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invest your time

How you spend your time forecasts your future

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Creating time, Mindset.

To soothsay your future, look at how and where you spend your time today.

Listen to Pavlo Phitidis discuss the impact that the way we spend our time has on the future of our business in this podcast from The Money Show:

 

 

We have a choice on how we spend our time. Maybe the best way to highlight this is to use an athlete.

Think of a Mixed Martial Arts, tennis or football pro. They know that their peak income generating lifecycle is around 10 years. Smart athletes ensure that they spend their time maximising their earnings over that period. They focus all their time on maximising their performance during gameplay. They adjust their lifestyles to maximise that time and spend none on anything that they can outsource or have offered to them at a level of expertise greater than theirs. So, they hire a nutritionist and a cook to maximise their fuel intake to perform at peak. Without their help, they’d spend time understanding nutrition, shopping for food and preparing meals. Over 10 years this might well consume 16,400 to 17,300 hours. Time that could be spent improving gameplay, performance, and earnings.

This week, we had a session with a business owner growing fast. It was so refreshing to hear his concerns about how he spends his time to ensure the best application of it to maintain his growth rates. A brief analysis suggested that there were better options, most of which he was not even aware of.

All businesses traverse a development lifecycle. How you spend your time over that lifecycle matters and it must change.

  1. In start-up – spend it chasing deals and cash flow

  2. In early stage – confirming your vision and identity

  3. In build stage – creating a system of delivery

  4. In empowering stage – securing a team

  5. This gets you to a place where you can enjoy organic growth. Changing from doing to leading is now imperative.

  6. In grow stage – finding that next level

  7. In value stage – migrating your business to exit

The problem we all face is that habits develop, conventions entrench and perspective wanes. An inability to see the wood for the trees compounded by not recognising that time runs out carries a regrettable cost that can never be recovered.

fishing lures

Why your website is not enough to win new customers and grow your business

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Featured, Lead generation and conversion.

A website is essential, so you invest time, care, and money into building one. Then you wait. You wait for something to happen. And nothing does. What now?

Listen to Pavlo Phitidis share a story about fishing, to make his point about reaching your target market, in this podcast from The Money Show

To get fishing right, you need to know what species of fish you want to catch.

Each species behaves differently and eats differently to almost every other species. Let’s fish for carp – a big, mud sucking, freshwater fish species. You fish for them using patience, rods, reels, line and bait. You fish for them in muddy water. Building a website is like carp fishing. You find a spot by the dam, set up your rod, reel and line. Add a big hook with bait and cast it into the water. Nothing bites.

It doesn’t bite because it does not know you are there. To let the carp know you are there, anglers mix special bait preparations. They add flavors, spices and condiments. They also cast 4 or 5 lines in all with more flavored baits. The carp smells it in the water and presto – you catch a fish.

Your website is like the hook in the worldwide ocean.

To catch a fish, you need to decide on your species, understand how it behaves, create a bait that it loves and let it know that you are there, baited hook and all.

In your business, this means that you need to build campaigns to reach, entice, draw in and hook your future customers.

Campaigns are your bait and are used to attract fish to your website to see if what you do and how you do it is valuable enough to them to become your customers.

Campaigns have several elements.

  1. Promotion

    A message that you communicate that will get a response from your customers. It might establish and build your brand to create credibility and confidence in your customers. Or it might be a promotion with an offer to secure a transaction.

  2. Format

    Your campaign needs to be formatted to a suitable medium. Is it a flyer, a social post, a billboard or advert? The format will affect the messaging and creative design.

  3. Communicated

    Your campaign needs to be actioned. Email campaigns need to be sent to your audiences, radio campaigns need to be flighted in the appropriate shows and flyers dispensed at the relevant locations.

  4. Measured

    Your campaigns should be measured. See what works, what doesn’t, adjust learn, perfect.

