Business and Personal Coaching can be a strange concept to most. It was to me when I was first introduced to it.

SO when I developed this coaching programme, I took all the lessons I learned from my experiences of building a business from zero to a financial success that affords me many comforts in life.

There are so many coaches out there, each with their own unique skills. Mine is to help you get your mind clear on what it is you want for your life, and not falling into the common traps of building a business.

Identify Fit

Making sure that we are able to work together is super important. You don’t want to work with anyone that you don’t feel can help you and your business, there is a difference, grow and achieve the vision you have. We’ll get to vision in a moment.

To help clarify if we are potentially a good fit, I create this story and outline to give you and idea of what it is I can help with, but also some of the challenges that I’ve helped other with in the past. Not only have I run a successful business, growing it from zero to multiple millions (annually), I also managed a staff headcount of 30 people. As wonderful as that might be it’s nothing compared to me watching it all fall apart and going through the pain of the business failure tearing me apart.

Fortunately, both I and the business survived and “we” are better for it. There are scares that we carry and lessons that I feel we gained that could just help others on the journey of building a business and prevent them from going through what I went through

So to help you get an idea, you want to consider these things:

• These are the things you are struggling with

• This is what I can help you with

What is your Vision (not mission & values)

Understanding and sharing your vision, without using any corporate speak or messy words that sound clever but mean nothing, is the aim here.

You want to be in a place where you are able to get your vision clear.

This, for some, reads like all I’m interested in is money. While money is a big factor for me, it’s not the money that’s the point. It’s the lack of it that drives my anxiety through the roof and I want to move away from that. Either way you look at it, more money in my bank account is what I want.

Now that I have my vision, the next part is easier, which is HOW TO GET THERE, and that is the strategy.

Your vision has to be personal. It must be connected to a person. The vision cannot be a vision for a company. A company does not have a vision – people have vision.

Each director of a company can have a different vision and that can help resolve future issues to make sure that all the directors are aligned.

Now this vision can change as we start to get closer to an existing vision. So for me, as I gained more financial comfort in my life the vision did expand a bit and I’ve added to it, things about being a good dad and other things, but I’ve spent such a lot of time thinking about and practising the strategy to get to my vision, it is a never ending vision. I will attain, and never attain the vision.

Now that does not mean I don’t get the satisfaction of where I am or that I will always need more money. As I’ve grown and achieved more financial freedom, there are things that I realise that I want that I didn’t know I wanted before. Those things then put me in a place where I need to consider my financial position before making an investment or purchase and so I’m back to thinking about my bank balance when making a decision, which means I have not achieved my vision.

Mine might be a complexity that isn’t easy for others to grasp but I understand it clearly and I embrace it and I am energised by it.

It’s very important to know the difference between knowing your vision and sharing your vision. Others do not need to share in your vision because then it will never be yours. It will be a permutation of your vision but never the authentic, one of a kind, original, YOU vision.

Get your house in order

Before the Strategy

Before we can work on your strategy statement we need to reduce the noise in your business. Noise is anything that causes any anxiety, stress, or discomfort (and also avoidance – I don’t want to talk about it) that is impacting on your ability to think clearly and stay centered.

Too many days feeling like you have no (or low) energy, just don’t want to face the day or feeling defeated and like an Imposter, then that is a sign that you have noise in your business and life that needs to be cleaned out.

Some try and do this as part of setting the strategy but I find that once you have less noise (as the noise should not be part of the strategy) the strategy is clear and clean. With the noise it’s filled with distractions

Clean up the mess and reduce the noise

We want to focus on the operational flow of your business to make sure that it is running as efficiently as it can with the available resources. The main aim is to get as much output with as little input or put differently, maximise the output and minimise the spend.

This would have lots of focus on the Expenses in management accounts at a detail level. Reducing software fees, people costs, and other expenses that may not be necessary right now is essential for growth.

You will need to spend money in other areas, but not right away. For the most part, what I’ve seen in businesses that I’ve helped, is that they already have the resources needed to execute the strategy and may have legacy costs that aren’t needed for where the business is right now.

Again, I want to underline the right now. This is important to understand that it’s not a forever statement but rather something that needs to focus on the business in it’s current state.

What ADMIN needs to be done

This is a big part of cleaning up the house. Admin is in many ways a marketing and sales tool for smaller businesses. The same applies to big business but it is mainly why small business doesn’t make the switch to growth beyond the small business threshold.

The small business threshold is really an operational mindset that is manifested in two ways:

• I have to do everything (posession)
• I must hire for everything (abdication)

What you get here is either situation resulting in an all-or-nothing approach which leads to stagnant results. This is because of indecision by the founder/CEO, or thinking that they are the only person that can do a task, or that they are incapable of doing the task and hire on abdication.

These 3 states of mind do not allow the business to grow and so the business will always flow in the small business territory.

Setting a Strategy

A strategy is nothing more than taking the vision that you have a plotting a course, a map that helps layout how you are going to get to your vision. If your business was a roadtrip, the vision is the destination and the strategy is the map navigation of how to get there.

Now that you’ve set your vision and cleaned up your house, it’s time to work on the vision. The cleaning house will allow you to remove clutter and get singular focussed on the strategy. What you don’t want your strategy to include is a bunch of detours to pick up or drop off other people (or processes). You want to make sure that all of that is handled in the cleanup.

Your strategy will be broken up into quarterly goals which will be further split into monthly goals. That way you are not trying to eat an entire cake from the business recipe’s you will define, but rather just deal with little slices that you are able to manage through each milestone.

