Meetings can be a huge drain on time. And as business moves from online meetings to some in-person engagements, the demand to deliver a return on time – not just for you but for the person you are selling to, is more important than event.

While in Chicago, Pavlo attended a conference on experts tactics to advance sales and business growth. In this podcast from The Money Show he shares a few of these to optimise your outcomes from any business meeting.

How you set up a meeting, how you manage it, how you follow through after

How do you set up a meeting?

First impressions count, and people buy from people, not companies.

Creating this impression is entirely in your control.

Why are you meeting? Who needs to be there, who will be there, and what does success from that meeting look like?

The meeting agenda is the most powerful tool to get this right. Set it, confirm it, and use it to build consensus and excitement ahead of the meeting itself.

How do you manage a meeting?

How you enter the room counts. If you are selling to a team or to a single person, getting there ahead of time, being appropriately dressed, and knowing who your audience is sets you apart.

Introducing yourself and your team correctly reduces time wasting and creates a connection immediately. Your audience needs to remember your name, know why you are with your company, and find reasons to connect with and trust you.

The job of your team is to connect and resonate with the audience relevant to them and create an alliance and champion out of them.

How do you take notes in a meeting?

People buy from people, so whilst taking detailed and comprehensive notes has value, avoid doing it in the meeting. Eye contact and connection are more important. Make a list of who will be in the room and what their roles will be ahead of time. When it comes to discussion, which you’ve allowed for by setting up the agenda, write down only the powerful words that you can remember afterward to create your notes around. After the meeting, in the car, record your notes before leaving the parking lot.

How do you follow up after a meeting?

Always send a follow-up email. Using your notes, confirm what you heard, ask if anything further needs to be added or corrected, and confirm the action items and follow through that you agreed on in the meeting. Saying thank you at the end of a meeting as opposed to next steps impacts your audience’s expectations and what they are committing to doing next.

To “Scale & Grow” you need to up your game in the most important game of business, selling, is how we can get a return on time and cost. New habits are needed since repeating yesterday won’t change anything tomorrow.

The economy is emerging from the Covid slump; it’s the beginning of the year – there are a lot of new hires. So how do you get new employees up to speed fast and effectively?

Employees are drawn to different companies because of their distinct characteristics, whether it be the company’s remuneration package, culture, or growth opportunities within the company

What’s going through the employee’s mind.

• As is—”re-alignment to the new company and its model and structures.”
• As was – “It’s not like the past, company, it’s different here”
• Still settling—”I haven’t settled yet, but I’ll get there, or will I?”
• Constant flux – “Will I make it past the first 3 months the way things are going?”

Every employee needs a structure for them to get their work done. When there are systems in place to help the employees reach their full potential, it will be easy to settle.

If you build your business on solid systems, you will be able to make use of the right technologies to automate your business systems. The trick is to first build those systems manually and automate them in stages for the employee and the business after this. The implementation of good business systems will result in business achieving scalable and sustainable growth with the new employees and across all areas of the company.

Listen to this podcast from The Money Show where Pavlo Phitidis discusses how to get new employees up to speed and returning value.

HR System

Job Description

This must say exactly what you want the person in the role to deliver. It must thoroughly define what the person must come in to build, run and be responsible for.

It’s even more important to make sure that the new employee ticks the following 3 blocks:

• The right Fit – they must fit into your company in terms of its culture, values, work ethic
• The right Skills set – they must have the right skills set for the job they’re hired for
• The right Aptitude – they must have the capacity to be easily adaptable (change is still on the cards)

Recruitment

A clear and accurate Job description will play a critical role in searching for and selecting the right candidate for the role.

On-Boarding

Training – what and how

Its important to make sure that you prepare a safe landing for your new employee. Make sure you understand the system they will be coming into fully and how they will fit in it so that it becomes clear from the get-go what it is expected of them. Failure to do the onboarding process effectively and provide essential training that enables the new employee to be effective in their role will leave them feeling like a misfit in your organization and lead to their loss of confidence in their own ability to deliver desirable results within their new environment.

Performance Management

Measurement

Without the measurement and management of performance in your organization, you will not be able to gauge your organizational performance. The key here is to ensure that performance is consistently and fairly measured for all employees. Most importantly, good performance must be rewarded, and there must be consequences management for non-performance. This will help you retain good performance and help you weed out non-performers.

Where does the actual business value lie? Is it in the product, people, or processes? The lazy answer is that it relies on all three, but a deeper look into it might surprise you.

Product

Physical or service, the product of a business refers to what the business offers to solve a customer’s problem. Sourcing, developing, and building a product or suite of products is essential for any business that trades. This often creates a mindset that centers the value of a company on its product.

People

Pavlo says he’s “heard utterances from my team is everything to if you want something done correctly, do it yourself.” So, which is it? Without your team, you are not a business. A one-person or two-person business is one that you create for yourself. The team is vital to “SCALE & GROW”, and advance the size, profitability, and ability of a business.

Processes

The daily, weekly, and monthly activities that you need to perform across your business functions govern the customer experience, the team experience, the supplier experience, and any other stakeholder in your business. Without process, chaos reigns. Too much process creates a pool of treacle for anything new to happen.

The best approach is to adopt an investor mindset, something especially hard for any company founder or owner to achieve.

Listen to this podcast from The Money Show where Pavlo Phitidis discusses “product, people, or processes”

Products can and will be imitated and replicated by competitors. With time and money, their value erodes. People come and go, and skills are more available now than ever before. A mindset arguing that people hold the business value. Then if that’s so, where is the value in the business if people come and go? Processes create the experience behind every engagement with a business. If a good experience a customer, supplier, or employee has with the company is reliable and predictable, they will continue to support that business. To get this right means that you need to understand your customers’ needs, wants, psychographics, and behaviours. It means you need to have a definitive culture and set of values that attract and repel employees, leaving you with those that identify with your company and, therefore, customers. In the order of processes, these elements need good products to trade effectively.

This equation of business value….it all starts, and ends, with processes leading the value investment!