  5. Repeated

    Establish a campaign calendar and make the adjustments needed to suit the buying behavior of your customers. In hot summer months you might use flyers, in cold rainy months you might use radio.

  6. Multiple

    More rods in the water create more attraction and familiarity. Campaigns are no different. Run multiple campaigns when you have the money. Do radio and flyers because done together, the chances of your fish seeing your bait increases exponentially.

Business is a dynamic system of activities. It never stands still. Bringing your website to life means letting customers know that it exists amongst the 480bn other websites clouding the Word Wide Web and about 10,000 or more competing for your fish’s attention.

 

 

organic next level growth

Two types of growth every business owner should have in play.

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Innovation, Leadership, Scale & Grow.

Growth carries great weight! The weight of winning it, the weight of servicing it and the weight…of understanding and leading it! Without it your business is on a death curve. It will harm your income growth, customer acquisition and retention, team and supplier relationships and your opportunity to one day exit your business. Think of it like a President who has lost favour with the party and population – nobody wants to stick around a lost cause!

Listen to the Money Show podcast of the discussion Pavlo Phitidis had about the 2 types of business growth:

  1. Growth is a System.

Business growth is a system of activities, integrated to create an outcome. It doesn’t come from the product or service your business offers. It comes from the organizing the functional, commercial activities of your business into a single system. Marketing generates new leads, sales convert them, operations fulfil and service them and administration coordinates them – all work as a single system to create a great experience that customers than promote. The product or service you offer is what solves the customers problem; the growth system is what creates a good experience in having that problem solved for the customer.

  1. Growth is designed.

You can build a ship to sail fast or slow. You can build a building to be small or tall. It all comes down to design. Being clear on what you want to achieve in your business lets you design the right system to achieve it. When building an Asset of Value™, design is premised on your companies positioning in the market. Once clear, a System of Delivery (the commercial functions optimized and integrated into a single system of coordinated activities) enables your positioning. With these two layers in play, you can then direct and organize your team to power and lead the system implementation. This generates two outcomes. Organic growth and time; time to lead next level growth.

  1. Organic Growth

This is growth that sees your business grow revenues on a consistent, reliable basis, largely without you. The rate of growth depends on several elements including country GDP growth, sector and industry growth, life stage of your business amongst others. For example, if your country growth rate is 3%, your sector and industry is forecast at 5% and you are a 7-year-old business, you should look to secure an organic growth rate around 15-18%. If you are a 30-year-old business, you might adjust it to around 12-15%. Remember, this is growth that occurs largely with out you. It is driven by the System of Delivery and your team and is premised on your positioning.

  1. Next Level Growth

With organic growth in play, and most valuably, your time released from daily operational activities, you need to turn to next-level growth. As the term suggests, next level growth sees a significant increase in revenue coupled by a moderate increase in costs. The level up is felt in profit as the “yawn” between revenues and costs widen.

The “yawn” is an essential indicator of next level growth. Ramped up revenues that are tracked by ramped up costs grows your business. It also grows complexity, points to a failure to scale effectively and increases your risk.

In an Asset of Value, next level growth that yields the “yawn” is gotten by finding opportunities that maintain the positioning of the business, require little adjustment to the System of Delivery and don’t stretch your team way beyond current levels of comfort and capability. These opportunities can be in new product development, new market entry or acquisition, new investment in plant, equipment, space, digitization, marketing, and talent.

Essential, vital, critical to the choice we make as business owners (and the single biggest investors in our business) is not to stall or disrupt organic growth. Landing a next level growth opportunity that stalls organics growth simply pulls you back into daily operations and takes your eye off the opportunity, further exposing and risking your business to harm.

  1. Valuation

Growth, the history of growth and the future promise of growth are one of the biggest factors impacting your business valuation. A buyer or investor into your business does so either because they see growth potential unrealized in your business and will offer you a few dollars, or because the growth in the business makes it worth man, many more dollars. My first few business I bought were priced at a dollar each. They had served their founders well over the years and time had made them complacent. The complacency was fatigue which came about because of 30-40 years of running a business that centered around their everyday involvement in daily/weekly operations. Without them there, there was no growth. That was obvious to me and the bargain price of dollar had liabilities attached to it plus no growth. A fair price…. right?

