The Strategy of Preeminence is a fundamental marketing mindset attitude based on establishing yourself as the most trusted advisor.
It has been brought to the attention of the world by maverick marketing genius, Jay Abraham but he has admitted that he discovered it when working with a client.
It is the ability to put your client’s needs ahead of your own.
To do whatever is in their best interests and to show that you really care about making their lives better through your product or service.
A business owner must face up to having to make difficult decisions. One of the best techniques for finding clarity is Zero Based Thinking.
This learnt about this concept from management expert Brian Tracy but I’m not sure if it’s one of his original ideas or if he got it from someone else.
This is useful if you have employment decisions to make or if you are thinking about stopping something that you started.
The next time you have a difficult decision to make, ask yourself this one question: [continue reading…]
I first read book, The E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and encountered his ideas on the Primary Aim when I decided to focus my consultancy and coaching business away from big businesses and towards business owners and entrepreneurs.
This introduced me to the idea that the business owner has a unique opportunity to design and build a business that can help deliver the perfect life.
It’s an opportunity many business owners never think about so they never get to grips with designing a business that really works for them.
Your primary aim answers the question of what you want to do in your time on earth. [continue reading…]
How intentional are you in the planning and managing of your business?
I see a number of different approaches taken to business planning by business owners:
Intentional business planning means starting with what you want to achieve and working backwards, challenging yourself on how you can do it.
In the last few days I have introduced this idea of intention business planning in two articles:
How To Target Your Ideal Profit
How To Target Your Ideal Sales Value
In these, you start with what you want to achieve and you work backwards through your key performance measures to reveal what you need to do to achieve the plan.
I’ve written and talked many times about the best idea in the famous book The E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber is the concept that you must manage your business intentionally.
If you don’t, it will manage you.
Instead of the business working for you, you find yourself trapped working for the business.
And it’s an extremely hard, tough and demanding taskmaster that is never satisfied with what you do.
According to the E Myth approach and I completely agree, managing your business starts with deciding:
If you need a salaries and benefits package of £200,000 p.a. to live the life you want, how are you going to design a business to deliver that money?
On this topic, you might want to read How Much Should You Pay Yourself As The Business Owner?
When you manage intentionally, you’re very clear about what you want to achieve. You’re not accepting whatever the world throws out you.
You get there through intentional business planning.
You work backwards from the profit you want via the sales (and contribution) targets that means your business has to deliver all the way back to the real drivers of your business performance.
When you’re clear about how many qualified customer leads you need each week, you will look at your marketing in a very different way.
It stops being a “spend and hope” activity and starts to be an “intentionally plan, action and expect” activity.
Again, the intention of starting with what you want to make happen and working backwards to how you can make it happen is the thing I find most appealing about the Seven Sentence Guerrilla Marketing Plan.
What Will Happen In Your Business If You Don’t Make Changes?
Your business will have a momentum at the moment. Change is always happening.
It may be positive with your sales revenue and profits increasing month of month because of your existing marketing.
It may be negative because you’re losing customers faster than you’re gaining them or prices are being forced down because your products are struggling to compete because there is a price war in progress because of the difficulties of trading in the recession.
I encourage you to identify these trends and project your business performance based on these trends.
If you’ve done your intentional business plan and your trend projection, you will have two financial forecasts for your business.
The first is what you want to happen.
The second is what is likely to happen if you don’t make changes.
The difference is the gap and working out how you can close the gap by taking specific actions is called gap analysis.
If your business already has momentum moving in the direction you want, the gap may be comfortingly small.
A few tweaks and minor improvements in what you do and how you do it may mean that you can close the gap easily and you’ll reach the “business of your dreams” sooner than you thought.
Just don’t be too complacent.
You need to be clear about your critical success factors and key performance indicators so that you can monitor your business and make sure that improvements are happening as expected.
However, if the trends indicate that your business is going backwards, the gap between what you want and what it looks as if you’ll have can be frighteningly large.
This exercise can be a real wake-up call.
