Scale & Grow

“ChatGPT: The AI Language Model Taking the Business World by Storm”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a topic of interest for decades, but with the advent of cutting-edge technology, AI is now more accessible and applicable to the business world than ever before. One such AI tool that has put the business world on red alert is ChatGPT, an AI language model developed by OpenAI, a private AI organization founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Wojciech Zaremba. With Microsoft among its investors and a $1bn investment, OpenAI is a driving force in the development of AI technology.

So, what is ChatGPT, and why is it so significant? Essentially, ChatGPT is a tool that helps businesses and individuals to communicate and engage with their customers and audiences in a more effective and efficient manner. However, it is important to note that ChatGPT is not a solution in itself but rather like an exoskeleton, providing support and enhancement to human capabilities.

The rise of ChatGPT has caused concern among some, who fear that its widespread use could lead to a homogenization of language and a loss of creativity. While there is some truth to these fears, ChatGPT has the potential to free up time and energy for individuals, allowing them to focus on more important and creative tasks. Moreover, the technology is still in its early stages and will likely continue to evolve and improve, offering even greater benefits in the future.

Pavlo expressed interest in his perspective on ChatGpt in a recent Money Show podcast.

So, why are we talking about ChatGPT now? As the first of many AI tools set to enter the public domain in a usable format, ChatGPT represents a huge opportunity for businesses to get ahead and use it to increase their performance.

Looking to the future, ChatGPT has the potential to create a range of new careers, including language model experts who will be responsible for fine-tuning, teaching, and optimizing the technology. Content creators who can step up and go beyond the vanilla will also have a key role to play, as will project managers, who will be required for all projects utilizing ChatGPT.

In terms of competition, it’s inevitable that it will come. However, the opportunity to use ChatGPT across all business functions is simply too good to ignore. From marketing research and communications to sales, operations, accounting, procurement, and recruitment, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the way businesses operate.

Marketing departments, for example, can use ChatGPT for research, with the ability to ask and get an answer, without having to spend hours searching across websites looking to upsell. ChatGPT can also be used to improve the quality of communications and product descriptions, as well as translate website content into different languages.

In sales, ChatGPT can help to understand customers and markets, and improve engagement with relevant messaging, even in second languages.

In operations, ChatGPT can automate repetitive tasks and provide consistent product descriptions across all media. In accounting, ChatGPT can help with benchmarking and interpretation, while in procurement, it can aid in research and negotiation. And in recruitment, ChatGPT can be used to create job descriptions and KPIs.

ChatGPT is a game-changer for the business world and represents a huge opportunity for businesses to improve their performance and stay ahead of the competition. The future is here, and the time to act is now.

Life is about selling, and business ownership is about non-stop selling. Excellence in selling leads to business excellence, and often it has little to do with how good your product or service is.

Looking at the many different businesses that exist, they all have special features and unique products and services that are well thought through. But at the end of the day, everything is becoming increasingly commoditized.

It is absolutely vital to get the deal done when you’re in front of the client because, on average, a client is looking at more than one service that is similar to yours. The art of getting the deal done is not about talking about the product and service that you have to offer. It’s about learning how to manage the objections that are sure to come. And objection management is what selling is all about.

Objections vary; it’s where somebody makes an excuse to not engage with you, not buy your product, or to push you away, and if you can manage the objections, you’ve got a higher chance of then making a sale.

In this podcast of the Money Show Pavlo explores the 5 main reasons nobody wants to engage with you about your product or service.

• Money: I can’t afford it!

The big M is money, and often the excuse is “I can’t afford to” or “We didn’t account for this.” There is always the money objection that arises and disrupts the selling process.

• Trust: I don’t believe you will deliver on your promise!

Trust is where real wealth lies. Its where real currency lies. It is absolutely necessary. It’s the essence of branding. Trust is important. If prospective customers and clients trust you, you’re more likely to have a smoother and more productive conversation with them, which can ultimately lead to their choosing your services or business.

• Need: I don’t need it!

To serve the need, you’ve got to elicit the need. You’ve got to ask the right series of questions to help people understand that you have something of value and you know that you are serving the right customer. You often have to help people understand that they don’t know what they don’t know. And it is this process that is the essence of business development. It’s more than selling. It’s more than marketing. It’s a process of education. It’s expensive, it’s costly, and it’s absolutely essential. As a result, creating the need is critical.

• Urgency: I don’t need it right now!

Let’s say we have a good argument for money, we’ve elicited the need, but there’s no impulse to move forward, no decision to take that big step.. Now you have to show that without buying the product or service you’re offering, a problem will arise. That it is going to be costly; that it is going to be painful; and thatit is going to create trauma and drama in that person’s life. If you don’t create that need with a strong enough impulse, the urgency never arises to make the decision now. And the problem with someone not making a decision in the moment when you’re in the process of selling is, a week later, they’ve likely forgotten about you. So that urgency is vital to making somebody move.

• Time: I don’t have time to engage with it!

This is where your preparation comes in. And if you raise all the objections ahead of time, knowing what objections you typically face—whether it’s money, time, urgency, trust, or need—if you raise them all ahead of time before a client or customer can raise them and resolve them proactively, you’ll be on the front foot to close those deals because it will leave that client or customer fully engaged and trusting in the process itself. It’s called selling in the sunlight, and it’s one of the best ways to do it.

Pavlo’s tactic:

When someone says ‘not right now’, I usually say “Respectfully, in my experience when people say that it means you’re either not interested or unaffordable, may I ask which is it?”It’s an open-ended question puts them in a position where they’re going to say either, “I’m not interested.” Then, you know, it’s a need, an urgency issue. Or they will say “it’s not affordable”. Then, as you know, it’s a money and trust issue.

And if you’ve done your work, you know how to resolve both of those in the second round of discussion. Don’t let go. Once you have a customer or client that you know well and can serve well in front of you, you need to close the deal because it puts you on the front foot of selling, which puts you on the front foot of leaving successful and growing your business.

Recently I met a valuable business. Valuable because of the skills, talent, and costly capital equipment recently purchased. By recent, I mean before the interest rate hikes of 2022. Capital equipment lends itself well to debt funding, and debt funding secures its returns through interest. Rising rates can burn a business unless you raise revenues too.

What was interesting about this business was its leaders’ mindset. They believed that only they, or people like them, could build the business and grow it beyond their hefty £22.7m annual revenues. Comments like, “What we do is very specialized, and it needs us, hands-on with our teams, to get the job done” and “In our industry, it’s relationships and reputation built by our highly specialized, deep expertise that grow a business”.

In this podcast of the Money Show, Pavlo Phitidis discusses the perception and reality of uniqueness in specialized businesses

Rising inflation, which drove interest rates higher, exacerbated the uncertainty that was fuelling the recession. Unless this business grew, they’d be left with the cost of their capital equipment, an agitated workforce wanting to “engineer” things, and possible demise.

Every business has two pieces that need to be coupled together to succeed. By succeed, I mean increasing revenues and profitability and doing so in a manner that sees the owners free 70% of their time from daily, weekly, and monthly operational activities. It will allow that business to scale, grow and ultimately be sold. They did not meet any of these criteria!

They did have one key element to success: did have a brilliant product or service, as a result of their highly specialized skills and capabilities. To accelerate their products’ and services’ value, they needed to build a second element: a commercial system. The first solves client problems; the second creates an engaging experience for clients. Both are necessary if you want to grow beyond your available time.

After accepting that their specialization was very similar to their competitors, creating no advantage or disadvantage and levelling the playing field, we spoke about what sets a business like this apart.

Like any business, it is about whom you serve (your customers and clients) and what experience you create for them. The experiences I refer to are those that you and I are subjected to every day from suppliers. How do they market their propositions to us and then sell, deliver, and administer the relationship with us? All these elements are articulated by commercial activities, including marketing, sales, operations, and administration. These activities, organized into a sequence that creates the experience, are brought to life by purposeful teams. This was the missing ingredient that saw their brilliance manifest in  £22m revenue, rather than the £60 to £80m revenue performance they should be doing after 32 years in the game.

It’s hard to see when all the habits you’ve developed since being in your business have been formed against your strengths. Engineers make things. Doctors fix people. Vets fix animals. Chefs cook things. Our underlying interest drives our training and vocation. Intellectually, that feeds us.

Developing and deepening your skills in your chosen profession is exciting and influences what business you build as a result. However, this makes us essentially product-centric, when only customer-centric business models promise scale, growth, and premium exits. It can also make us forget to build a commercial system to drive the business and grow it beyond our hands, heads, and hearts.

Finally, after 3 hours of discussion, the engineers agreed!

We recently surveyed a few hundred business owners, asking each what they saw as their biggest growth impediment.