  1. Virtuous Cycle

Business growth suggests opportunity to talent. Everybody wants to attach to a winner. Is also suggests value to customers, growth to suppliers. It holds the promise of growth in turn to funders. All are roll players in further driving your growth.

Your business growth is never yours alone! It also attracts unwanted attention from competitors if you become complacent because of it. Complacency, a sense of “having arrived” reduces vigilance and the relentless attention to growth that sustaining it requires. Competitors entering your domain, when vigilant, provide opportunities to invest in sustaining innovations and further can educate and grow a market of customers that your incumbent leadership can access too.

If you are not growing, you are dying. Pursuing growth without having built or designed your business to sustain itself risks everything. The goose that lays the golden egg (organic growth) needs to be solid and secure before you charge ahead into the market looking to become bigger for the sake of it.

 

 

 

covid zombie

What’s holding back business? Covid Zombies, supply chain disruption & engine room entrepreneurship

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Featured, Leadership, Mindset, Trends.

Pavlo Phitidis identified 4 issue plaguing business owners and spoke to The Money Show about what to do about them. Listen to the podcast or read on

Rail to Road

On a recent journey along South Africa’s roads, particularly in the Eastern Cape, between Craddock and Port Elizabeth, Pavlo was struck by the incredible number of trucks trundling along, many transporting manganese, from north of Kimberly!

The roads are being destroyed, as they lie parallel to a railway line that is almost entirely empty.

 

Broken Supply Chains

Commodoties are booming right now, mining is booming, and the extensive net of industrial service businesses that supply and support these mines are struggling – to find steel, a key raw material to support mining activity.

Pavlo spoke of a large fencing business owner who he spoke to, who was desperately trying to find steel, to preserve his business.

This business owner had a strong sales team visiting customers, leaving them with R80 – 90million of business that they couldn’t service! And he was terrified that his clients would find someone else who could find steel somehow.

Pavlo’s advise to him was to put the customer at the centre of the decision. This business owner insisted that he needed the raw material to manufacture the fencing in South Africa, because to import the completed fencing material eroded all his profit on the deal.

Pavlo’s point is that at times like these, when you risk losing customers, and demand for you service could dry up, rather take the hit and do whatever it takes to fulfil the promise that you made to your customers.

When steel does become available again, at least you will have a customer base to work with, to build up your profits again.

Rather make no profits for the next 6 months, and hold on to your customers. It will also keep your sales team busy and motivated.

 

COVID Zombies

In the first 6 months of lockdown, staff went home and all of a sudden found themselves incompetent.

They had moved out of a workplace environment where staff would interact with their colleagues, bouncing ideas and problem solving together. When they were out of their context, they couldn’t do it.

For managers it showed up that they had been measuring performance on activity – being on site, attending meetings etc, rather than output.

Many companies needed to digitize their HR – communications and productivity software, which created great apprehension among many staff who weren’t sure whether they were being spied on, or micro-managed, or misunderstood why they were being monitored in a new way.

 

Engine Room Entrepreneurship

The shock of the lockdown brought leadership from the ‘bridge’ down to the ‘engine room’ where they were back into day-to-day matters, putting out fires and managing their apprehensive staff far more directly.

The crisis here is that new opportunities – and there are many that have come with the changes that Covid brought – are hard to see from below the decks.

How to prevent being ghosted after a positive initial sales meeting

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Featured, Lead generation and conversion.

How often are you ghosted after a positive, warm sales call? You were on fire; the client was positive and responding and it was clear that your offer was right on point. And then, nothing. You can’t get hold of the client. You’ve tried email, phone, social media even and nothing.

