Struggling to Grow Your Business? Can't Remember Why You Started It?
If your answer is something like, "yes, sometimes," or even "I don't care any more," chances are you’re working really hard and can't figure out why you're not making more progress. All of which adds up to lost sleep and lots of frustration. You see, as business owners and entrepreneurs, we’re really, really good at what our business does. Whether that’s building houses or baking cakes. What we’re not good at, we tend to tell ourselves "I'll get to it at some point" and keeping doing what is easy.
Whatever the business, it’s human nature to stay in our comfort zone. To spend time where we have the most knowledge, skills, abilities and let’s face it—passion! After all, it’s our passion for what we do that got us where we are.
But at some point, every business hits a wall. That wall almost always has to do with limitations that keep the business from growing. And it hits that wall usually because we’re busy doing what we're good at (let's call it laying bricks) all day long. It’s easier (and feels more satisfying) to deal with the urgent and pressing fires of the moment than to slow down and really think through why we’re struggling and find a more permanent solution. When we try, it feels like our brains are filled with mush. We don’t think as quickly and nimbly as we do when we’re busy laying bricks. And solving the struggles, unless it’s a full-blown crisis, doesn’t strike us as equally urgent, so we put it off. Until we smack our heads against the wall we’ve built.
Working IN your business means doing the daily tasks of the business. Take for example, a landscape contractor. She or he is working IN the business when mowing lawns, planting, fixing sprinkler systems, creating landscape designs, quoting new jobs, handling customer complaints, billing, doing payroll, doing the banking and the books, maintaining the website, sending out email promotions, going to networking groups, hiring and training workers, fixing equipment, buying supplies. You get the picture.
Working ON your business means creating the vision for your company, setting goals, measuring progress and tweaking accordingly. It means creating / updating and following a plan that sets out what you need to do and when you need to do it, along with contingencies for when things don’t go as planned. So a business plan for a landscape contractor would answer questions such as:
- What products and services will I offer? What could I offer that would set me apart from every other landscaping company?
- What will I charge? When do I raise my prices? By how much? What kind of mark-up should I have for plants, sprinkler systems, flagstones, chemicals, etc?
- What kind of customers do I want? How many customers will I need to make a living? To break even? To make a profit? To expand? How much time do I allocate for each job?
- What are my competitors doing? Better than me? Worse than me? Differently than me? What’s working for them?
- What geographic area am I willing to work in?
- What kinds of landscaping designs do I want to specialize in?
- Where will I get my plants, hardscape and supplies? What kind of terms do I need from vendors to manage my cash flow?
- How will I finance the business? How do I manage cash flow in such a seasonal business?
- How many employees will I need? When? Where will I find them? How will I train them? What do I pay them? What benefits must I offer? What kind of career path can they have with my company? What if they go work for someone else in the off season when I don’t have work and don’t come back? How will this affect my insurance costs?
- What kind of marketing and promotion will be most effective? How much will I spend on it?
- How will I find customers? How will they find me?
- What policies do I need for handling employees? customers? vendors? partners?
The Wall
Continuing as a landscape contractor, let’s say you’ve got 25 weekly maintenance customers. That’s 5 jobs per day at an average of 1.5 hours per job, including travel to/from and a 30 minute lunch break. You’re now at the maximum number of jobs you can handle by yourself with a couple of hours in the early evening left over to meet potential new customers and work on landscaping designs. You’re making an okay living, but not enough to save money or expand. After all, this is a seasonal business and winter always comes sooner than you expect. So you still need more work.
But if you get new work, which eats more time out of each day, where will you find the time to keep meeting new customers? Do new designs? Buy plants and supplies? invoice customers? Go to the bank? And what do you do when you max out your available hours? How will you grow your business? How will you even manage the business you have? How do you find time for your family? Time for yourself?
Discovering Your Solutions
We help clients get their arms around the struggle so they can break through that brick wall and grow their business to the next level. We use a variety of tools that help assess your business, identify problems and threats while shining a light on strengths and opportunities.
We work with you to take a hard look at your business from the 50,000 foot level. To get you up and away from the bricks so you can see how tall, wide and deep the wall you’ve built, is. And to help you see the breadth of opportunities you’re missing out on. To identify different solutions and their options so you can make a thoughtful, deliberate choice about how you want to proceed with your business.
We help you dream big by rediscovering your vision for your business and helping you expand on it. So you remember why you wanted this business in the first place. To help you create your business plan or update and refresh the existing one so it clearly maps out the routes to take to make your vision a reality.
Usually, by the end of the process, most business owners feel renewed passion and excitement because they now have a level of clarity they didn’t have before.
Still others come to realize that they no longer wish to own the business. Some want to retire and some realize they’re no longer enjoying it. And that’s ok too. Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur! (Owning a business is not a prison sentence.) Should that turn out to be true for you, we help you design the right exit strategy.
