That’s quite a challenge set by the title but with the help of BusinessSummaries, the business book summary service, that’s exactly what you can make happen.
As a business coach who talks to many owners of small businesses, I know that there is an element of scepticism about business advice and the concerns comes from two main areas:
- I am very busy - I don’t have the time to learn.
- Business advice is very expensive
Notice that rarely do people say variations of ”I know it all. I don’t need to learn.” Instead it’s a combination of concerns about time and money.
I used to say that it will only cost you £10 to £15 to read a great book that could inspire you and change your views on your business forever (eg Michael Gerber The E Myth Revisited or Jay Abraham Getting Everything You Can) but I always knew that time was an issue.
It takes time to read a full book and even longer to move into putting changes into place in your business.
Business Book Summaries - The Solution
There are a number of companies that summarise business books and my current favourite is BusinessSummaries.
This is a very flexible service for anyone who wants to learn how to build a bigger, better business but doesn’t want to spend very much and doesn’t have much time.
How To Improve Your Business In 4 Hours Per Month
The idea is simple.
You read one summary report each month in a particular area and then you put what you learnt into action. That way you improve your business, slowly and systematically.
OK there is more to it than that but I will tell you the entire process below.
Introducing The Eight Pillars Of Business Prosperity
Talk to any business adviser and we each have our own formula for success.
Mine is based on the Eight Pillars Of Business Prosperity so let me explain:
- Your key performance numbers - your starting point is to know where your business is. How you are performing across all your business activities.
- Your vision, goals, priorities and time management - where are you going and how does that translate into actionable priorities and activities.
- Your market positioning - how you find the best market segments and niches and put yourself in position to beat your competitors and win.
- How you generate leads - what methods you use to gain the attention of new prospective customers and how you make these methods for effective.
- How you convert leads into orders - leads are very nice but they don’t pay the bills so this pillar explains how you persuade someone who has expressed an interest and turn them into a new customer.
- How you turn one time customers into frequent buyers- it is vital for your profitability and growth that satisfied customers come back and buy again and again.
- How you lead your team - as your business grows, you have to learn to achieve more through other people so you have to set the direction, inspire your team and manage performance through your employees.
- How you systematise your business - your aim should always be to build a business that works well without you based on great staff and effective, well designed and documented systems that deliver great customer service consistently.
This list of eight pillars represent everything that you need to develop your business but ignore all the compliance issues that you have to do - the accounting and tax rules, the employment legislation, the Health & Safety laws…
If you become a regular reader of my blog and I hope you do, you will become very familiar with the Eight Pillars as they are the basis for everything I talk about.
The System For Improving Your Business Quickly And Cheaply
- Take a good look at the Eight Pillars of Business Prosperity model and then assess your performance against each of the pillars. Award yourself 10 if your business is perfect in this area, 5 if your business is OK and less if your business has a lot of work to do in this area.
- Decide what are the biggest priorities (or stop reading if you’ve got a total score of 72 with no area with a score of less than an eight - at that level you are not going to find magic answers to move you from great to superb.)
- Sign up to the BusinessSummaries service.
- Based on your top priority, choose your first book summary and download the PDF and the audio file. You will see that you have hundreds to choose from. I find that learning is best with an audio and visual experience where you can do one, the other or both.
- Read or listen the summary once to gain an overall understanding of what the book is about. This will take about 20 to 30 minutes.
- Repeat only this time start taking notes or highlight areas that are particularly relevant to you.
- Based on what you have just learnt, spend 30 minutes brainstorming ideas on how you can use this new knowledge in your business. Don’t judge, just record your ideas and work around the themes. A simple mindmap with main and smaller branches can be a useful way to record your thoughts. I recommend that you create your own journal or file to use rather than sheets of paper. That way you capture the ideas permanently.
- Review your list and decide which ideas you are going to out into action. I would prefer that you implement two effectively than ten ineffectively.
- For those ideas that you have chosen, it is now time to do a little planning. Set your goals/targets and identify the action steps you need to implement the ideas.
- Put the ideas into action over the next month. Be consistent and focused.
- Record your performance towards your target and congratulate yourself if you are making good progress.
- Reassess your ratings against the Eight Pillars Model. Choose your highest priority target and repeat the process.
So there you have it.
A business development process based around the BusinessSummaries book service.
It takes you through your business systematically based on your assessment of the highest priorities and is a gentle introduction to learning about development and most importantly, taking that learning and turning it into action.
I believe that you will achieve more with the other more expensive business development programs that I bring you but this is a great way to start.
Your success depends on which books you select (and that depends on which particular issues you are trying to solve), how well you implement them and how well you cover the joins.
The other business development solutions are more focused on particular issues, may take you through a step by step process and join from the start to the end.