Although you may get stressed, be comforted by the idea that you’ve been altered to the problem early and you can take the actions needed to turn around your business.
Start brainstorming how the gap can be closed. Get your team involved.
Record as many ideas as you can before you make any kind of critical assessment.
Some ideas may sound crazy as soon as you hear them (or they spring into your own mind) but one of these might be the springboard for some genuine innovation.
Then go through and assess the better ideas. Get your team members to select their ten favourites and pool votes to see which have the most support.
Eventually you will build up a series of action items that will help you to close the financial gap.
You can prioritise based on the return on investment or return on time. I’d choose whichever is your biggest constraint.
If you’re always short of time, then you need to make sure that your time is spent on the most productive activities. If money is a problem, then you need to focus on the return on investment.
What If You Can’t Close The Gap?
The idea of using gap analysis and identifying the actions needed to close the gap is very logical but you may struggle to think of enough things to do to close the gap.
That may be because you haven’t made a realistic enough assessment of your business issues and problems.
Read 21 Reasons Why Your Business Isn’t As Successful As You Want It To Be
Alternatively you might need some help to close the gap.
I can think of three approaches:
Every business is different but there are at least five essential components to entrepreneurship:
You may be tired of hearing that 50% of small businesses fail within the first two years and 80% within five years (source Michael Gerber) but each of these factors play a role in contributing to the failure rates.
The Power Of Ideas
If the idea is not good the business will not get off the ground. In the UK, the BBC has a TV show called “The Apprentice” as a group of wannabees compete to have a £100k a year job with entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar.
Last week’s show featured a terrible idea. The two teams were asked to create a new celebration day for the greetings card industry and one team came up with the Environmental Awareness day when we were also supposed to send people we know a paper card encouraging them to conserve the world’s natural resources.
The Apprentice team thought we should use resources to encourage people not to use resources!
Not exactly sensible and not fun either with the lecturing tone of the cards they designed.
But other ideas are great.
For example, who cannot admire the idea of Starbucks which totally changed the concept of coffee and has swept across the globe. I don’t get the Starbucks concept myself but I admire the idea which has inspired so many people to spend a small fortune on coffee.
Management Skills
In Business Failure and Bad Management, I explained that insolvency experts believe the overwhelming cause for business failure is that the management team is just not up to the task. Too much talk, too little action. Too many bad decisions and not enough good ideas.
Management skills make a huge difference and that’s why the business management support industry is thriving from the thousands of books through to extensive ongoing coaching and consultancy programs.
Time and Commitment
Many business owners I talk to are amazed just how much there is to do when you are starting a new business and how many hours it needs to do everything that must be done.
Better management skills and experience can make life easier (you waste less timing making mistakes and then having to recover) but clear goals, prioritisation and time management discipline are essential.
But you can outsource tasks which are outside your strengths and you should delegate to any staff you have so that your hours are kept within reasonable limits.
Money
It seems that you need money to make money and it is certainly much easier to spend than it is to earn.
Many businesses make a loss in their first year although it is a concept I am not keen to encourage. If you plan for a loss, it creates a ready-made reason for you to lose money.
More justifiable is that a growing business usually needs cash to finance the business. You may need to buy equipment and stock and your customers are probably going to expect to pay you after your suppliers expect to be paid. The bigger your business gets, the more “working capital” is needed and that’s why fast growing businesses are often profitable but need to keep raising extra finance. (See Secrets Of Getting Your Bank Manager To Say Yes if you need a bank loan).
Entrepreneurs may bring other resources and tangible assets to the business to lower the start-up barriers. For example the entrepreneur may own a property where the business can operate. At the lowest level, this is working from home which millions of people do but the entrepreneur could own an office building, a warehouse or factory unit as an investment.
Since property usually requires signing a formal agreement, often with a significant commitment into the future, the chance to avoid these risks can give the business a significant advantage over competitors who are starting up.
Relationships and Reputation
I thought about separating out relationships and reputation but your reputation is at the very centre of your ability to build strong relationships with customers, suppliers and other people who can help you to build your business.
