A Simple Coaching Project

A Simple Coaching Project. In Blackboard Fridays Episode 64, Jacob talks about Growth Planning. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.” Back independent since 2019.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.

Transcript

Hi Blackboarders. Welcome to episode 64. One of the questions that I often get asked when people start to go through the volume of content that we’ve made available through this series is where to start? Where do I begin and how do I know exactly what my strategic priorities are?

Now this overlaps nicely with another question we get, and hey please keep the questions coming we love getting them from you, which is for people who are newer into business who are into that startup phase of the business lifecycle, and they know that there’s an awful lot of stuff that they don’t know, so where do they start?

Crossing off the two of them, we’ve developed what I call a simple coaching project. I do this because it’s something that my team can go in to any business and know that we’re going to help create some outcomes by walking through the six coaching sessions that are detailed here, but it’s also something that you could do yourself.

In fact, every single one of these topics has been covered in a Blackboard Fridays episode to help you to really make the most out of your business wherever in the business lifecycle you are.

The first conversations you need to have, if you don’t really know where to begin on strategy, are around the different layers of context and the business lifecycle. These were covered the very first episode of Blackboard Fridays.

The layers of context talks about how from a vision down, there are decision-making filters that impact us as business owners. It’s a great episode where we went inside Ed’s head to determine the number one priority for your business and we did an exercise of marking yourself, compared to your business, across all the different elements and the different layers of context to determine which ones were causing the most negative impact in your business and where you needed to start.

Use that information in conjunction with understanding the top three priorities for the phase of the business lifecycle that your at. The very first instance, that’s going to give you a list of about a dozen different things that you could be focused on in your business and help you to prioritize which ones are going to be my just impactful that you need to address immediately.

That might in and of itself be sufficient for you to go and build a business plan based on those. If you do want to keep going though, the next step we have is looking at your strategic marketing plan.

In that episode, we talked about identifying your ideal clients, we talked about understanding their pain and defining your brand promise, which we talked about in another episode, so that it matches the pain of your ideal client. You demonstrate that you are their solution.

Then, how do you use the five attractants to convert those ideal clients into leads at the top of your sales hourglass? I have a lot of value with clients running that exercise in a coaching session.

The next step, which won’t surprise you after we talk about generating leads, is how we then get into the sales hourglass proper? Measuring your current conversion rate, those leads as they move down through a brand promise, engagement, perhaps a commitment product, how percentage-wise well do you do it converting each lead into an engagement and into an actual client and what would you like that conversion rate to be?

You can start to see how we shift from the inspiration of the idea that we talked about in these episodes into something practical that you can do. If your conversion rate is currently 30% and you want it to be 50%, what can you do about that? What else can you do at each of those different layers of the hourglass differently to improve your outcomes?

This is also a great time to look at your strategic referral channels, how are you building those relationships so you’ve got an unpaid sales force out in the marketplace sending you pre-qualified, pre-sold leads because that will have a massive impact on your conversion rate if done well.

We shift now from the revenue coming in to start looking at your profitability, your efficiency as you’re investing money and time using the R&R framework. Clear roles and responsibilities to create rest and recuperation.

The exercise you can run for yourself as a small business owner. Where are you spending your time today across the four categories of wealth, growth, revenue, and administration? What percentage is your current mix and how would you like to be spending your time?

And then use the Russian brothers exercise to shift, if you want to be doing more growth, more green time, well, that’s things you need to be doing more of but to create that time, there’s probably some red, some administration that you need to be doing less of? What are the specific tasks that you need to shuffle in order to have the right balance of your investment of time in the business?

Of course if you have a larger business and a team, then undertaking the full hour an hour project, going through things like roles and responsibilities charts, ideal weeks, momentum meetings, workflows, training, all of those aspects are critical to improving the efficiency and profitability of your business.

Once we start talking dollars, it’s hard to escape them and so session 5 is now building out the growth plan using the capacity engine framework to map your journey from now to where you want to be.

We learned through the capacity engine that strategically, there’s only one decision you need to make in your business at any point in time. Do I need to be better, get more power out of my current engine or do I need to be bigger and grow the size of my engine?

It’s taking those steps towards the vision that you defined that helps build the strategy of your capacity engine. This is a good time to review your profit formula and to make sure that as you grow, you continue to do so in a profitable manner.

The last of the six sessions that I recommend is a bit of a review. You’ve covered an awful lot in your business across going through this program and so taking the time to review what you learned, what you decided to do differently, perhaps even some of the quick wins you’ve already achieved, but then take all of the different things you could be doing and actually turn them into a strategic design.

You can’t do everything at once. Good strategy is knowing what you’re saying no to or at the very least not yet. With this focus, you can then choose what you’re going to focus on strategically and then shift from that design to execution because ultimately, no matter how good the frameworks, no matter how good the Blackboard Friday videos you watch to help you do that, or the coach that you engage to walk you through this and ask you those tough questions, no matter how good all of that, those ideas are worthless if you don’t execute.

Wherever you are in your strategic journey, of course my team and I would love to help you go through this process or something more specific, if you do have a clear specific need. If it’s something that you want to trial yourself, then that’s why we’ve created these to help you go through all of these critical conversations, to understand the decisions you’ve made in the past and the decisions you need to make in the future, in order to achieve the business dream that you’ve always desired.

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