Getting this sales challenge sorted needs you to get a couple of things right. Listen to Pavlo Phitidis discuss this on The Money Show:

  1. Why does your business exist?

Whilst your purpose might be to make money, create wealth, support the economy, generate employment, or make a difference to the world, your businesses doesn’t care. Its only purpose is to solve defined problems through a great experience for its customers.

 

  1. Become expert at serving customer segments.

You hope that it is enough to have an excellent product or great service offering, with all the right features to solve defined problems. The problem is that your competitors have equally good offerings. Let me be clear, without a good product or service offering you wont even exist. But on its own, it’s not enough.

 

  1. Develop a sales engagement system.

Whilst your product or service offering can fix a customer’s problem, how you engage with the customer creates the experience. This includes how you market to them, engage them in the fist meeting and should they select you, how you deliver on your service thereafter. All these activities stack up to create the overall experience. Your sales engagement process is an essential element of the experience.

 

  1. Master your sales discovery meeting.

Often when selling, you spend most of your time talking to your product or service offering. This product-centric selling was valuable in the 1700’s to early 1900’s. It simply is not good enough today. A smiling, nodding customer (seemingly hanging on to your every word) does not mean that they are engaged at all. Polite yes, but not engaged.

 

  1. Understand the “why” behind the problem at an emotional level.

Problem-solving selling has 3 layers of sophistication behind it. The first is to engage with the customer in such a way that they tell you the problem that they have. This is where many sales techniques go wrong. Mostly, you jump in with how your product or service offering can solve it and…. deal done! A fatal mistake.

 

Once the problem is stated, you should transition your line of questioning to understanding how and why and when the problem comes about. Spend time on this conversation. Get into the detail. Let your customer really drill down into the detail. At this point, your customers would almost be living the cause of the problem, and then you transition into a line of questions to understand how it makes them feel. That is the gold in selling. The emotional outcome of not having the problem solved, creates the opportunity for you to solve it and remove that personal, emotional pain.

 

  1. Solve the problem and resolve the “why”!

Now talk to how your product or offering can resolve the problem. Be sure also to ask how, with that problem resolved, the customer would feel. Be sure that in your engagement, that feeling, attributed to you and your product, confirms the emotional outcome of relief and certainty.

 

We all buy emotionally and justify logically. Fitting your product or service features to a stated problem is a lost opportunity and matches you to any other competitor in the market. Turning the stated problem into an emotive need matched to a personal problem is what sets you apart and ensures that “yes” is very highly likely a real yes.

business purpose

Why do you, and your businesses, do what you do?

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Leadership, Mindset.

It’s easy to forget why you do what you do as a business owner.

Listen to the podcast from The Money Show where Pavlo Phitidis unpacks this big important question:


The vision we have for the business when we start is informed by many false premises. We think it will be easier than it is, we think we will get ahead faster than we do, and we think we will be standing on the bridge of our ship, leading and guiding our crew as we sail into growth and profit.

And 10 years on, or 20 years on, we struggle to remember why we do what we do. It mostly feels like a slog, stuck in the engine room of the ship we built, hauling coals into the furnaces that drive the engines that turn the propellors. At the same time, the seas we sail in change, constantly, relentlessly. The ship we thought we’d build is perhaps not the right ship today or for tomorrow. It’s equally relentless staying ahead of the change and it too, wears you down. Inspiration, when lost, means it’s time to get out. Staying in will erode the value you have built so far. Keeping your inspiration means keeping clear on why you do what you do.

And there are two “why’s”. Yours and your businesses. They differ and they should and clarity on both feeds the passion, energy and inspiration you need to maintain a clear head, hold perspective and lead your ship to its destination, profitably and on time.

 

  1. Why do you do what you do?

 

Passion is vital. It is the fuel that drives your engine, that keeps you going, rejection after rejection and disappointment after disappointment. These ‘nay saying’ forces do eventually lessen over time. Holding your head and persisting needs more than passion. It also needs purpose.

Passion drives your idealism, but purpose must guide your pragmatism. Why you do what you do for each means different things. Passion is deeply personal and reaches back into the depths of your psychology and culture as an individual. Purpose is easier to define, and it must be so for when passion wanes, purpose leads that next level of commitment to get and keep you on track.

We believe that there would only be one purpose – to build your business into an Asset of Value. This is a business positioned to win in a changing, competitive world, enabled by reliable operating procedures and systems, and empowered by a high-performance team to generate consistent organic growth. This releases your time to focus on next-level growth and innovation.

The outcome is a business that grows revenue and profit, operating largely independent of you, enabling it to be one day sold for a premium value in a clean exit.

This matters because 94.6% of businesses started, fail to sell. Despite being well-run, income generating businesses, they close at great cost to the business owner, their family, and employees.

 

  1. Why does your business do what it does?

 

Tying your business’s purpose to yours feels intuitive but it’s wrong. Your business doesn’t care about your purpose. It is inert and needs to be separate from you. Too much emotion around your business creates confusion as to why it exists. So, what then is your businesses “why?”.

 

It’s not about creating jobs, paying taxes to build a nation, making you rich or giving you meaning and a sense of purpose. Whilst you hope that all these features are in play, your business exists for one reason only – to solve a problem for your customer through a great experience. Understanding your business this way lets you build your business to serve and through that have its why answered by those whom it serves.

Do you know what the problem is, how it comes about, the cost of it not being solved and how you get it solved? Equally, do you know what experience your customer wants in getting this done, and do you know what makes up that experience? Have you built a business that can do this every day, all day, reliably and consistently and adapt to the changing world around you? Do you know who your customers even are?

Building a business is tough. It gets tougher and tougher over time as your why and that of your businesses too become vaguer and vaguer. A crisp, clear and simple purpose behind why you do what you do and why your business exists is no different to being clear on what your destination is and how you plan to get there fast, simply and reliably. It’s an imperative!

Right team

Getting the right people to do the right thing at the right time, affordably

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Leadership, Team.

Unless you are psychic or have more time on your hands than any normal business owner would have, evaluating a potential employee with a CV in hand is a risky business.

Clouded by your unconscious biases, under pressure to get additional hands-on deck when under pressure and time scarcity make hiring the right person into your business hard to achieve.

The wrong candidate costs time, money, reputation, brand, revenue, profit, and culture.

As much as we’d want to blame a skills shortage, or maybe “millennials”, or social services, or the courts, or anything else, the reality is that we, as business owners, are to blame.

Getting the right team is essential if you want to build an Asset of Value Business. The idea that, “if you want something done properly, do it yourself” is a lazy, sloppy mindset that is destined to keep you in the engine room of your business day in and day out. It will never build your business into a growing, profitable business that can of a day be sold. Your business will remain an income generating job and for some, well, that’s okay.

But if you want an Asset of Value Business, getting your team right is vital and a critical skill. Listen to the podcast discussion of Pavlo Phitidis discussing how to do this on The Money Show or read on to get it right:

  1. Start with the end in mind

Why do you exist, as a business? Understand why you do what you do, in order for everything else in the business to align to this vision. Pavlo’s view is that you should always be building your business for the end of a successful exit – a sale.

Having the right team on board is essential to appeal to a buyer.

 

  1. Position to dominate

What makes your business special? The features of your product, the price and your service are all easily imitated. A business exists to solve a well defined problem for a well-defined group of people, with a specific, consistent experience.

This defines the purpose behind your business, and if you and your team can answer this crisply and clearly, you are positioned to build a business that can deliver this.

 

  1. Enable through a System of Delivery and empower through System Operators

A system is s series of activities, performed in a sequence, that is measurable and teachable. So if you are able to teach the system, then you can recruit system operators, rather than individuals who may, or may not be able to perform these clearly defined activities.

