If you want to scale up your business, there are five fundamental things you need to get right – or you could just end up turning little problems into much bigger ones.
The Brisbane Business Hub recently invited Bill Stack MBA/TM, a business coach at onGROWingBusiness.com and Action Coach Australia, and Lucas Meadowcroft, AI expert and founder of Crofti.com, to discuss the foundations that every ambitious business owner needs to put in place.
“Lots of business owners unintentionally create businesses built on chaos,” Bill explained. “So when those businesses scale up, they just end up expanding that chaos.
“But there are methodologies you can put in place that will help you to increase sales and profits, free up your time as a business owner and create an amazing team.
“With these steps, you can build a commercial, profitable, enterprise that works without you.”
1. Mastery
First up, you need to stabilise your business and eliminate any chaos that has crept in early on, so your time is spent effectively and you can focus on meeting your customers’ expectations and gaining financial know-how.
“Business chaos can mean constantly putting out fires and having no clear sense of direction,” Bill said. “To eliminate this chaos, you need to apply mastery across destination, money, time and delivery.”
Bill suggests beginning by asking yourself the following questions.
Destination mastery
- Where are you going with this business?
- How is this business going to fit into elevating your life?
- What numbers does the business need to produce to achieve your goals?
- Is this going to be the right kind of business for you?
- Is this going to be the right kind of business for your family to own over generations?
- What is the big picture?
Money mastery
- Where is your money going?
- What money is coming in and going out?
- What is the best usage of that cash?
- Are your products or services haphazardly priced instead of optimised for the market?
- Is your pricing optimised for different markets?
Time mastery
- What is your team doing with their time?
- How often do you double check to see if there’s any waste in your systems?
Delivery mastery
- How well is your product or service given to your customer base?
- How many of your customers are raving fans, not just satisfied customers?
- What is the referral process?
- What is the feedback process?
- What do you do with any feedback?
“When you have all four of these things down, you’re not losing money,” Bill said. “You know exactly what you’re selling and why you’re building your brand, and customers know what they’re buying and why, and they’re incentivised to refer you on.
“Once mastery over these things is established, you can begin to add extra things to your offering, like bundles and strategic alliances, to improve your customer experience and maximise your profits.”
2. Niche
Once you know what you’re selling, you need to be able to articulate that to the world in order to start generating leads.
“If you want to conquer your niche, it boils down to your unique selling proposition and your guarantee,” Bill said.
Bill warned that the idea of ‘guarantees’ can scare a lot of business owners, but if used correctly, the enhanced conversion rate will cover any losses that result from it.
“Make sure your guarantee is easy to fulfil and won’t ever be unfulfilled,” he said. “This differentiates you from your competitors and creates value for your customers.
“Do your research into guarantee models and choose one that works for your product or service. This front-loads conversions and gains you market share that covers what you need to fulfil the guarantee.
“Test and measure your guarantee to make sure your business can sustain it before committing to it.”
3. Leverage
Once you’ve got cash in your pockets, Bill said it’s time to consider ‘leverage techniques’ – things you can reinvest that money into that will make your business more efficient, and ultimately more profitable, over time.
“This creates less double handling of information, less lost information and less wasted meetings on things that could be done through automation,” he said.
Bill invited Lucas Meadowcroft, founder of Crofti.com, to discuss how AI can be particularly helpful within this step.
“Fear around AI is the number one thing I hear,” Lucas said. “It is becoming more common to have a blurring of the lines between digital, physical and biological, which can seem scary, but it really isn’t.
“AI has been around for 60 years and you’ve already been using it without even knowing it, so why wouldn’t you use it to increase efficiencies around business processes?”
Lucas acknowledged that the sheer amount of AI apps being developed for businesses today can seem intimidating – but he suggested that, instead of being overwhelmed, businesses should start by asking themselves two simple questions.
“Ask yourself, your business partners and your team members, what’s the biggest frustration that you have in your company today? That’s the first question. And then the second question is, if you could come to work tomorrow and never have to do a particular task again, what would that task be? Because that’s the task you want to automate.
“Don’t focus on keeping up with all of the latest developments in AI. Over 10,000 startups have launched AI services in the past 18 months, so you don’t possibly have enough minutes in a day to go out and test every one of them. Instead, focus on what you need. Use a website called There’s An AI For That, which aggregates all of the AI services that are available. Search for a particular task you want to automate, or a problem you want to solve, and it’ll tell you what app you can use to do that.”
4. Team
Ultimately, no matter how good the systems you put in place may look on paper, Bill said that whether or not they’re successful will come down to the culture you build within your team.
“You’re in charge of the culture that you end up building,” he said. “Culture eats process for breakfast. If you have a bad culture, they’re not going to follow the right processes anyway.
“So you have to think about the team members you want to put in place to maximise this machinery that you’ve developed. Who do you want running this new business you’ve built? It can’t always be you – this is where you need your team to start taking some of that workload off you, so the business can work without you.
“The team’s job, ultimately, is to make sure your customers are thrilled. If the customers are thrilled, they’ll keep coming back, and they’ll refer you on, and you’ll start building up resources that can be put back into the business and back into your team, so they can continue to focus on thrilling your customers. That’s the cycle you want.
“It sounds simple, but a lot of business owners have a tendency to forget this. Instead, because they don’t trust certain team members to do their part, they start running around like Superman or Superwoman and trying to do everything themselves. And that Superman Syndrome breaks the cycle that you’re trying to establish.
“Bring in people that you know will fit into your culture, and trust them to do their jobs. That’s the only way to build a profitable business that works without you.”
5. Synergy
Finally, once your business is operating smoothly, it’s time to consider synergy – what other markets or market segments can you start serving?
“Once you have a well-oiled machine in place, it should be replicable,” Bill said. “A successful business can take various forms, because the principles are the same. You know what it takes to be productive and profitable.
“Then, once you’re replicating your business, what does your life look like? Are you ready for that – or are you standing in your own way, and preventing yourself from building a business that will work without you because you still want to be the superhero?”
Ultimately, once you have a business that works without you, you can focus on investing in your future – which isn’t necessarily the same thing as your business’ future.
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