How to Take a 3 Month Holiday While Your Business Grows

“When I met John 2 years ago, I was in a very difficult place. There was never enough hours in the day, I was very busy with a busy diary. 2 years later, for the first time in 33 years, I am taking 3 months off work to go to New Zealand with no emails or phone calls. I now Own a Business, I do not Have a Job!”

 

“John’s first words to me were that ActionCOACH can take a good business and help make it great and what we needed in the first instance was to recognise that our business is a good business. I told him how I was exhausted running the business as I was working all hours of the day and night, reacting to what the business threw at me. I’m a driven person but I was stuck on a treadmill with no exit strategy.

“I suppose the biggest barrier that any business owner is going to face at this stage is that taking time out of a busy working day feels completely counter intuitive as the time out of the business just means you are even busier when you go back to work. What you come to realise is that you need to spend this time looking at your business as it actually ends up being the start of how you can free up more and more of your time.”

“Why have I done so well using a business coach? When you have a good business you think ‘well that is ok’ and you don’t necessarily want to get involved in challenges because you are doing ok. Many business owners understand the technical aspect of their company – an artist may be great at painting but won’t make money without a good agent, in fact, they may not even see why they need an agent at all. But ActionCOACH want to take good businesses to great and that invigorated me.

“We’ve gone from planning to borrow £30,000 to enable growth to identifying £130,000 of savings in the budget this year. December was historically a difficult month to obtain invoice payments yet December 2015 was one of our record months in terms of cashflow. We’ve gone from not having a handle on our KPIs to building bespoke Test & Measure Software that gives us real time conversion rates, lead source, geography of sale per transaction so that we can work out an accurate return on investment.

“My emails have gone down by 80% – just a small thing that makes life more manageable! I think when you have spent five months of planning and working on what you are trying to achieve for your business and spend time talking to your team about it, they begin to buy in to your plans and start to take ownership for more things that they might ordinarily email you about. It seems that by telling them the rules they are ready to play the game.”