How long will it take to get RESULTS?
A question I often get asked is how long is this process going to take? How long will it take me to build a business that isn't dependent on me being there, but still makes a great profit?
It really comes based on two key questions.
The first one is where are you now? and the second one is, how fast do you want to go? To help better understand this I'm going to show you a 6 steps model.
This is one of the core tools that we use to navigate through this process of building a business, which makes money and isn't dependent on us being there. The foundation of this model is the Mastery layer.
At Mastery we are focused on four key areas:
Destination.
Where are we going?
How do we want the journey to be?
What is it that we want to achieve through this business?
Delivery:
How consistently do we deliver our product?
Time:
Do we work on our business a minimum of 10% each week? For most people, that's about 4 hours each week.
Do we have a default diary in place?
Finance:
Do we have financial dashboards to drive the business?
Do we understand sales break-even and profit break-even?
Do we have a cash flow forecast that we can use to navigate the ups and downs of cash and the time it takes to flow through the business?
Many businesses, whether they are large or small, they have one or two areas within mastery that they may need to focus on or tighten up on at least. For some, this will be a process that will take some time, perhaps years for others.
Niche:
From there we move up to Niche and Niche is really about this idea of developing a part of the market where we can compete and dominate based on our terms and because of that we generate predictable cash flow. When we're generating predictable cash flow, we really open up a whole bunch of opportunities within the business, which will talk about at this next level up called Leverage but there to key things at niche: building a unique selling proposition and a guarantee or some form of promise.
Leverage:
Leverage is about creating efficiency.
Efficiency means that we can do more with less. We get a better return for less investment, so the ways that we're going to be doing this is by testing and measuring through people and education, delivery, and distribution and also investing in technology. This is hard to do that without cash so leverage is a fun place to play. We need to have that cash to drive it.
Team:
Team is really about having the right people on the bus, in the right seats as Jim Collins would say. When we have the team layer sorted, we have strong leadership and action plan sorted, we’ve got rules of the game and we are practising involvement and inclusion, we have a structure for growth.
The last two are Synergy and Results:
At Synergy we are really looking for a general manager to be in place within the business or ourselves as the owner performing that role. Synergy involves thinking about scale and duplicating.
For other people that may not be about expanding the business, it may actually be about selling down and reducing some of their shareholdings and achieving a level of freedom. This means different things for different people.
The amount of time it takes to move through the various stages will depend on where you score out of 10 for each of these areas. You'll get a general sense of this now, but we have a worksheet which if you like a copy, I can send that to you.
Through this, you can score yourself in each of these key areas of the business and find out exactly where you are right now. The scale will help dictate how long it will take you to move up this model. Another thing that will drive this will be you personally.
So what is your level of commitment to this process?
How much time and energy and effort are you willing to invest in the process?
If you would like to work this through and get some more clarity on the process itself or if you'd like to do a scorecard on your business, Flick me an email, and I can help you to do that.