The top 3 are

1. Scale – how do you build a system of growth
2. People—how do you find, manage, and lead your people?
3. Growth mindset—how do you maintain an inventive, positively inspired outlook and action in the environment of business that we face today?

In this podcast of the Money Show, Pavlo unpacks an approach to deal with each of these big challenges to growth:

Scale

This is about business design. Like a ship, building, plane, or train, it is designed and built to serve a particular need. An office tower is designed differently from a shopping centre. They serve different audiences and fulfil different needs. They are designed to optimise their ability to meet these needs most efficiently.

The design of your business, too, must be thought through. What’s different in a business is that the design needs to shift and change as the business grows. Most companies I’ve seen operate with a business model suited to half or even a third of the current revenues of the company. It’s as if the businesses are stuck in a start-up or early stage of business design even though they are achieving revenues 2 to 3 times their maturity. It’s unsustainable and eventually kills you or the value you have created over years of effort.

People

Finding the right people to do the right thing all the time is a global challenge. Talented people are essential to growth. If talented people occupy a growth mindset and work on a business built for scale, you create a nucleus of growth in the industry.

Skilled people look to innovate. That means creating more value. If coupled with a scalable business, that innovation leads to growth. Competitors with talented people respond, and the competitive cycle kicks in, attracting funding, talent, and more innovation. It creates vibrancy and growth across and through the industry.

In an environment where talent is draining away or cannot be afforded because of its scarcity, the design of your business is key to getting your people element right. A simple business is scalable and needs a design that changes as the business grows.

The other impediment to getting the people piece right is delegation. Suppose you do not develop a delegation framework that lets you delegate effectively. In that case, you will always be pulled back into the engine room of the business. You eventually get worn to the bone, lose all inspiration and passion, and slowly erode the value you have created. Getting delegation right is about two things.

You and your attitude to delegation and what and how you delegate.

As a business owner, delegation should be your primary function. If you don’t believe in people, you don’t think anyone can do it as well as you or as fast as you. Suppose you harbour deep in your unconscious mind a fear of success that sees you erode the passion and inspiration of your team, amongst other things. In that case, you need to get some perspective. Fear of success is deeply unconscious, and it remains one of the greatest impediments to growth that I’ve come across.

How you delegate is equally essential. Most business owners delegate instructions, and this opens up misunderstandings that begin to break down trust and confidence. When someone doesn’t do what you told them to do, what attitude do you eventually hold toward them? The key to unlocking delegation is delegating a system of activities that can be measured and produce a definable outcome.

Mindset

Many challenges are being faced across all economies globally. Inflation, cost of capital, access to capital, talent, supply lines, energy concerns, war, currency fluctuations, and political mismanagement are some of the many issues experienced everywhere. So, it’s not personal. And that’s the most important thing to consider. It becomes personal if you allow it to wear you down. You end up wearing lenses that highlight everything wrong and wear yourself down further. And with that, everything wrong begins to dominate your day, seeding depression and anxiety. You can get trapped in that space. Ask yourself then, what does that achieve? An alternative is to create a different reality and to do so by creating a morning mantra – I’ll only focus on what it can control.

When you disconnect from the internet, the anxiety and stress caused by various realities disappears. Next, recognize that what’s wrong in your industry is wrong for all. It’s not personal. Your competitors are suffering from the same challenges. It makes for an equal playing field.

To get ahead, adopt a growth mindset that says we will grow despite everything that is wrong. That pair of lenses lets you see the challenges as an opportunity to get ahead of your competitors, which means growth. As an outcome, it breeds positivity and feeds inspiration. You are in control of it all. If you struggle to get to the other side of a negative mindset, get some help. An outside perspective is valuable and can prevent you from wasting months or years of your precious, valuable time, which you can never get back.

An upset brand manager contacted the Money Show following an unflattering review of their ad campaign.

Pavlo joined the show to discuss the most fundamental part of any marketing activity – positioning. When the positioning of the brand is not determined from the get-go, then the brand is simply everything to everyone.

Listen to the discussion or read on for a few key takeouts:

Brand Positioning:

It all comes down to what makes your company unique. Not in your opinion, but rather in the opinion of your customers. Not so much in what they say as in what they actually do. In other words, they express their satisfaction with your service or

Why does brand positioning matter?

A well-built business that consistently gets to both the next level of growth and value is one that has been built on clearly articulated, relevant positioning. It enjoys clarity and certainty as to why it exists and how it will grow.

A brand is really a feeling that people who engage with that company have towards that company. And a brand is going to be created by two things.

