Dorothy may have been handed a simple road to achieve her goals on a silver platter when she landed in OZ, but she spent a long time on that winding yellow road to get there, and came across all sorts of nasty distraction and monsters standing in her way. Thankfully you won’t come across any angry apple trees or flying monkeys in your business journey (we hope!), but there will be barriers and hurdles in your way. At ActionCOACH, I help you navigate that tricky path, and instead of sending you down the yellow brick road, I show you another path with just 6 stepping stones leading to your Emerald City.
Step 1 – Mastery
As a business owner, there are some basic skills you need to master in order to take back control of your business. Typically, this can be broken down into 4 key areas; destination (where is your business going?), money (what activities are profitable, and which aren’t?), time (how do you optimise your time to boost productivity?), and delivery (how do you make sure you are always delivering consistent results?). At the mastery stage, it’s all about learning how to walk before you can run ahead – if you don’t you might end up falling flat on your face at the first hurdle.
Step 2 – Niche
Now that you have a good idea of what’s going on in your business right now, it’s time to look forward. Step 2 is all about turning your business into a commercial, profitable enterprise by defining your niche and designing your services and operations around it. Find your USP, add value and learn how to market your business more effectively using that information.
Step 3 – Leverage
At ActionCOACH, we define leverage as ‘doing ever more with ever less’. Confused? Don’t be. That basically means learning to use what you have in the best possible way to increase your profitability. For example, if you have a process that is very routine with every customer, you could look into automating it, releasing that time and resource for other tasks to earn you more money. See where I’m going with this?
Step 4 – Team
Your team are the single biggest asset your business has, so it’s no surprise that they are an integral part of the 6 steps to success. At the team level, you give your employees the chance to take ownership and put a structure in place for their own growth. Businesses with strong teams tend to perform better, grow quicker and achieve better success, so in step 4 we focus on creating winning teams within your business.
Step 5 – Synergy
The synergy step is always an interesting one, because it’s essentially tying everything together and making it work together. If you have planned and executed steps 1-4 properly (which with our help, you will have), then step 5 is all about connecting everything and opening up options you had never seen before. So now, we have brought you to the end of the path, and while we stand at the gates of the Emerald city, we point out the Quartz City and the Sapphire City on either side that you had never seen before.
Step 6 – Results
The final, and perhaps most rewarding step is seeing the results all of your hard work yields and choosing which city you would like to enter for the next step of your business adventure. Whether that’s more money in the bank, more branches for you to manage or simply more free time in your diary, the results step is all about rewards and freedom. Now that you have a seamless and chaos-free workplace, you have the freedom and flexibility to consider your options without extra burdens or confusion surrounding you.
Sound good? Want to get started, but not sure how? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. In partnership with ActionCOACH I run lots of sessions, including 90-day planning workshops and 6 steps to success events to help business owners just like you get started on the road to success. To book onto an event, or find out more about how I can help you, just drop me a line to get in touch.
