Work Smarter Not Harder and Fast Track Your Business

A systems approach to business is based on the idea of "ever more with ever less," according to ActionCoach CEO and founder Brad Sugars. It gives your business a real competitive edge by allowing you to increase the speed of production, reduce rework, and make better use of resources. Systems are made up of clearly defined, interconnected parts, each with its own set of goals, that work together to improve efficiencies and allow your business to leverage information and data, marketing investments, and even the skills of the employees across the business. A valuable benefit of a systems approach is that it's not dependent on top-down micro-management. A well-organized and supported system frees the business owner/leader from being the source of all information and involvement in every single decision and process. It frees you from your business and allows you to be a smarter business owner allowing you to work smarter not harder. You'll know you have a good system in ...

  In today’s tough competitive marketplace there are a lot of businesses seeking out business help to change the perception of their business of being a commodity to a business that is unique and provides something of value to the marketplace.  One way of standing out and providing value to your industry and your local market is by positioning yourself as the local market expert.  You are the one everyone goes to for information on your industry. Here are 3 tips to help turn you into a market expert. 1. Tell your Story – We all have a story to tell.  What’s your story?  Why did you choose the industry you are in?  What challenges did you face while creating your business?  How does your story (your past experience) help you to be a problem solver for your clients?  Using stories to help clients relate to your vision & mission of being in business will help you to begin to create trust with your prospects and your market at large. 2. Create a ...

The Power of the Point. This is the point where success and failure meet. This point is the point deep inside us. This is the point of our motivation, where our decisions to choose come from. We are talking about people taking responsibility and accountability for their life and business, and taking ownership of the situation they find themselves in. Most people aren’t really aware of the way most people operate. The point is pretty simple. We can either add to or drain this point. When our actions and decisions drain our energy and that of those around us, we are lying in bed while opportunities pass us by. This bed is made up of our blaming, our excuses, and our denial. I'm sure you've met some people that live in this space a little bit of their time. If you think about it, it's easy to blame other people for the circumstances that our choices put us in, people will find anybody and every one the blame. This could be the government to their competitors, to their mo...

My definition of a successful business is a commercial profitable enterprise that can work without you. What I have seen over the many years of working with business owners just like you is that experiencing significant growth in our business can be both a tremendous blessing and a horrible curse.  If we've not set our business up properly to scale up, we've actually created unseen bottlenecks that slow a business down. We, the business owner, end up being the one that takes on that additional burden. We quickly find ourselves working 70, 80, and sometimes 90+ hours a week, trying to juggle all the balls of that incremental business.  Ultimately, not being able to keep all the balls in the air and now when they drop, customer service suffers. Over time we start to lose customers because they're not getting the service that they are accustomed to and expect. This makes us work harder having to deal with customer service issues and now we have to spend more time selling to ma...

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...

Money is not good or bad. It's just a tool we can use to help us achieve our goals. With that said, we can use it for both good and bad. Today's tip is based on a comment I got from a business consultant with the SBDC. One of the areas that he sees as an opportunity for growth for business owners is in the area of understanding how to manage their profits better. The reason we are in business is to make a profit, but profit is just a theory. We can be making a profit but if we can not turn it into cash quick enough, we can go bankrupt. As a business owner, how can you manage your profits better? In order to build your profits in your business, you should have 3 different bank accounts. Why? When you have all your money in just one account it's harder to manage. Our first instinct when we see our bank accounts growing is to spend it. So let's take a look at the 3 different accounts you should have. One is your operational account, the 2nd is your taxation bank acco...

  "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 ...