1. Firstly, by the product that you offer.
2. The experience that they have interacting with your company.

Looking at a typical food chain store, there are three main components that are going to drive the brand: the consumers, the franchisees, and the employees in the company, and all of them together will form opinions through social media, through engagement with friends, family, and others around what their impressions and experiences are.

The product must solve a problem. That’s its job. But the thing that makes up a product is quite complex because it goes beyond the actual food, its preparation, and all the special ingredients.
A competing brand can replicate this at ease. What really distinguishes the brand is the experience you create for a customer group.

product by using it repeatedly. They tell their family and friends about your business. 

Disruptive Brands:

Disruption and transformation without purpose are of no value to consumers. It’s clear that the definition of a “disruptor” – and its  formula for success in a world of uncertainty, change, and transformation – isn’t black and white. So, what is the secret to success in this continuously changing world?

Flaws in positioning

Almost always, brand managers argue that they are positioning themselves through their product, service, and price.

Product: They argue the merits of their product in terms of its features and benefits. In the case of a food chain, the argument will be based on the taste and the special ingredients that are used for the food, and how their taste sets them apart from everyone else.

Service: many, in fact, most, say it’s their service. By keeping our ears to the ground and listening to our customers, we were able to offer a unique personalised service “bending over backwards to accommodate and please their customers”.

Price: The price debate. Arguing price in such a large market that has many competitors creeping out is baseless. If you are not in a competitive market, then price probably doesn’t matter in any event.

If you reflect on what you have built so far. A simple business, focused on solving problems for a few well-defined customer segments and retaining them by creating a great experience delivered reliably and consistently. You have a few growth strategies maturing all the time, and they are all now led and run by your team. You have time on your hands. Apply it to focusing on deepening and locking in your value.

The starting point here is to understand the basic premise of value investing. If you are investing in a share on a stock exchange, you want three outcomes:

1. Income – your annual dividends. 
2. Capital – you want the capital value of the share to grow over time so you can sell it for more than you bought it.
3. Tradability – you want to be able to sell and buy the share as you like

Value is all about behaving as a shareholder or investor in your own business. Looking at your business like you look at a share is how you lock the value into your business.

In this Podcast of the Money Show Pavlo Phitidis unpacks the final layer in building a 100million valuation company: [VALUE]

The fourth layer is all about growth.

With your time now split to only 30% on operational and management activities because of the first 3 layers, you have time to focus and lead growth. There are several different types of growth you must generate to both lift revenues and deepen profit, and one without the other is of little value.

Growing revenue is about increasing your company’s revenue, while growing profit is about increasing your company’s profitability as a percentage of your revenue. In effect, you want to increase the “gap” between your revenue and your costs to increase profitability while also increasing the quantum of revenue to increase profit.

The first three layers see you with a company that serves well-defined customer segments whose ideal customer experience you’ve determined in the Positioning layer, which is then built out in the System of Delivery layer and brought to life in the Purposeful People layer.

Locking in capital

Achieving this needs you to lock in the growth and future profits of your business. Depending on what business you are in, this can be achieved across multiple areas.

1. Brand – A brand is a feeling that your stakeholders have towards hearing your company name. What you do for who, how you do it and why you do it carry all the building blocks of a brand beyond pretty logos and business cards. It’s hard to get right and costly too if you cannot answer these questions with a vision for yourself and your business. A brand is lived before it is felt and it must transcend your business into the industry and sectors you work in.
2. Suppliers – any dependencies on suppliers must be locked in, contractually or otherwise. If you represent a brand in your territory, that contract must ensure longevity and cession. If you run a restaurant, you must have a long-term tenancy, etc.
3. Customers—to what degree can you provide a service (and every business is a service business) over the long term for your customers? If you can move towards providing a service over time as opposed to a single project, that secures long-term customers. There are many ways to get this right. Think of a motor plan as an example.
4. Team—how do you lock in your team as the drivers of your business.

Across all these areas, you need to ensure that you, your role, and your presence are minimised.

Ensuring tradability

Understanding the 5 levers of valuation and exit is key for any business owner. Not knowing them means you may well build a business that does well for you over 10–20–40 years but cannot be sold or transferred when you want to exit. You’ll have earned a good income, but the capital gain will be lost, robbing you of monetising the years of investment and risk it took to get here.

Let’s end off by behaving as the buyer of your business. The promise was to create a business worth 100 million.

20 years in, you should be owning a material portion of your market. This could be as much as 2-3% in the service industry. In manufacturing, this should be around 3-5%. It varies from industry to industry, but you need to have a view on it, and you need to be in a position where you are generating at least 10-12 million in profit. After 20 years, this should be possible… right?

Valuation works as a multiple of profit. In general, multiples start at around 2-3 and move up to 5-6.

So, let’s make a deal. The 5 levers are a set of questions that cover the following areas:

1. What distinguishes you in the eyes of your customers?
2. How is the business operated and run?
3. Who makes it all happen?
4. Is there future growth?
5. What happens without you there?

An Asset of Value™ is a business that answers them all. Each layer plays into the next as they couple together and demonstrate that each of these question sets can be addressed in a manner that earns an additional 5 multiples on the running industry multiple.

On a 10 million profit, a 5 multiple earns an additional 5 multiples to give you your 100 million asset.

Jack was 54 years old when he came to Aurik, he had 76 employees at the time and his revenue was $4,89 million per annum.

He was also exhausted.

Jack ran multiple, disconnected businesses. one supplied baked goods to hotel chains, another was a retail coffee shop, he also had a few bakeries which he ran, and he bulk broke flour to distribute to smaller bakers around him. The business was extremely chaotic, and Jack wanted to sell it, but who would buy his problems?

Working with Aurik, Jack identified 1 business and closed the rest, together we developed Systems of Delivery, empowered by a team, to dominate that chosen sector.

The System of delivery released his time to focus on new market segments and innovation to enable next-level growth.

Jack’s  annual revenues increased 10-fold and his business was valued at $77,2 million after working with Aurik.

 In addition, Jack no longer wanted to sell as he business was fun and exciting again –

Watch this video summary of Jack’s story

To build your business, there are many things to consider. One being that no investor wants to invest in any company where it is just you. You need to have a team. Because if you were to have the misfortune of a sudden death, many investors would be interested in that company if they knew who would carry on the value. Business owners see this as an exciting opportunity and yet the toughest one to get right.

In this podcast with Pavlo Phitidis from The Money Show, he looks at the key elements in building the team you need for a business that can scale and grow.

Some key takeaways from this:

• The market tells you what you’re doing right and, more importantly, what you’re doing wrong. And if you don’t shape up and fit in with what the market wants, you’re not going to be in business much longer. It takes time to understand the business.

• It takes time to understand yourself, more so when your business is still in the early stages. To have an effective skill set requires you to make 2 to 300 decisions a day, which can often be difficult if you don’t know yourself or your ability to understand what you need for yourself, your team, and to build your business.

• The saying, “Time is Money,” can be interpreted in many ways. Should you have gotten a person on board only to discover 6 to 12 months later that they were the wrong person? Getting rid of them to re-fill the position will cost you 50 to 80% of that person’s annual salary each time.

• Employers hire against a profile, and a profile has a number of elements to it. You need to have a psychological profile, and you need to have a cultural values profile, and you need to have a job profile. What is the job? What are you expecting that person to do before you bring them on board, outside of their position? What is the actual job?

• There is often a high need for the employee, and when the correct steps are not followed onboarding that person, because of sheer need and urgency, your judgement could be shrouded by what you’re looking for, and that cognitive bias makes you a little bit crazy and sometimes the person you’re employing is not the person who’s really there. You need to look beyond the Resumé.

• The most important consideration when hiring to complete the team you  desire is to always hire someone who is smarter than you, more energetic than you, more determined than you, and more driven than you. The team member must want to be involved in the company and, more importantly, in the company’s future. You can usually see this in the interview when they know about the business and are intrigued by it. So as an employer, to stick to the mission, selling a job is essential to get someone who’s going to be a real asset in your business, because when the business is growing beyond a certain point, that individual needs to adapt or get the boot!

Global inflation and the strong Rand create an environment that is ideal to position your business to expand into global markets. Now is the time to explore the opportunities for growing a business and make it happen!

Finding the opportunity in crisis

On the one hand, global inflation rates are beginning to rise,. On the other, the strong rand helps to supplement measures that are sometimes beyond our control. However, the two together are providing an excellent atmosphere for a company to grow into worldwide markets.

In South Africa , we’ve become accustomed to inflation and the Reserve Bank’s ability to manage it by adjusting interest rates. And for us, dealing with this in our business is almost almost a kind of muscle memory. In more developed markets, this is profoundly unfamiliar territory.

