6 Quick tips for working ‘ON’ your business!

We all need to work ‘ON’ our business, not just ‘IN’ it!  Here are 6 quick tips from our friend and business coach, Donald Cooper, to help you make it happen!

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Over my 20 years of working with business owners and managers around the world, I’ve found that most of us spend the majority of our time working ‘IN’ our business and not enough time working ‘ON’ it.  The result is that no one is proactively running the show.

Why do we not spend more time working ‘ON’ our business?  Because most folks get into business, not because they understand or love ‘business’, but because they’re good at designing, doing, creating, selling or fixing something.   But now they’re in the ‘business’ of doing that…and the business part of it isn’t so easy or interesting to them.

Working ‘ON’ our business, that all-important process of proactively visualizing, planning and implementing an extraordinary customer experience, innovative, attention-grabbing marketing and creating a more profitable future, is much more intimidating territory.

The proposition of creating an effective team and empowering them to take action seems more difficult than just doing it all ourselves. Getting comfortable with ‘the numbers’ and using them to proactively achieve better margins and a healthy bottom line seems like a daunting task.  Creating and effectively delivering compelling customer value and experiences and then communicating that in a crowded and cynical marketplace is overwhelming…so we retreat to the familiar and work ‘IN’ our business.  We do the day-to-day stuff that we’re comfortable with and know we’re good at. It’s just human nature.

How do we make the switch and become more proactive and effective managers?  The first step is to set aside a specific amount of time to work ‘ON’ the business every week.  For many of my clients, Tuesday morning seems to work best, but you can pick any time that works for you.

Now, that you’ve set aside time to work ‘ON’ your business, specifically what will you work on?  Here are 6 tips from my transformational Management Workshops and Boot Camps…

1. First you need to be clear about who your target customers are, what life’s really like for them and what they really want from you.  Think and feel like a customer.  When they choose, buy, use or consume what you sell, what are they really trying to do; what do they want or need to know, how do they want to feel…and about how much do they expect to pay?  Finally, how will you make it easy for customers to buy?
2. Next, be clear about the extraordinary customer value and experiences that you commit to always deliver. Value and experiences that will ‘grab’ your target customers, clearly differentiate you from your competitors, make you ‘famous’…and grow your bottom line. Then, determine how you’ll market and promote to stand out, be noticed, be trusted and be preferred. How will you get people to understand all of your value and go out of their way to get it?
3. Then, you need to be sure that you actually want to become as big and as good as you must be to be a profitable market leader in 3 to 5 years.  What must your business look like in 3 to 5 years?  How big must it be?  How efficient?  How must your business model, target customers or market positioning change? What new technologies must you embrace? What bottom line must you generate to be financially healthy and what kind of talent do you need on your team to make all of that happen?
4. Many business owners are simply comfortable doing what they’re doing right now and don’t want to do the work to become ‘better’. They don’t want to become what they must become…and they’re in big trouble. They should get out now before it’s too late.  Mediocrity is no longer an option.  If you own the business, make sure that it’s paying you at least twice, and preferably three times.  First, it should be paying you a salary equal to what you could earn working for someone else.  Then, it should be paying you a return-on-investment (ROI) of at least 12%. 15% or 18% is even better. Finally, at some point you should own your own building in a separate real estate holding company and the business should be paying you rent every month. If the business isn’t paying you two or three times, what needs to change to fix that?  Can it be changed? When will you get started?  If you don’t understand your numbers, you don’t understand your business. By the way, in the real world, your investment in your business is what you could sell it for in the next few months.  If you put $1 million into it and could now sell it for $1.7 million, ‘congratulations’!  But, if you put $1 million into it and could only sell it for $600,000, you’ve peed away $400,000.
5. The fifth thing that you’ll want to be clear about is your people. What kind of team do you need to always deliver your customer commitments and to create your extraordinary future? Hire for the future, not for the past.  Hire talent, not bodies and hire people who are a good fit with your culture.  When hiring for key positions, hire ‘guides’ who have been there before.  ‘Guides’ are people who have a track record and can help you get to where you’re committed to be. Now, how will you treat, reward and acknowledge those great people so that they want to stay and help you grow the business?  Remember, the best people have to work for somebody…it’s just that you have to deserve them.Create pride and commitment by teaching your history, sharing your Vision for the future of the business and by living by a set of values that good people can be proud of.  Then, create a career path for the people on your team who have the ability and desire to grow.
6. Finally, what will be your commitment to the community in which you make a living and the planet on which we all journey?  How will you be more environmentally responsible and how will you give back?  Your customers will love you for it…and your staff will be more engaged knowing that they they’re working for a business that makes a difference.

So, these 6 points will give you a good start on working ‘ON’ your business.  Create a file for each of the 6 points above.  Commit to work on a few of these points every week.  Involve your team, get their ideas (they have lots of them), give them projects to do and follow up.  You’ll soon discover who has the ability and desire to move ahead.  Then, celebrate and reward success…and deal with non-performance.  Failure to deal with non-performance is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today.

‘Congratulations’, you’re well on your way to becoming a world-class, proactive manager.

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For more information, or if you are interested in working with Donald Cooper, please reach out to him here:

www.donaldcooper.com

Phone: 416-252-3703

Email: donald@donaldcooper.com

Thank you,

Your Costen Insurance Team