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 ge

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

  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

Most businesses after a period of growth, hit plateau and that proverbial glass ceiling, and the business owners struggles with trying to figure out why. You haven't really changed anything, you've gone through this significant growth period, and now, sales are flat or maybe declining a bit. You're frustrated/ You're discouraged. You're scratching your head wondering "What's going on? Why can I continue to maintain this growth trajectory?" What you don't realize is that you haven't properly prepared your organization to scale. What I mean by that is you haven't put systems, processes, procedures, disciplines and structures in place to enable the organization to prepare for growth. Yes, you might have this in place, but what have don’t realize as business guru, Marshal Goldsmith says, “Is that what got you here, won’t get you there”. You’ve out grown the initial systems you put in place. What's happened is that as the organization ha

Finding good employees are hard to find in any economy. Sometimes we just settle for a warm body. We then end up with a group of people that might or might not be a good fit for our organization and culture. What I want to talk about now is one of the hardest things that you might have to face as a business owner or leader. What do you do when you have a really loyal employee, someone who's been with you for a long time, but their performance has slipped. Their performance is not where it needs to be anymore, you just can't get rid of them or you just don't want to. They've been with you for a long time. They've been loyal, somebody that you could always count on. Somebody who had your back. Loyalty really matters.. and you value that. Plus, you don't want to be flippant about somebody's life and somebody's job, their livelihood. But, consider for a moment... What if, what you're perceiving, to be continued loyalty is partially loyalty, but it&

  I’m going to let you in on a secret, if you want to build a business that works without you, well you can’t.  You probably weren’t expecting me to say that.  This will take a shift in mindset.  You don’t build your business your team does. Now you’re probably thinking, "yea right, I can’t get them to show up on time.  Do you really expect them to grow my business?"  The answer is, well, yes and no. To have a great business you’ll need to hire great people.  I know you’re thinking, "Hey, I can’t find people to even show up to the interview."  This is going to take another mind shift because most businesses do recruitment all wrong. Recruitment is not about hiring great people; it’s about attracting great people.  Now if you looked at your business from an outside perspective, would the best in your industry want to work for you?  Interesting question, isn’t it? Recruitment is not about hiring it’s about marketing.  You need to create a business that would attract t