Work Smarter Not Harder and Fast Track Your Business

In today's business tip, I want to discuss and actually distinguish the difference between a leader and a manager because leadership is not just a job title. Being a good manager takes a mind shift that takes you from being a producer to a more productive manager. Anyone at any level of an organization can be a leader. I'm specifically referring to people that report to you, or that you're in charge of guiding them to grow and succeed, and then how you get more out of that whether you are up and coming manager or even the owner of the organization. Being a manager takes a mind shift. A mind shift that can be very difficult for some. Once someone becomes a manager, their success is no longer determined by their individual contribution. Their success is now measured by the results of their team. I've seen this a lot when I've seen the top producers get promoted to a manager. Just think about this for the most part. These are people who are promoted internally in ...

  Just as a farmer knows that their business is affected by the change of seasons, so are our businesses. Unlike a normal season that typically lasts about three months, each business season can last many years or on average about 10 years. If you don't understand how this business season will really affect your business you could be caught off guard and this can have a very negative effect on the health and the survival of your business. Let's start talking about Spring. This is the time when the farmer starts to sow the seeds. We are starting to plant ideas and they start to grow. You've survived the Winter and now you're beginning a totally new economic cycle planting the seeds and maybe even looking for other revenue sources. We may even possibly recruit new talent to help us grow. Generally, at this point, we plan and map out our focus for the succeeding years. Business Spring usually lasts many years. You need to give these ideas time to develop. Then after Sprin...

  My definition of success that I got from Tom Hopkins many years ago is that success is a journey towards the achievement of predetermined worthwhile goals. When you take a deeper look at this statement, it is expressing that success is different for everyone. Each of us is on our own journey towards our own success and so we must focus on our own journey and not someone else's success or someone else's journey. If we're looking at someone else's success, we are taking the eye off the ball. We're taking our eyes off of our journey and that could quickly lead us to get off the tracks. Have you ever looked at a co-worker or another entrepreneur and think, "How did they become so successful so quickly?" It's easy to focus on what we see , that being successful seems to be little time or requires very little effort. The problem is that we're just seeing the results and not the effort that it took for them to get there. When we do this, we are losing ...

  How do you create an automatic business that runs without you? This is not just theory. It comes from guidance, a system, and a commitment from the business owner that they want to work on it. Let's get started with the definition of a Business according to ActionCOACH.  It is a commercial profitable enterprise that works without you - the business owner. You see, when I work with my clients, I get them to just work on one of these areas. Is it a commercial enterprise? Or is it a profitable enterprise that works without you? See, I meet lots of entrepreneurs that want to start, maybe, one, two, or three businesses, and guess what? They all have the same problems. Because the fundamentals are not set up correctly. Commercial means that you're selling something that people value or something that they want to buy. Profitable means that you understand enough about your business finances that you could possibly increase your profits without even increasing your revenue or even ...

  Let's start by digging into some of the frameworks that ActionCOACH has to help entrepreneurs understand their real role in business and how to run an automatic business that runs without them. You see, as a small and medium-sized enterprise, what is your product? Is it the food that you serve? Or the service that you sell? We say that your product is actually your business, and the only reason that you would want to build a business is to eventually sell it. Now some of you I think might disagree but some of you might decide to franchise it. Well, that's selling. Some of you might decide to bring in new shareholders and that's selling it, partially. Some of you might want to sell it all together and then again, some of you might want to go IPO with this business. The essence is that the name of the game in owning a business is “How can I further expand my wealth by using other people's money?” Whether it's expanding my business or selling it or building other bu...

  Today, we're going to talk about how we can improve the quality of life and businesses for small and medium-sized enterprises right here in North Florida and beyond. ActionCOACH is a globally proven system that I want to talk to you about and how we could really work for you and your business, to provide a different way of guidance and support for your businesses and really other small and medium-sized Enterprises right here in the North Florida area. You see, 80% of small and medium-sized businesses closed their doors within 5 years. That's pretty sad, isn't it? But why is this? Because many of the small and medium-sized business owners just burnt out. They're not getting enough results. And this is not the dream that they had. And so they had to close their doors and they had to try to maybe go into another business or go back to work for other people. This is why we have to bring a different way or a different kind of business education and business guidance to t...

The last few years have been very crazy for entrepreneurs. Some were going out of business and are just keeping their heads above water while others are really truly thriving out there. Well, some of my clients are having some of their best years ever. So the business climate out there seems to be getting better, but we're not out of the woods yet. It seems like the government and the economist out there keep throwing that “R” word around… Recession , right? So why do some businesses thrive while others implode during these economic recessions? This remains puzzling to too many business owners and entrepreneurs out there. But I'm here to tell you that not all businesses have to suffer during a down business cycle. An overwhelming majority of my clients, as I mentioned, not only survived but thrived as well. In fact, one of my clients likes to introduce me by saying that " If it wasn't for Steve, we'd be out of business. " So what separates these successful b...

When we look back at our life growing up, it's filled with a lot of memories. The first day we went to Kindergarten and then Elementary School, the first day we went to High School, the first day we went to College or a Trade School, the first day we got our first job. But what is more important...those first days or our last days? Those last days are our milestones. Those were days we had celebrations and parties. The day we graduated Kindergarten, Middle School, High School, College, Graduate Schools. Those graduation days were milestones in our lives that we looked forward to, that we worked towards. Graduation is not an end of a journey but the beginning of a new one. But then something happened... Once our schooling and education ended, it seemed that our graduation days ended as well. I would like to suggest that it doesn't have to be that way. What if we could just insert new graduation days into our lives like when do you want to graduate from your business? I posed ...

When we don't set priorities, we find ourselves putting out fires instead of working strategically to grow our business. This is a real cause of major bottlenecks for most businesses because it's really hard to identify these issues because you're running around right in the middle of it. So the question is, are you really focusing on "busy work" or "strategic work"? When we are working on "busy work", we are finding that we are reacting to everything else that's around us. We begin to lose control and we start to feel overwhelmed. This is just a symptom of an underlying problem that we have not set clear priorities in our business. I know what you’re thinking, and it's like “Yes, Steve I have priorities. We have tons of them.” I'm going to let you in on a secret. The truth is, if everything is a priority, well, nothing is a priority. You might be trying to maybe go too wide and not deep enough into each of these issues. I want to h...

  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...