It makes hiring easier as you can quickly assess whether someone has the aptitude and experience to perform those activities.

 

  1. Generate employee meaning and value

Meaning comes about when you have a good match between the actcitiy and yourself as it builds your confidence, and the more confident you become, the more pleasure you take in doing it, so you want to do it more, which makes you better, which builds your confidence more.

Understanding your role in contributing to the whole further builds purpose.

 

  1. The 3rd lever of valuation achieved

When you have a system of delivery, operated by a purposeful team, you as the business owner are released from the day-to-day activities of running the business. And for a buyer – the fact that business doesn’t need the owner in it to function, is the 3rd lever of valuation.

What if Buffet were buying… is your business sellable?

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Aurik Business, Exits, Grow & Exit.

Most business owners are so wrapped up in the many challenges of their business that when Pavlo asks them: “What lies ahead?” Their responses are very vague.

The reality is that there are only two destinations for every business: sale or closure. And globally, 94.6% of businesses started, fail to sell.

Many owners believe that because they have built a business that generates good income; that has put a roof over their heads; that creates jobs and has a productive impact in their industry, it will be sellable – this is not the case and the stats are there to prove it!

Listen to Pavlo unpack why we build unsellable businesses, and how to build with a buyer’s mindset in this podcast from The Money Show:

Pavlo’s view is that as business owners we get wrapped up in how we start our businesses – there’s generally very little capital available so all our focus is on generating cashflow to get things going and build some momentum.

In addition, there are usually demands at home that require money, and we build the business around the needs we have to service.

After years of operating like this it becomes habit, and it is very difficult to realise that you’re still doing things the way you did 5, 10 or even 20 years ago.

Businesses aren’t just sold, they need to be built to sell.

The starting point is to realise that what you need from your business, when you sell it – is not a credible valuation methodology!

Secondly, as wonderful and unique as you think your business is, there are thousands of businesses just like you.

Valuation is mathematical. The maths compares risk and return across the market. And understanding the levers that can increase or decrease the risk and return in valuation is critical.

Buyers look at our businesses differently to how we do.

Buyers have key questions in their mind when they look at a business.

The questions are designed for 2 things:

  1. To establish whether I can get a return?
  2. To evaluate how to reduce the price by picking out the flaws in the business

Understanding how the buyer thinks, today, will affect how you build the business for tomorrow.

What are the questions that buyers ask:

  1. What makes you different from the dozens or hundreds of businesses like you. If you can’t distinguish yourself, that’s a mark against you.
  2. How far into the future can this business continue. You have to be able to show growth in the past – that will continue into the future. The way to do this is to demonstrate that there are systems to continue this trajectory.
  3. Who is going to do it? In a buyer’s mind, are they buying the business to run it, in the way that you’ve run it? Will the staff stay? Will it run without you? Often, without the owners in it, there is nothing to be bought. A business has to operate without the business owner, or in effect the business owner has just built a job for themselves rather than something that has value for a buyer.
  4. How long will it take me to pay off my investment, and is there enough growth in the business to take me into profitability?

 

chassis

Build a chassis that can support your business’s growth

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Leadership, Operational systems, Positioning, Scale & Grow.

Business growth increases complexity: More customers, more locations, more employees, more suppliers, more money, more inventory and….more risk.

Where does risk come from?

  1. You start to doubt whether you have the skills to run a complex business. That seed of doubt can fester and become self-fulfilling
  2. The business you loved becomes demanding, a nightmare, all the excitement you felt when you started it – goes away. And you think that you do not want growth as it’s too hard, But if you aren’t growing… you’re dying.

Is there an analogy we could use to understand it better? 

Listen to Pavlo discuss a couple of analogies in this episode of The Money Show:

 

 

Pavlo argues that using the idea of the chassis of a car – the framework that bears the weight of the vehicle, is a strong analogy for building the framework of your business to support increasing complexity.

