Grow Your Business withoutn Driving Yourself Crazy

Add to cart
CONTENTS

Part I: Business vision and crazy makers
1 What drives you crazy about growing your business?
2 Growth, ease and profitability
Questionnaires and checklists to assess your business
3 Your vision of business success
Where you want to go. How to get there

Part II: The Problem Solvent
4 The problem solvent
The five elements needed to tackle any barrier to growth
5 The inner game of growth
How is the way you run your business a barrier to your growth?
6 Hire Wonder Woman or Superman
The help and support needed for growth
7 Get the secret knowledge out of your head
The systems and procedures needed for growth
8 Promote yourself to CEO
Polish the skills and capabilities you need for growth
9 The right tools for the job
Workplace, equipment and materials for growth

Part III: Cracking the Barriers
10 Put it all together
How to apply the problem solvent to your growth barriers
11 Recapture your time, leverage your effort
Don’t just save your time; invest it
12 Build a culture of growth
13 Build a culture of profitability
When profitability is no longer optional
14 The dreaded transition hump
I How to minimize the disruption of change
II How to get the bandwagon rolling

Part IV: Making it Happen
15 Calculate the benefit and cost
Is the benefit worth the cost?
16 Setting a plan of action
You can get there from here
17 How to stay on track on your toughest challenge
Accountability templates
18 The power of the group
How to join a business owner’s group
Conclusion

SAMPLES FROM THE BOOK

CRAZY MAKERS OF THE SMALL BUSINESS OWNER

Do any of these sound familiar to you? (Hope you don’t check them all!)

Overworked—Working too many hours. Can’t take a vacation. Don’t feel comfortable getting away. Things always come up to keep you in the office.
Strapped—Cash crunch, now or chronic. Sudden downturns. Can’t get needed capital. Not paying yourself enough.
Blahs—Not doing what you love. Mired in minutiae. Having to manage/administrate all the time.
Help wanted—Can’t get quality help. High turnover. Dead wood. Stuck with people who aren’t doing the job.
Dysfunctional family—Employees squabble, shirk, run the show. There’s one bad apple. Your hardest-to-replace employee drags the organization down.
Empty pipeline—Lost one big customer. Don’t know how to market or reach new people. Business used to just come in, now it doesn’t, and you hate selling.
Roller coaster—Boom and bust cycle. Goes way up: overwhelmed. Goes way down: over-anxious.
Handcuffed—Only you can run the business, so you’re chained to it. Never without your cell phone or pager.
Juggler—Balancing two endeavors: your old cash cow and your emerging business. Both demand your time and energy.
Fading—Want to pull back and focus on something else. Can’t because managers aren’t good enough to take over.
Henpecked—Problems with partner or key person.
Near-sighted—Lack of vision. Lost sight of where you are going. Caught in the trees (or swamp); can’t see the forest.
Trapped—Caught in a dilemma, no alternative is attractive, can’t see a way out.
Your unique crazy-maker

If you are nodding your head and saying, “Yes, that’s me!” then this book is for you.

Who Should Read This Book
I wrote this book for owners of businesses like these. Maybe you will recognize them:

A mom and pop retail store. Mom and Pop are always there. Only they know how to do certain key things, and they can’t trust anyone else to make the deposits. They can never take a day off together.
A design company with the owner and six other designers. Every job is a struggle with deadline and budget. He longs for the time when it was just him.
A rapidly growing, wildly successful restaurant. It has doubled in size and gone from twenty to fifty employees. “I feel like I need to wear a nametag so my kids will recognize me,” sighs the owner.
A home-based graphic designer. She has to juggle it all—doing the work, generating more business, getting the invoices out.
A personal care salon. The employees never seem to have enough clients or make enough money to be happy. The owner feels like she works for her employees.

A bakery with thirty employees. The owners by far work the longest hours. They have hired managers to reduce their load, but the employees go around the managers and come to the owners.
A non-profit organization. “My board members just don’t think like business people. Yet they expect me to produce results and stay within budget. I have nobody to talk with!” complains the Executive Director.

These are not high-tech, venture capital-funded endeavors. These are Main Street companies run by people dedicated to doing the best job they can. They are successful, but they work way too hard. They are profitable, but they don’t take home as much as they want or need. They have grown, but they would like to be larger.
Many started their businesses from nothing, out of a garage or back bedroom. Some bought out former employers; others took over a family business. Some have been in business for decades; others are brand new.
Very few of them set out to be business managers. “My husband and I have art backgrounds. We never had formal training on how to run a business. Now we have six employees,” says the co-owner of a print shop.
Many came from the corporate world. “When I was with the bank, I routinely put together deals of two hundred million dollars. That was nothing compared to the stress of meeting my ten-person payroll,” says a former investment banker who took his “golden parachute” and started the studio he had dreamed of for years.
If this sounds like you then read on.

Sample of Chapter 1

Chapter 1
What Drives You Crazy about Growing Your Business?

”I decided to start my own business so I wouldn’t have to work so hard. Sure enough, I only have to work half time. And it doesn’t matter which twelve hours a day I work"
– Lament of the overworked business owner

Does the following scenario sound familiar to you? You run your own business and it’s going well. You’ve had a lot of success. But as you grow, a funny thing happens on the way to the bank—or to the beach. You hear yourself saying things like this:

“Double the size of my business? I would have to work twice as many hours.”

“As my business grows, I become more of an administrator and manager. I no longer get to do the work I love.”

“It’s so hard to find the good employees I need in order to grow. I hire these people and I end up doing their jobs as well as mine.”

Do you find yourself nodding your head? Then keep reading.

The Paradox of Growth
The bigger you get, the harder it can be to grow yet further. This is the “paradox of growth” for small businesses. It hits every kind of business: consultants and personal practitioners, professional service firms, retail stores, general contractors, small manufacturers. It hits fledgling businesses and long-established businesses, and businesses ranging in size from one person up to a hundred or more employees.
I hear their complaints: Too often, growing their business collides with the desire for profitability and ease of operation. The growing business dominates their lives. They work longer hours, and have less time for family and personal interests. Their revenue grows, but their profit does not. They have to work harder and harder without earning any more money. Their headaches increase but their paycheck doesn’t. No wonder growth loses its allure!
Yet growth is important for the continued viability of their businesses. Staying the same has its costs as well.
As I have worked with these owner-run companies (well over a thousand by now), I have noticed that the situations they encounter, and their reactions, sound very similar. The challenges to continued growth that they face fall into a handful of areas. I found myself giving the same advice time and time again.
From this, I have developed a simple formula to crack the barriers to growing your business. That is what this book is about. It lays out an approach to tackle any barrier to growing your business and shows you how to apply it to numerous common situations.

“Your book is brimming with great ideas for both business and life. Thank you for contributing to the body of knowledge so desperately needed by small business owners.”
-- Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing