This month, Mike Foster, The Entrepreneurs Mentor, shares his top tips for business growth and the benefits of working with a coach or mentor.
After running my own businesses and supporting many more, I have observed what makes a business work and seen the core characteristics of a successful business owner. However, the same things do not make every business tick, which is why I love my role as a mentor every single day and why business is not simple!
I’d like to share 6 of my tips for growth based on my observations and work with hundreds of business owners and my role as The Entrepreneurs Mentor:
- Ensure your vision is crystal clear, to create more effective and meaningful goals and objectives to take you in that direction. It has to be your vision, only you can define your own success.
- Maximise your time with a focus on high pay-off activities. Work out what you really need to execute without distraction for the development of your business. Like the team at CRM, I love to use one-page plans to identify the activities that will deliver your target KPIs and deliver your vision or goal. Prioritise your to do list, avoiding the new shiny things, manage your diary and understand your distractions. If you know what to focus on, the distractions become clear, and you can reduce them with delegation, outsourcing, automation, authority or systemisation.
- Understand your numbers. Yes, those that are shown in your financial reports but also the real numbers that drive your success. What numbers create your outcomes in terms of revenue, margin, and profit? For example, is your revenue made up of activity such as the number of people that buy from you X the average sale value X the number of times they buy from you. Knowing these drivers also helps to forecast your business more effectively.
- Know your market and your audience. Can you clearly profile your ideal customer/s? What is their pain, problem, fear, want, need, desire? How does your product or service provide the solution with a differentiation that creates your value proposition? Where do these prospective customers hang out? What marketing channels will you use? Which marketing tactics will help to pull these prospects towards you with interest? Do the steps of your sales funnel match your buyer’s journey?
- Get good people around you. Firstly, those on your payroll. How will they contribute, be productive and help you create a business less reliant on you? What do they need from you to be invested in your business? Do you have the right people in the right place with the right responsibilities and objectives? Then look at your external resources like supply chain, subcontractors, and advisers. Do they create value that helps you deliver your promise to your customers?
- Create systems in your business to help it run productively without you. Capture how you do things, share best practice and train people, monitor their use and look to continually improve them. This helps many business owners to let go, trust more and scale quicker.
How can a coach or mentor help you?
To support your business, you might engage a consultant to come in and deliver a specific task or project for you. A business coach, listens, often uses open questions to stimulate the best from within you, that then provides guidance. They can help you make better decisions, overcome challenges and reach your goals. A good coach will push you to be the best version of yourself and provide insights into the way that you work or operate. They can provide support and encouragement to help you work through your challenges and problems.
I work as a mentor. I coach my clients as above and I will share experiences, case studies, good practice and proven models to spark or fuel the business owners own thoughts.
In my experience, business owners who want better choices for themselves and their business feel that the benefits of working with a coach or mentor are:
- Planning with purpose. What’s the plan for change, what could you do differently? Such support can help you consider your vision and plan, often creating light bulb moments or the ability to see the wood through the trees.
- Focus on what’s really required and avoid the blind spots. Running a business is a lonely place at times, so a coach or mentor provides an additional pair of ears and eyes. This can really help you with an honest, unbiased view, when creating or developing your plan, making key decisions or reviewing your strategy.
- Shared experience. These fill a knowledge gap or give another view of your strategy and business model by sharing experiences of working with others.
- Remove the fear. A mentor can share proven steps and tools to demonstrate the potential and possibility of positive gain.
- Reduce procrastination. Often a symptom of not having the confidence to make decisions unless the outcome feels more certain. The support to consider the potential outcomes of a situation, analyse the risks and consider the pros and cons, will help you make quicker decisions rather than wasting your energy or resources.
- External motivation. Too often we don’t celebrate the successes or even see the small wins because we’ve moved our thoughts to the next thing. Business has many ups and downs so a mentor’s support will keep you focused on your why, your purpose and your reasons for running your business to maintain the required trajectory.
- Accountability to someone. We achieve much with accountability to ourselves, but to break an old habit, create a new one or commit to change, being held accountable by someone else can be a game changer. Accountability keeps you focused on your committed activity and its execution.
- Act as your compass and keep you moving in the right direction. I share thoughts that help businesses to develop, scale and grow.
I hope this has been thought provoking and helpful for the development of your business. If you’d like to explore how a mentor could help you, visit www.entrepreneursmentor.co.uk or https://linktr.ee/mikefosteroxford to get in touch.
As a Mentor, Coach, Adviser or Non Exec Director, Mike Foster supports others to achieve the success they define. He helps clients to visualise, plan, maximise their time and execute with motivation, whilst providing some accountability. With his broad knowledge and experience, Mike provides a valuable contribution to key decisions and helps people to obtain the business their hard work deserves.