In a business, the chassis is everything that is needed to consistently deliver to their customers, to solve their problems. It is all of the systems and processes that you need to fulfil your promises to customers. Your business chassis needs to be strengthened to prepare for the growth that is coming so fulfilment is not compromised as you get more and more customers and orders.

Another way to think of it is how human beings grow: When you’re born, until 20 or so, you grow in spurts. A baby is born, then it grows in height, then there’s a filling out phase, then more growth, and so on. As we grow in height, all the energy in our bodies is going into making our bones taller. Then there’s a lull but during this time the muscles and tissues are building to hold up the next spurt of bone mass. It’s preparing the body for the next phase of growth.

When we find our business in chaos, we need to pause growth to build the muscle to support the growth. Get your systems in order.

 How do you get it right to grow without the risk spoiling it all?

 Choose a sport that you want to excel in – let’s take shotputter and a long jumper.

The two will be very different to look at. The shotputter will be solid and heavy and strong. The long jumper will be lean and long and flexible.

Figuring out which sport you’re in is the same as positioning your business… it determines every decision from then on.

What they both have the same is internal organs: lungs, kidneys, liver etc. In business these are your business systems. Procurement, finance, HR, operations etc – they are consistent across all businesses.

To take these athletes to Olympic heights, you have to ensure the organs are healthy and functioning optimally. Regardless of their particular sport. And then build the muscles needed to be a shotputter.

Finally – measure that performance to check constantly what is responding well, what is working and what needs work.

This data, both in terms of what is coming down the pipe, and the capacity of the business to deliver on it, will be critical to maintain your growth rate.

 

why what how do you do what you do

Business success starts with clarity: Why, what and how do you do what you do in your business

Written by [email protected] on . Posted in Aurik Business, Leadership.

As we gain hope that Covid is going to be put behind us, new thinking says it’s going to be part of us. And it’s not fair. Hope was fueled by the vaccines but not only don’t we have any sign of them, we now aren’t even sure they will work as the virus mates and mutates. So, uncertainty now seems to be the new certainty.

As a business owner, you still need to lead. Listen to Pavlo Phitidis discuss what this entails on The Money Show podcast:

 

 

Leading means maintaining a single course and direction for your business instead of pivoting every week and flip-flopping from one announcement to the next. It harms your business, your reputation, your team, your customers and your suppliers.

Business success is built over time and consistent action.

If uncertainty is the new certainty, simplifying and answering why you exist, what you do and how you do it holds the key to consistent action despite the uncertainty.

In fact, it unlocks opportunities aligned to your capabilities that, in an increasingly uncertain world, can accelerate your businesses growth beyond anything that a stable, predictable environment could offer.

Answer the following questions to simplify your focus and ensure your actions align with your purpose:

 

  1. Why do you do what you do?

There are two whys – the first is asked of the business owner – why are you doing what you do? And secondly, why does your business do what it does?

You need to be clear on both.

The answer to the 1st question should always be to build your business into an Asset that can secure your and your family’s future.

The answer to the 2nd question is NOT to sell what you have, it needs to be a problem that you solve for your customers.

 

  1. What do you do to achieve it?

This is the plan. What you’re doing in your business today determines your future. The best way to see where you’re going is to look at what you spend your time doing.
Your time is finite and how you spend it speaks to your commitment to yourself, your ambitions and predicts what your future holds for you.

 3. How do you do it to build momentum and to get it done easier, and easier?

Imagine starting from scratch and going for a 5km run… the first one will be awful. But if you do it again and again you’ll build muscles to support running, a style that makes it more comfortable and you’ll get running fit. It does get easier if you keep doing it.

If you can keep doing the things that bring you closer to your goals, and can score your progress along the way, you’ll find those activities become easier, some will become almost automatic.

To get this right you need systems, which create the framework for these repetitive actions to come together to deliver the progress that will get you to your goals.

It’s that simple…simplify!

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