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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
Who do you think you are, and how does this impact your business?
When you start a business you have a profound choice to make, and I'm betting you and most other people don't know about it, so you will have made your choice without knowing it, nevertheless this choice will have an outsized impact on your future success.
The choice is this: do you want to be a doctor lawyer landscaper accountant mechanic chef builder plumber etc; in other words the skill, trade or profession that many if not most of us start with, or, do you want to be a business owner?
Let me explain how this choice makes such a large difference using an example.
Let's take the example of someone who cleans offices for a living and decides to start a business the cleans offices. This is probably a common scenario.
This fellow starts his business, does some marketing, converts some leads into sales, hires some cleaners and gets to work. If they're any good, they grow. The owner does less and less cleaning and spends more and more of his time running around sorting out problems.
But let's stop and think for a moment, what business is this owner really in? Now obviously the service he provides is cleaning. But the work the owner has to do is marketing lead generation selling recruiting managing client relationship management accounting bookkeeping and managing people. Probably also developing standards, processes and procedures and so on.
Now in a cleaning business what is by far the hardest part all that list? I'd put it to you that making the sale is probably the easy part, everyone wants their offices cleaned. Finances aren't so hard as you have monthly income and monthly expenses and not a lot of accruing going on which can make accounting complex. The job itself is not that hard, it's a little more skilled than most people realise but it's not rocket surgery. So think from moment what is the hardest part of running a cleaning business?
The hardest part is getting people. Not many people set out in life to be cleaners. Most do it because I have to put bread on the table and that's a job available to them for a range of reasons. They're doing it because they have to. The hard part of a cleaning business is finding people who are reliable, turn up on time and do a proper job.
So this chap who started the business, the business he is really in, is recruitment and training.
Now, if this chap thinks of himself as a cleaner who just happened to start a business, he will think that the answer to his business problems is to clean better. But he will have high staff turnover, high absenteeism even sloppy workmanship, resulting in unhappy customers and customer churn. He might blame the customers, the employees, the industry in general. He might run around trying to fill all the gaps with his own efforts and find himself exhausted and burning out.
If, on the other hand, he decided the day he started his business that he was going to be a business owner, things would turn out very differently. His competitor did this. She realised that her job was not to do the cleaning. Her job was to learn and do whatever it takes to make her business successful because that's what business owners do. At some point she realised that the hard part of running a cleaning business is recruiting and training. She did whatever it took to get good at this, and she did it gladly, because this is what will make her business successful.
Thinking like a business owner goes on paying dividends. As she travels from office to office, she might notice all sorts of little problems that she can solve for her clients. For example window treatments such as blinds and so on are difficult to clean but still need it. The business owner figures out how to clean them. The cleaner will ignore them. The business owner will see an opportunity for additional lines of revenue which are really cost effective because she's already on site. She might also notice that the upholstery on the office chairs needs cleaning so she will find out how to clean them and add that service on. These additional services are usually much higher margin than the basic service.
It doesn't end there. If office cleaning becomes very competitive with lots of entrants in the market and margins are squeezed to nothing, the cleaner will hang on, because cleaning is what he does. Even if it means going under. The business owner will realise there is no longer an opportunity to build a viable business and pivot her business as far as is required to make it a profitable business - even if that means her business lands a long way from office cleaning. She does this because she thinks of herself as a business owner, not a cleaner.
So you see, how you think of yourself, has a profound and long term impact on your business success.
Have a think about what the hard part of your business is. Are you doing enough to upskill yourself and the capability of your business, to handle it? Could it be holding back your business? I'm happy to help you work out what that is, and what you can do about it, if you want to make contact.
I'll give you one to think about right now. The vast majority of businesses depend on staff, on people. Even if it's an online platform, you need developers and systems administrators etc. If you use contractors, they're still people, just with a different commercial arrangement.
So you have no choice but to get good at leadership and managing people. Have you embraced this, or are you avoiding it? If you're avoiding it, reflect on why you think you might be. Are you working on what your business really needs, or are you working on what you're good at, or enjoying?
Until next time, this is Mark Jackson.