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This podcast is for small to medium business owners. You've got a lot to gain, a lot to lose, and business is tough; there's a lot at stake. Business acumen is what every business owner needs, it will make a profound difference to your business.
This podcast will cover marketing, positioning, branding, lead generation, selling, negotiating, customer service, managing staff, managing finances and accounts and much more.
https://www.businessveteran.com.au/
mark@businessveteran.com.au
Welcome to episode one of the business coach with me mark Jackson.
In this very first episode I'm going to cover just what this whole podcast is about who it's for, and why you should care.
This podcast is for small to medium business owners. It doesn't matter what kind of business you own, you know how to do what the business does, you are the expert in that, where I help is with business skills because making a business out of whatever your business does, be it landscaping, plumbing, surgery, engineering, retail and so on requires business skills and this is where it goes wrong for so many business owners. Now if you live to be 1000 you'll probably figure it all out but unfortunately we typically only live for about 1000 months. So getting some ideas and some tips will take you a long way.
Just what do I mean by business tips? Well apart from doing whatever the business does, the other skills required by the business owner include sales, selling and negotiation, marketing, pricing, branding and positioning, leadership and managing people, finance and accounting, and business strategy.
So why should you care? Three reasons: in business you can stand to gain a lot, you can stand to lose a lot, and it can be extraordinarily tough. There is a lot of steak. Employees will never understand what do you have to put up with, the fact that your family home is on the line, the fact that everything have ever worked for is be at stake. Employees stand to lose their job, and that is sad, but it is nothing in comparison to what you stand to lose.
Hopefully you will exit your business one day having made enough, both in dividend and equity from the sale of your business to set you up for life, and that you never have to work again, you are freer to choose your future. However at stake is the loss of all your personal assets, and bankruptcy, the stain of which lasts are lifetime. Add to all that just how tough businesses is.
So why is business so tough? Here's my take on it: a business can be divided into essentially 3 departments. The first markets and sells a product or service, the second delivers on that product or service, and the final department keeps score and keeps the accounts. Now the vast majority of people who have a job work somewhere in one of those three departments. It is the unique role of the business owner and the CEO to have to sit across all three pillars to knit them together into a cohesive whole which makes sense. The sales department rather you sold your product for less, they believe they could sell far more if it was cheaper. the delivery department would like to sell your product for a whole lot more because their costs are a bottomless pit. The finance department can't tell you what to do, they can just tell you what happened and model what would happen if you give them some future scenarios. Not only do you have to navigate the three very different mindsets, but you have to manage your own time, energy and psychology through the roller coaster ride of the highs, lows and complexities of business ownership.
Alright, so if you are serious about succeeding in business, and just as importantly, not failing, then every bit of business learning you can do is going to make a difference.
Now what gives me the right to an opinion? Why would you listen to me? I originally qualified as an IT guy. It was so long ago it wasn't even called IT back then, I studied computer science in the early 80s. Shortly after leaving uni I had an entrepreneurial seizure. I thought "I can do IT therefore I can run a business that does IT" so I started a business. It turns out, this is how most businesses start. I was a typical startup.
I built my business up through to a medium sized enterprise employing about 30 people with a really good reputation and I sold it as a going concern and cashed out. Sounds like a good story, and it was, except that it took 24 years and a lot of pain! So retiring at the age of 49 I had to think about what I wanted to do next. But one thought kept occuring to me. The enormous, and privileged learning journey that I had undertaken was of extraordinary value. I came to realise that what I really wanted to do was help other business owners avoid the mistakes I had made, take advantage of the great ideas I chanced across and make a success of their business faster than I did, with hopefully less stress. So I hung out my shingle as a business coach and I've been doing that now for 10 years. I suspect I'm one of the very few business coaches who has actually run a business of any substantive size [one man band doesn't count]. At a quick count, half the clients I've had in the last 10 years are still clients, so they typically hang around for years and I have had quite a few fantastic success stories and turnarounds. Some of them are still a work in progress!
The benefit to you is that you will probably learn something that you take back to your business which will make a profound difference to your businesses future. Given what you stand to gain, what you stand to lose and just how hard it is, don't you owe that to yourself your family your employees and the customers you serve?
If you feel you and your business would benefit from some one to one time with me, I'm very happy spend an hour with you and see what we can come up with. There's no hard sell, there's just helping you resolve an issue, or even figure out what the issue is. If you want, we can then talk about working together for longer to get your business humming.