The best way to look at business in terms of likely potential for extra sales, profit and growth would be to be able to compare your key performance measures to your main competitors.
This is a process called competitive benchmarking.
It is a systematic comparison of your business with competitors and businesses like yours from other parts of the country (world) in particular critical success factors and key performance indicators.
Imagine learning that an average competitor makes £100k profit per year before owners remuneration but your business only makes £30k.
Imagine the power of knowing that the best competitors have sales of £150k per employee while your business generates £65k per employee.
That would make you think hard about your business and the methods you use in your business, wouldn’t it?
Unfortunately this information isn’t publicly available in the UK which I regard as a disgrace.
I don’t agree with the abbreviated accounts that can be put on public record because it means that one business can’t find out how another business is performing. Some people regard this confidentiality as a benefit but I see it as a curse.
Are There Other Ways To Access Competitive Benchmarking Information?
Sometimes a trade association will carry out a benchmarking study.
If you’re offered the chance, I urge you to take part.
The DTI in UK tried to create a very valuable service called the Benchmark Index. It has since passed into private hands.
I was very keen on this idea and trained to be an advisor/facilitator but unfortunately the scheme has rarely hit critical mass in enough different industries.
Still I couldn’t let a good idea stop me, so I held my own private benchmarking study into marketing practices for business coaches, executive coaches and life coaches. In total, I got 262 coaches to share details with me.
There is no reason why you couldn’t do something similar, either yourself or by paying a professional like myself to create the survey and write the final report.
If you get invited to take part by someone else, it is well worth paying some money to help fund it. The information you get will bring considerable insight into what is happening in the market.
One of the nice things about being a business owner is that, as your own boss, you’ll never need to ask for a pay rise.
You’ll have to answer the question…
How Much Should I Pay Myself As The Business Owner?
You will have conflicting feelings as you wear both the hats of the employee and the employer.
As the employee, the salary and benefits package you receive will determine your standard of living.
Benefits include things that you could buy as a private individual but the business pays on your behalf. In the UK this includes costs like company cars and medical insurance.
As the employer, you’ll be aware that there are many other calls on the money a business has at its disposal:
The Opportunity Cost Approach Of A Business Owner’s Salary And Benefits Package
I’ve discussed the opportunity cost approach in the article
How Much Should An Entrepreneur Or Small Business Owner Earn?
I’ve also had a much deeper look at it in my free report, The Profit Tipping Point.
The gist is that there are two market rates available to act as your guide when thinking about how high (or low) your salary should be:
As you can see, the twin hats of employee and employer are coming together here to give you an approximate range of how much you should pay yourself.
There is also the issue of how much is the work you are doing really worth. I mentioned earlier paying yourself as a chief executive but what if you’re doing much of the work of an administrative assistant.
It’s hard to justify a salary the equivalent of £100 per hour if you spend much of your time photocopying and filing!
The three questions to focus on are:
That third question is not a particular problem if you own your own business 100%.
It becomes much more of an issue if you have one or more other partners or investors in your business.
Suppose you find yourself involved in a management buyout. One person has been the CEO earning £100k p.a. and there are three other senior managers who used to earn between £40k and £60k p.a.
You have provided different amounts of the finance based on your own personal financial situations and to cover the inequity, you’ve agreed that any profit above the base salary and agreed bonus will be paid as dividends back to the people who provided the finance.
Since you’re all working full time in the business, do you all receive an equal salary or do you recognise the market assessment of your previous worth?
I suspect your answer and assessment of fairness depends on whether you are the CEO or one of the other managers.
This is a controversial issue and you will read different views on the best approach. I’ll try to present a fair summary and give you my own particular solution.
If I could think of clever names, I’d create a 2 x 2 matrix to show the main four situations with Profitability Before Owners Salaries on the one axis and Owners Salaries and Benefits on the other.
There are four basic situations:
Let’s take a look at each in turn.
Here the business is performing very well and the business owner deserves the rewards of the success.
Taking a generous but affordable salary and benefits package out of the business is the ideal situation.