This will then allow us to have smaller parts of an overall vision. Using myself as an example again, if my goal is to have financial freedom that my decisions are free of consideration of the money in my bank account, then for the first year, the sub-vision should be to create some savings goal, let’s say R100k. That’s a start to a bigger vision.

If you are on a roadtrip that can’t be completed in a single drive, even if that is split amounst the passengers, then you want to define where and when you will stop to take breaks. So if the destination is 10k kilometers away, how much do you want to cover on the first day. Where are the fuel stations. Where will you eat, toilet breaks, stretch your legs. Who will drive first, then who’s next, who needs to rest while other people drive. These are all smaller goals that have purpose for a bigger goal, for without these goals, the big goal is just a dream waiting for a morning to wake you up.

Now that we know where and how, let’s bake a cake

Baking without a recipe

Once you have a vision set and you’ve worked on setting your strategy, you want to learn as much as you can about your business. I refer to this as the baking without a recipe stage. Up to now, you’ve probably been running your business on gut feel and some experience, mixed in with advice from others.

The result is that you have no idea what is going on, for the most part, what’s working and what’s not, and most scary of all, for the things that are working, you aren’t 100% sure as to why it’s working.

I call this baking a cake without a recipe. Sure you can try and bake a cake without a recipe, and you may even pull it off and get something that’s edible and maybe even tasty. Chances are that the next time you bake a cake, the results will be different because you may not remember everything you did and not sure of the order of what you put into the cake, and how long it baked for in the over or even what heat you put the over on.

A Story (in real life)

I was once having a conversation with a business person that had a food production business. Their products were amazing (to eat) and they really seemed to be ready for growth. All the talk we were having up to that stage was about the growth of distribution channels.

So while going through the discussion of understanding their growth ambitions and what channels, local and international, they felt comfortable with, I started to unpack an alarming reality.

The founder did not have a single recipe of how to make any of the products written down. More than that, they were unwilling to train anyone to make the product, from start to finish, or do anything to grow the production side of the business.

The founder felt that without their input the products just wouldn’t be the same as it took their special taste expertise to understand if, at a point in production, they needed to tweak the recipe.

If you find yourself agreeing to this then there are some things I’d like you to consider. I know you want, but I’m going to try anyway.

McDonald’s and Burger King make food products that are served in almost every country in the world. From one country to the next the product tastes the same. It is impossible for the founder to taste test every single product batch that is produced.

– I wonder how they do that?

The second point is more for McDonald’s. Did you know that McDonald’s original founders were not the ones to make it the great success and worldwide business it is today? The original McDonalds brothers (Richard and Maurice McDonald) were not involved in the global expansion, Ray Kroc who is known as the founder of McDonalds was responsible for it’s global growth and popularity around the world.

As a founder, you can either make or break the business based on your internal biasis of just how much the business needs you. If it’s all you, you don’t have a business, you have a life sucking, can never take leave job that is never ending and you can’t get away from it.

The Recipe for success

In order to be successful in business, one that is not all demanding all of the time, you have to create recipes.

Like baking a cake, you need a recipe for the “stuff you do” in your business. They will help you create repeatable processes that can be taught to others.

No doubt, the idea of having to create all these recipes can feel overwhelming, that is why we will take time to understand your business and just where to start.

The most important activity is to start.

There are no key areas, everything needs a recipe, but you can decide which cake you want to bake first.

A Sales Framework

I have an entire program dedicated Just to developing a sales plan using the Sales Framework The sales framework is a tool to help you create consistent, predictable revenue in your business.

This covers the 4 pillars of Sales

• Who
• Where
• How, and
• What

The four pillars are what you need in place in order to help your product, service, or cause stand out in the mind of your customer. It doesn’t matter what the product is, whether you’re an NGO trying to solve world hunger or if you’re the next hottest tech company going to revolutionise the way we live, each business will need these 4 pillars to get their products in front of the right people at the right time, with the right messaging.

Example:

Facebook started out as a University social application. In the early days of Facebook, they knew who they were targeting, that was the students at Harvard. That was it. The strategy was simple, use the local student paper to let people know about it and to leverage off the previous “endeavours” of Mark Zuckerberg to get the exposure.

They knew who they were targeting, they knew where those people were, they knew the way they would talk to them and they knew what they would say. When they started expanding they just repeated that strategy of who, where, how, and what.

The Sales Framework is a tool that you use to work through what your pillars will look like for your business and then use those pillars to create, consistent, predictable revenue in a repeatable framework.

Who: who is my customer

Where: Where is my customer (Geography)

How: How am I going to communicate with them (Facebook used newspaper articles)

What: What am I going to say each time I talk to them.

Once you have a Sales Framework mastered, the rest of your business recipes will help you scale your growth.

The Coaching Programme

The goal of a coaching programme is to help you work on areas of yourself and your business that allows you to unlock your potential, improve on personal and business skills, and learn new skills, all with the goal of helping you achieve your goals quicker, with fewer distractions.

The most important aspect of a coaching programme is that it has a start and a finish.

This programme is 3 a three-month investment to help you work through any limiting beliefs you may have inherited and unlock your business acumen so you can focus and execute on your vision through the strategy we will define.

The Sales Framework is an added tool to help you create consistent, reliable revenue so you can avoid the feats and famine of inconsistency.

I hope to see you as part of my coaching programme soon.

Richard