Keys to successful business

It is refreshing this week to meet business owners who understand the importance of:

leverage
delegation
automation
business systems
learning from mistakes

Each of these are important business principles which business owners embrace in varying degrees.

So I am delighted to be working with a new client who is taking on all of these with gusto.

A former client

This is in stark contrast to a now former client who engaged me last year for coaching and business development.

This person was always right and had nothing to learn!

I subsequently disengaged this client because I was wasting my time and their money.

Why engage someone to coach you and help you to grow your business, if you are not going to do what they suggest?

And often . . . not even listen to the discussion!

One of the partners was attentive, but the other just did not want to be there. I am not even sure why they engaged me in the first place.

Maybe they thought that coaching was some magic pill that would instantly bring masses of revenue into their business.

But their business was already struggling, because they did not understand or apply these principles.

It is true that you can lead the horse to water but you cannot make it drink.

In Contrast

In stark contrast to this former client, we have now been engaged by a business owner who has been in business for several years now and freely admits that he has made a lot of mistakes in his first 2 years.

The difference is that he acknowledges the mistakes and is looking for ways to learn from them.

He has already set up simple business systems.
e.g. he wrote a list of all the things that he did while cleaning his premises and then engaged a cleaner to attend to them each day.

“They just go through the list and the place is kept clean. That is one less thing that I have to worry about doing each day.”

Leverage and delegation applied and working with effective business systems.

We also talked about how to automate his lead generation and handling processes within the website that we are going to build for him.

How to automatically capture details of prospects and clients in his CRM Customer Relationship Manager, and how to automate various communications with the client in order to reduce his admin workload.

And, (forward thinking on his part), how to make client management a simple system that can be passed off to an admin person when they are able to employ somebody for that.

Here is the proverbial horse already at the water and lapping it up.