This is compounded by the ongoing COVID supply chain crisis. It’s not going to change anytime soon and businesses are realising they need to learn to live with it.. As a business owner, protect yourself, get yourself a jab, do what you need to. But business isn’t going to stop any longer because it can’t afford to.

Listen to Pavlo Phitidis in this podcast of The Money Show, share the possibilities of expanding into global markets.

Why is it that the time is right to grow your business in developed economies like the UK and US?

The US and UK markets are viciously competitive to levels that we as South African companies are not, so entering those markets is not a simple task.

So, growing a business by understanding the market environment, guiding, and managing changes to your product or service, and finding access to those markets requires you to find someone who will be able to conduct market research for you and look out for your interests. It’s not something that you can commission from a so-called research agency that might be well located in the US, somewhere in Europe, or in the UK, where it may be. And I say that because, very often, those services bill you and then leave you with a document that contains a lot of theory but no practical path to getting to revenue quickly.

What you need to do to make it happen

The fear mongering taking place across the UK, in the US and Europe about the very real inflation impact – something that those environments are not used to – is creating a lot of discussion, and a lot of consternation, right across business. And that consternation is leading to a slowdown on the take up of services, and of investments. In those environments, the rand albeit stronger than it has been in a while, acts favourably for us because outsourcing to countries like South Africa, to companies that can respond effectively to it is where we are seeing massive growth across the clients that we are working with in South Africa.

It is a prime, prime opportunity to get that toehold in, which is so hard to gain. Now is the time  because when you do, you learn fast what you need to do to upgrade your service and product and capability. You might as well have thrown a grappling line onto what will be the fastest moving ship for your revenue two or three years from now. But you need to be growing your business into an Asset of Value to ensure you’re ready to scale and grow into markets beyond South Africa.

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.

If you are not growing your company, you are dying. The war in Ukraine, global supply chains, microchip scarcity, remote working, COVID, and inflation will kill your business… if you allow them to!

Inflation in a business is like cancer in a body. It’s often not detected until it’s either too late or requires a massive effort to eradicate and remedy. The best way to understand how it works is to think about R1,000 and what you do with it.

Say, inflation is running at 5%. If you place it in a current account, no interest is payable. At the end of the year, that R1K has the buying power of R950, and at the end of the following year, it’s worth around R900 and so on. Alternatively, you could place your R1k into a money market investment offering 4.5%. That way, before tax, you maintain the purchasing power of that money over the year. It’s worth R1,050 at the end of the year and so on. But the problem, of course, is tax and its impact on your purchasing power. That R50 interest earned can only be worth half of that, depending on your tax rate, but in any event, it still sees your money eroded. So here is the problem: many business owners don’t run calculations like this. They are too busy contending with the many challenges in the business environment. Their heads are also full of the deafening, seemingly relentless noise created by the information overflow generated by local, national, and global events.

But you leave it in your current account because you need to have it at hand.

In this podcast, Pavlo Phitidis discusses how your business may thrive in today’s economy, where the business environment, political environment, and global environment all play a role.

Why do you need to have it at hand and readily accessible?

Plan to plan, but no plan yet.
This is likely to develop a growing aversion to risk as well as a mindset that only ever sees risk. If you are here, either sell your business or get some help to get into the next option below!

The plan to sustain
Do what you’ve done until you have an idea of what you want your business to be. Whilst it’s better than not having a plan, it’s not good enough. The reason is simple. In your industry, you have competitors that are planning and acting on their plans to grow. Their growth erodes your business.

Make plans to expand.
Turn an idea into a plan, a plan into a document, the document into action. Or, even better, you can anchor your business into the future by defining what your company needs to be: an Asset of Value™. You engage your leadership team to set the 3-year plan and your operational team to develop the 1-year plan. Once all are aligned, you work with that team to break the year’s plan into quarterly milestones (measured outcomes over time). Once done, you create a budget. Once done, you delegate and assign the budget.

In this economy, business environment, political environment, and global environment, it’s tempting to feel overwhelmed, small, insignificant, unworthy, and incapable of growing your company and fulfilling your dreams and ambitions. Many people retain the shroud of an imposter, seemingly in control, up and at it and succeeding. The Jekyll and Hyde conflict exists in everyone – you are not an exception. It’s valuable to acknowledge and embrace. The frustration of this world must turn into anger. That anger must turn into positively inspired action. This is the turbine that propels action to make a difference and create a reality different from what we are told makes up the world. It’s a choice, and it’s in everyone’s power and self-interest to make it so.

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.