met.
8. Great ideas and growth come from all members of your team and should be openly praised, acknowledged and rewarded. If getting your team involved is an option… then allow them to work with you to grow your company.

Weekly Lesson Eight (Try this…)

Using the checklist above as a guide, write down two action steps that you can take to ensure you are working ON the business and not IN it.

Separating your business goals and interests from your personal ones can be challenging. When you act on an opportunity and it’s good for one but not the other… this can cause great harm to your business and/or your personal life. A few months ago I was in a local jewelry store with my son. He needed to have his new watch resized (it was a present from his sister and he was excited to wear it). I knew it was a simple and quick request so we popped into a jewelry store that we had passed by many times before, but hadn’t been inside due to its poor location. The holiday spirit was not alive in this shop. When we entered this really tiny shop (so small you have to make an effort to overlook customers) the owner somehow managed to completely ignore our presence. It was rather awkward standing a few feet away from him and being totally ignored but he was with a customer (who was having some very expensive jewelry appraised) so we were patient.

After five very long and uncomfortable minutes he finally managed to look up and tell us he would be with us shortly. Lesson #1 – if your store is no wider than 10 x 10, at least say hello to entering prospects (Duh!)

When he finally allowed us to explain the reason for our visit, he had the audacity to tell us that he “didn’t feel like doing this today.” Seriously, you just can’t make up this stuff. He explained that since it was the day before Christmas (actually, it was two days before Christmas) that he was simply too busy. Was this a good business decision or one that he made based on his personal interests? He didn’t feel like working any more than necessary.

Honestly, how hard was it to help us with this simple project? Sure, it was only a $10 repair, but a $10 customer today can quite often be a $100 or $1,000 customer tomorrow. Large client projects rarely just land on your desk…. Success is about building relationships. However, he made it clear that we were NOT a priority of his (i.e., take your business elsewhere). I guess he’ll never know if we’re in the market for a 5-carat diamond pendant (his loss!)

How do you decide which opportunities have potential and which should be ignored because, erh, you’re not in the mood to follow up or it doesn’t fit into a personal objective? Answering this requires being very careful in your selection of opportunities to pursue. You have to look at each opportunity on its own merit but it must meet one key criteria – it must align with your business goals, in some shape or form. You don’t want to might miss a great business win but you don’t want to get too distracted on the road to success.

Weekly Lesson Seven (Try this…)
Answer the following questions honestly. If you aren’t pleased with your response, think about what changes you need to make to improve the situation, for your benefit as well as the benefit of your company.

How tightly aligned are you business and personal goals?

Is what is best for the business NOT necessarily best for you? If so, what do you need to do to make this work?

Will your current role and personal goals need to change to get your business to the next stage of growth?
If yes, how will you handle this?

Are you willing to make the changes necessary to grow your firm?