How To Improve Your Business

Hi. Today, we're going to be talking about how to improve your business. There are many, many facets to this so I'm going to try and cover some of the core ones and give you some really simple structure you can follow.

The first most important thing is to really know what your endgame is. What are you aiming for with your business? Are you looking to sell it? Are you looking to create a lifestyle business so over time, you kind of create this level where you still own and run the business but you don't kind of go into work that much? Are you looking to kind of create your business in a way that you get to do the elements of it that you love and other people do the rest? Do you want to build a big business and have lots of employees? Do you want to be working on your own and kind of self-employed or a very small business? So, you get really clear on what the end game is that you're looking to achieve. What sort of work life balance do you want? It's really easy to kind of stop going at business and not finding any life left.

So, be really clear on that stuff first, because that's what's important. Then you can start to look at the business and what you need to do in order to get it there, so hopefully you've got a business plan, and within that, you've got other smaller plans, marketing, budgets, and all of the essential elements of running a successful business. If you don't, start there.

Then here's a really simple formula you can use to focus on how well your business is running at the moment. It's quite straight-forward. It's finance and money sequels, S&M, no, that's not what you think, it's sales and marketing, and plus operations.

So, finance equals sales and marketing plus operations. What I find in most businesses that we work in, they often focus very much on the finance and either the sales or marketing or the operations, the operations, the product, the produce or the service, how you distribute it, how it gets there, all the elements of running the business, and the sales and marketing are obviously how you get the business and how you bring in new customers into your business. So, what I encourage you to do is really focus on the sales and marketing and operations balance.

This is a little trick I learned from a guy called Robert Craven, and then the finance bit takes care of itself, so keep your focus there. Do this simple exercise, score yourself out of ten in each of those three core areas, give yourself a mark out of ten for your finance currently for how that's going. Give yourself a mark out of ten for marketing and sales, and give yourself a mark out of ten for your operations.

Once you've done that, you kind of take a look. I often find that a lot of businesses, particularly smaller businesses score themselves in the marketing area lower and that's often where the core focus needs to be in order to grow and improve the business. So, do that little exercise and then sit and write yourself a little focus and action plan for each of those three areas to make yourself get closer to a ten.

So, what are your three most important things you need to do within the finance area of your business? What are the three most important things within sales and marketing? What are the three most important things within operations, and what's the timescale that you're going to implement those things over? The second piece of the equation is then looking at yourself personally as the business owner or manager. What are your personal strengths and weaknesses? Where do you need to improve and change in order for the business to go where you want it to go? What are your strengths and weaknesses, you know, like time management, communication skills, leadership? All of those elements that make you a good business owner or manager. Financial education, you know, what are you doing really, really well and actually where do you need to grow in order for the business to grow? Spend a bit of time, focus on th