The format of the profit extraction is best agreed with your tax advisor to minimise the overall tax paid by the business owner and the business. Anything else damages your overall wealth.
Situation 2 – The Business Earns A High Profit But The Owner Pays A Low Salary
Some business owners don’t want lavish lifestyles with big houses and fancy sports cars and may not see any need to pay themselves a big chunk of the profit.
This makes sense if the business has third party borrowings that can be reduced or if the business needs the money to expand.
It’s also OK to have some rainy day money in the business that protects its future.
However, it is unwise to leave too much money in the business. Basic wealth management principles emphasise the need to spread risk with a diversified portfolio of investments.
Businesses can suddenly run into financial trouble because of changes in the wider political, economic, social and technological environment.
If you take money out, you always have the choice of investing it back in the business.
The business owner has adjusted the salary to reflect how the business is performing by not taking out any more than it can afford.
Many will argue that this is responsible ownership, cutting the cloth to make sure that the business remains viable while steps are taken to improve profitability.
Others say that the business owner should pay themselves first. Before employees, before suppliers, before the government. They argue that the owner didn’t go into business to live on a subsistence wage.
In this situation, despite the fact that the business is struggling, the owner continues to take out a high salary that the business cannot afford.
Some argue this is the right thing to do. It shows the business is making a loss and that should motivate the business owner-manager to take corrective action.
Others say this is irresponsible and threatens the future of the business because the owner refuses to recognise the real situation and is blindly continually to live a lavish lifestyle despite the business problems.
I want to delve into this debate much deeper.
First I’ll declare my own position so that you can allow for any bias.
I believe a business owner should cut back salaries and benefits. In fact, I go further. I think the business owner should take out a small amount to live and then take a bonus when the business is doing well. This way, the rewards automatically adjust for the performance of the business.
Does Your Salary And Benefits Package Make Sense Financially?
I’ve seen business owners do two strange things to fund their salary payments when the business is just starting or struggling:
This doesn’t make sense financially.
In the UK, when a person earns a wage or salary above a low level, it has to pay PAYE (income tax) and national insurance (social security costs). The business also has to pay employers national insurance.
While rates vary depending on the value of salary, you can find the business owner trapped in a situation where it lends the company 100% and receives back as salary 50% to 60% and pays the remainder to the government.
This is crazy.
It’s wealth destruction and financial suicide.
What Will Cause The Most Pain To Help You To Focus On Fixing The Underlying Performance Problems?
This sounds masochistic but the best solution to the “how much should you pay yourself as a business owner” question, if your business isn’t doing very well, is whatever the salary that will motivate you enough to take the right actions.
The downsides of the issues with solutions 3 and 4 are obvious.
If you pay yourself a high salary while profits are low, you are eating into the time you have to turn your business around by consuming valuable resources. Worse, you may not know you’re doing it if you don’t have regular financial information or perhaps you’re in denial about the situation and you don’t care because you believe the business will get back to profitability on its own.
If you pay yourself a low salary and your business trades just above the break even point after paying you a pittance, you may put up with the situation for years.
That’s exactly the trap many business owners find themselves in.
They believe they are being financial responsible by cutting back on their own pay and benefits but they don’t find the motivation to make changes. Instead, they get used to the struggle.
Saving money, in their personal and business lives, becomes the norm. They refuse to speculate to accumulate.
It’s one of the reasons Why Don’t Business Owners Buy More Business Advice.
It’s well established that the desire to move away from pain motivates people to action. If it doesn’t, then the problem isn’t painful enough.
People tolerate all kinds of problems until they reach the time when they say “enough’s enough.”
Nearly every business can be improved if you’re motivated, if you diagnose the problems correctly and you find the right ideas yourself or you get help.
To help you make the right diagnosis, please read 21 Reasons Why Your Business Isn’t As Successful As You Want It To Be
What Do You Think?
Do you have a policy for how much you should pay yourself?
Starting a business is one of the most exciting things you will do in your life.
If you think back to when you first started, your mind was full of opportunities and possibilities.
