Work Smarter Not Harder and Fast Track Your Business

  "I want to fire my employees!" As a business coach, I hear this a lot. As early as now, I’m telling you, there is hope. It doesn't have to be this hard. For most of us, when we started our business, we wore a lot of hats as we manage our day to day-to-day operations.  We did sales, provided our service, did the bookkeeping, and if we had the time, we engaged in business planning. We quickly realized that there just wasn't enough time in the day to get everything that needed to get done to grow the business.  Some days it felt like we were just spinning our wheels going nowhere. We started to fall behind and now we had to deal with unhappy customers.  These are the customers that we worked so hard to get. So then, we did it.  We hired our first employee to get to the things we could not get to during the day. At first, it looked like things were starting to get better, so we hired another employee, and then one after the other, to do the stuff that we couldn't ...

  Should you fire your clients? You’ll always get the customers you’re willing to accept. You may think that any paying customer is a customer worth having, but I’d argue that some customers are more trouble than they’re worth. There are some who actually cost you money every time you deal with them. The 80:20 rule (also called the Pareto Principle) states that 20 percent of your business comes from 80 percent of your customers, which also means that 80 percent of your headaches will generally come from just 20% of your customers. Make a list of the qualities you want in your ideal customers. This may include things like “they pay on time”, “they don’t fight me on my quotes” or “they refer their friends to me”. Now, go through your customers and categorize them into four “grades” – A, B, C or D. An A-grad e customer is your favorite kind of customer. This person probably pays your invoices on time, is pleasant to deal with, is happy to pay your quoted price, refers people to you, s...

You know, there's a saying that the only thing certain in life is death and taxes, and I'd like to add actually one thing to that and that's… change. The one lesson that we learned from dealing with the Covid pandemic is that change happens and how to really deal with it. Those that embrace change were able to adapt and continue to move forward and grow. You see when your business grows and as the business owner, you need to grow as well. When your business grows, your team is going to start feeling growing pains that are going to come about through changes that are taking place in the business. Implementing changes in your business, whether big or small can be tough. It's never easy. And if your employees are not on board with the process, that's when it's going to be even more challenging. To help my clients and their team manage these changes, we conduct a team alignment workshop. Its main purpose is to really align the team to your company culture and visio...

  As a business coach, I always try to stress that your business should not be your end-all. It should be the vehicle to help you get what you really want out of life. Your life shouldn’t be your business. Your business should get you more out of life. Here are what I believe to be are the 7 keys to improving ourselves and achieving the quality of life we want and deserve. 1. Quality of Results – To increase our quality of life we need to get better results. That’s easier said than done. How do we increase the quality of our results? 2. Quality of Actions – By increasing the quality of our actions we will improve the quality of results. So how, you might ask? 3. Quality of Decisions – To increase the quality of our actions we need to make better decisions. The next key will help us to increase the quality of our decisions. 4. Quality of Questions – The better the questions, the better the decisions you will make. One of the key ways that I help my clients as a business...

  Over the past 18 plus years of coaching business owners, I found that most people don't understand the difference between delegating a task and abdicating a task. According to the Webster dictionary, abdicate means to renounce a throne, high office, dignity, or function. That is to discard a responsibility. Many times I hear business owners say, “If I want to have it done right, I have to do it myself” or “By the time I teach someone to do it, I could just do it myself”. These two beliefs are what cause business owners to get stuck and get trapped in their business. True delegation is to assign responsibility or authority or to appoint one's representative. This doesn’t mean to appoint someone to a task and then just forget about it. It means you are still responsible, but you are now appointing someone to act as your representative. You need to define how you want them to act as “your representative” through the creation of systems and training. If you don’t, you will con...

  One of my favorite things I help business owners with is guiding them to turn their dreams into reality. Big dreams and goals are scary and that's why many people don't pursue them. What stops most of us is that we don't know where to begin. Let us start with a simple formula... Dream x Goals x Plan x Action = Success What is that multiplier?  It's our learning.  What we learn...helps us dream. But now we have to ask ourselves what do we need to learn to turn that dream into a goal? Or our goal into a plan? Or what do we need to learn to take our plan into action? In business, we will grow to our level of incompetency and stop.  Let's take a look at the process by which learning actually happens. The whole process of learning is, well, let's start with timing - how far ahead do you need to learn something? Do you need to learn it the day before you need it?  No, you need to be learning stuff at least a year prior to needing it. You need to learn stuff at leas...

Are you spending your day putting out fires that are popping out of nowhere? Are you always trying to fix something that’s not working in your business? Or, are you working on fire prevention enabling it to be more valuable and sellable down the road? Let me tell you what I mean... If you’re spending your day putting out fires, the fire itself is not the problem. If you find yourself always fixing your business, you haven't put the right structure in place.  You haven't put the right systems in place to be clear on what your ideal customer or employee is that will represent your brand and fit in and align with the culture of your organization. You might not even have a well-defined culture for your organization. There may not have an onboarding process for your team to make sure they are trained properly and show them your unique way of doing business. If you don't have all these systems in place, you're consistently putting out fires and fixing your business. Syste...