You had a clear and compelling purpose.
Little else mattered.
That purpose (perhaps even a calling) inspired you to work crazy hours, up to seven days each week.
And when you weren’t working in your business, you were thinking about it.
Do you remember how good that felt?
But Now…
If you’ve lost your mojo for your business, then it’s a drag.
It’s no longer an exciting dream but a frustrating nightmare.
You thought you’d have a business you love.
Instead, you’ve finished up with a business you hate.
Or perhaps it’s worse than that.
You’re indifferent.
The passion has gone.
The Three Big Reasons Why You Have Lost Your Mojo
Let’s take a look at these reasons for losing your mojo in more detail.
Your Health Threatens Your Business
I’ve certainly been there.
I came back from holiday in May 2010 and told my mastermind partners that I’d lost my mojo for my business while I was away. The effort of having a good (but relaxing) time had totally drained me.
I remember vividly saying “I’ve lost my mojo” when a few weeks before I had been so positive after recovering from a previous health problem.
A couple of months later I was sitting in front of a respiratory consultant with an appointment arranged a week after a chest X-Ray. My file was marked on the front in big letters written with a black marker pen “VERY, VERY URGENT.”
That focused the mind I can tell you. As did the consultant forcing me onto his list for bronchoscopy procedures the next day, despite the department telling his secretary that the list was full. It wasn’t the suspected advanced lung cancer than goodness but it was the start of my vasculitis.
Several months later I was sitting in front of the consultant again, and he said that it looked as if the disease had started to attack my kidneys. Two days later I was in intensive care with acute kidney failure.
The disease, which would have killed me in a few months is now in remission. The symptoms are largely under control although I have to live with the effects every day.
Something like this can suddenly strike any business owner. Hopefully not you but it is best to look after your health and to be prepared.
If you have a health problem, struggling with a business on the edge could push both the business and you into much more serious difficulties.
You Have Serious Family Problems
Sometimes you have to accept the work is a secondary priority. Some things really are more important.
Again I’ve been there.
In recent years, my partner (I wish I could think of a better phrase for ‘er indoors) has hopefully recovered from cancer and my father has died from it. Both times, my business had to take a back set.
I believe you work to live and not live to work.
When I’ve talked to insolvency practitioners, they often find that relationship difficulties and other family problems lie behind some business failures they see.
You need to create a robust business in the good times, so that, if your personal life ever hits the rocks, your business doesn’t.
You also need to invest in your relationships while you can. Remember the saying “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
I bet one of the reasons you started your own business was to take better care of your family and to give them things that you couldn’t as an employee of another business. It doesn’t make sense if you don’t have quality time with the people who matter most to you.
You Have Lost Your Purpose
This is the most common reason why a business owner loses his or her mojo for the business.
The struggles of surviving drive out of your mind the reasons why you started a business in the first place.
If you think back, you were energised by one or both of:
Probably the best idea from the famous book, The E Myth Revisited is the principle that your business needs to be designed to give you the life you want.
In the book, Michael Gerber explains the idea of your Primary Aim. This is the powerful and visionary statement that describes what your life is all about including how you want to be remembered with your legacy.
Your Strategic Objective defines the deal you have with your business. It explains why your business is an opportunity worth pursuing and committing your time to build.
I’m very clear that the purpose of a business is to create value for customers and the business owner(s). If you lose sight of that, you will run into problems.
Lock yourself away for an hour on your own with a pen and a blank sheet of paper or two.
I want you to find your motivation for your business again.
I want you to get clear on:
A successful business means that you do great things for both your customers and for your family (and yourself).
Get emotional.
Get committed.
Find your business mojo.
21 Reasons Why Your Business Isn’t As Successful As You Want It To Be
This is the first of a series of articles I’m writing to look at the major causes for poor profitability in an indecently owned business.
21 Reasons Why Your Business Isn’t As Successful As You Want It To Be
I have recently read the book “Profits Aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing” by George Cloutier with Samantha Marshall.
In the review I said the basis message for business owners is “to grow a pair, man up and take control of the profitability of your business.”
It’s not a nice, gentle book that says you will have a profitable business because the law of attraction will say you deserve it. Just the opposite.
I think any business owner who is struggling needs to read it and make their own minds up about what they will and won’t do.
The book is written around the controversial 15 Profit Rules and I thought I’d share them with you.
1 – Profits aren’t everything, they’re the only thing.
2 – End denial.
3 – Forget sweat equity.
4 – Love your business more than your family.
5 – The best family business has one member.
6 – Delegate, don’t abdicate.
7 – Live and die by a real plan.
8 – Pay for performance.
9 – “I am your Work God.”
10 – You are not in business to pay your vendors.
11 – When filing for bankruptcy is your best option, do it early!
12 – Don’t treat sales like your mother-in-law.
13 – Give up golf, retreats, off-sites and trade shows.
14 – Teamwork is vastly overrated.
15 – It’s not the economy stupid, it’s you.
There aren’t any words minced in this book. As I make clear in my review, I don’t agree with everything.
I’ve written about buying business advice from the perspective of the business advice junkie or addict in the past.
These are the business owners who buy too much and never get around to implementing much in their own businesses. Unfortunately this has become particularly prevalent in the make money on the Internet niche. I’ve written an article, Protect Yourself From Guru Greed for these people.
Today I thought I’d look at it from the other perspective…
Why Don’t Some Business Owners Buy More Business Advice?
First, why should they buy advice?
Many Small Businesses Perform Badly
Various statistics are bandied around for small business failure (see What Causes Business Failure) that may exaggerate the situation but too many businesses fail.
Even more struggle to survive. One of the big insights I received when I was a trainee accountant in the early 1980s was that the dream of being your own boss wasn’t as good as most people think. Since I’ve gone back to work with small businesses, I know this situation hasn’t changed.
Even if a business is doing well, I don’t believe that there is a business that can’t be improved by an injection of new ideas.
Business Owner Type 1 – “I don’t need any business advice.”
Some people are born with incredible instincts for what customers want, have a clear vision of how it can be delivered, the confidence to take action and the natural ability to lead and persuade other people.
It sounds like you are a budding Bill Gates or Richard Branson destined to change the lives of millions of people. You’re a natural risk taker.
However, while these people have great insight, if you read their biographies, they surround themselves with excellent people to compensate for gaps in their skills and knowledge.
Business Owner Type 2 “I don’t want any business advice.”
You may not be happy with the performance of your business but you don’t want to take business advice.
Perhaps you believe that you’ll just be told what you already know or that business advice is only common sense anyway.
Often there is a good dose of common sense but I often hear clients say “Why didn’t I think of that. It’s obvious when you say it.”
It’s often difficult to see what’s happening (or not happening) in your own business because you are so close to it.
Perhaps your pride gets in the way and you are determined to do it your way without any outside interference.
I wish you luck, but tactfully I feel obliged to point out that you are likely to get better results if you open yourself up to ideas from other sources.
Why try to invent the wheel when it’s already been done?
Business is difficult enough without trying to start from scratch every time you try something new. It’s better to build on the accumulated knowledge and best practices of the past.
I don’t understand why you are prepared to waste time and money making mistakes which can be avoided.
Business Owner Type 3 “My friends at the golf club (or pub) give me all the business advice I need for free.”
That’s great if your friends are business professionals or fellow business owners who have committed their life to learning.
It’s not so good if you are benefiting from their bravado that masks moderate performance in their own businesses that comes from doing the same old things in the same old ways.
Appearances of success can be deceptive. There is no shortage of stories of businesses collapsing when the top managers and owners appear to be financially successful.
A famous insolvency practitioner in the UK had an informal early warning system to identify distressed companies. These warning signs included businesses where the owner drove a Rolls Royce or a similar fancy and expensive car. These status symbols can be leased while there is money but when the money runs out, everything collapses.
Your business friends have the advantage of knowing you and your situation. Or at least the situation as far as your pride lets you admit. It is tough to say that things aren’t going well to friends who like and respect you so you be not even be giving them the chance to help you as much as they could.
Business Owner Type 4 – “I can get all the business advice I need free off the Internet”
It’s true there is a lot of business building information available for free on the Internet.
Some of it is very good, some is OK and some is poor.
There are two big problems:
The first is being able to assess the quality upfront. If you can’t, you waste a lot of time while you are searching for the golden nuggets.
The second is that you are rarely given the complete answer. Most business advice information is posted on the Internet by business advisors, consultants and coaches of one variety or another. This is part of their marketing strategy and tactics and it’s designed to attract and convert you to buy their services or products.
I admit that I am the same. I sometimes write very long, informative blog posts but I know that the advice I give to clients is even better because it’s more comprehensive and tailored to their particular businesses.
I accept that one of the big problems with business advice is that it is expensive.
I should also remind you that free advice is only good value if you gain from it. Even then, it may not give you the best result.
Learning how to make £1,000 extra profit for free is great – you’ve got £1,000 that you didn’t have before.
Spending £1,000 to earn £5,000 is even better because your gain is bigger.
This is a key issue to think about because it’s not the cost of the advice that matters but the difference between the gain you make and the cost of the advice.
There’s a danger to thinking that the marketing consultant who charges $2,000 per hour is much better than the one charging $200. You might hear the same ideas from both.
However, if you’re much more likely to pay attention to what the expensive consultant says, he may be the one to hire.
Business Owner Type 5 – “I only need specialist advice.”
You accept that you don’t know everything about the specialist compliance subjects like tax and employment law because it is impossible to keep up-to-date with everything.
You will therefore pay your accountant and lawyer, perhaps not willingly, but they are saving you money over the long term.
However, you don’t believe that you want or need general business advice on sales, marketing, finance and team leadership.
You could be right or you could be leaving yourself open to making common mistakes that cost you time, money and lost opportunities for extra profit.
I’m not going to try to convince you that all business coaches, advisors and consultants are great or that you should buy a multitude of books and audio programs.
You’ve made your own mind up and whatever I say isn’t going to convince you.
Will you do one thing for me?
Will you commit to learning from your experiences as a buyer and a seller, as an employee and a manager, as a borrower and a lender.
You can learn a lot from watching and listening to other business people.
It takes an open mind and plenty of effort to keep alert to the tactics that work and don’t work. It is well worth doing if you’re determined that you’re not going to tap into the knowledge of the people who make it their business to learn about business improvement ideas.
Business Owner Type 6 – “I can’t afford to buy professional business advice”
This business owner knows that there is a gap in knowledge and other people have good ideas, but they’ve got themselves trapped in a money-saving mindset.
They know professional business advisors are expensive. The better they are, the more expensive they will be.
And they’re scared of the costs, not recognising that it’s not what you pay that matters but how much you gain over and above what you pay.
How Much Should You Pay Yourself As The Business Owner?
I’m the opposite. I believe in business advice and I buy plenty of it.
I believe in constantly improving my knowledge, especially in the areas of marketing and strategy because that’s where my interests lie.
I know a lot but I know that there are always more ideas to learn.
Even If You’re Reluctant To Buy Business Advice, Isn’t It Worth Trying Some?
You may have lots of doubts about the benefit of business advice but don’t you think you should suspend your disbelief occasionally, if only to prove that you are right?
Just as I encourage the business advice junkies to stop buying and go “cold turkey”, so that they can start implementing, I encourage you to try it.
I was a consultant, small business coach and advisor based in Birmingham, with over 35 years business experience, including more than 20 years as self employed.
My main business qualifications are:
– Chartered Accountant
– MBA
– Certified Guerilla Marketing Coach
My main interests are in helping business owners who are stuck get unstuck by thinking more clearly about their issues and possible solutions.
I no longer provide professional business coaching but I will be sharing more ideas on my blog and will continue my popular business book reviews.
I can be contacted by email at Paul@BusinessDevelopmentAdvice.com
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