The Most Colourful Business Strategy in the World. In Blackboard Fridays Episode 50, Jacob talks about Growth Planning and Leadership. 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.

Welcome to Blackboard Fridays Episode 50! A milestone for us, and it also marks about 1 year since we started releasing our weekly videos – your ongoing feedback and love is much appreciated by the businessDEPOT team, and please do keep sharing these with your friends or telling them they absolutely, positively must sign up at www.blackboardfridays.com.au

The milestone warrants a very special episode, and so that’s what we have created. It’s a little bit longer and a LOT more comprehensive, as we walk through all 12 elements of ‘The businessDEPOT Way’.

‘The businessDEPOT Way’ is the coaching methodology our advisory team work with clients to design and implement, empowering their bright ideas and creating sustainable change. This integrated system is available to businesses of all sizes, and sets us apart from coaches or consultants who can only contribute one piece of the puzzle.

Some of these strategic frameworks are based on decades of research and application; all of them have been road-tested on privately held companies, active growth businesses, and SMEs across Australia and around the world.

If you’re feeling stuck, uncertain, or just don’t know what you don’t know in business, we guarantee 1 of these 12 elements is the cause.

So grab yourself a slice of celebration cake, watch this week’s episode, and see how well you’re applying ‘The most colourful business strategy in the world’.

PS: You can always catch up on previous episodes at http://businessdepot.com.au/insights/category/tools

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

Welcome to Blackboard Friday’s episode 50 and thanks so much for watching. For this special landmark episode, we’re going to dive deeper into what we call the businessDEPOT way. The integrated contextual approach that our clients apply in their businesses to empower their bright ideas. Not only is this a practical approach to business strategy, but the integrated consistency that we apply means that all of the key decisions that you need to make as a business owner are connected. This is not a whole series of more stuff that you need to think about. It’s one system that you can apply to get real sustainable results.

Let’s jump into it. It starts at the top here with the business lifecycle. You know where you are in your business journey, you can acknowledge where you’ve been, you know the hurdles and the brick walls that are coming up and importantly, you can recognize the feelings and the energy that is impacting you as a business owner and your team. That energy acknowledged and managed will impact all of the other decisions that you make.

From the business lifecycle, you jump into the layers of context. You may recall key conversations we had about starting at the top with context. Your vision for the business and how the vision you have feeds into the strategy, the resources, systems expectations and finally, manages the day-to-day staff that’s integral to your business. Too many business owners and frankly, too many competitors of mine, just play around in the stuff.

The businessDEPOT way is designed to pull you out of the business to get you working on and not in the business. Every single one of the strategic frameworks we have is designed to make a contextual decision that you can then apply. What do we mean by the contextual frameworks? Well let’s start moving through.

So you remember we talked about vision at the top layer of context. The three elements of vision: your commercial vision, your cultural vision, and your personal vision. Commercial vision is a conversation around the income and equity choices you want to create for your business. Culture covers things like who are your ideal team members? Why are you in business? What are your core values? And critically, how do you live that?

Culture rituals is one of the most watched Blackboard Fridays episodes and that was a conversation about specifically some of the how. The businessDEPOT way is not designed to be fluffy. It’s designed to be practical so that you can implement how within your business. The personal vision is the conversation we have is around the wealth quadrant, particularly the wealth quadrant for business owners. How do you make sure that even as a business owner, you’re not playing in the job quadrant? You’re actually building wealth for you and your family and from there, creating freedom. What’s your number? That’s a key part of your vision.

Once you’ve got your vision, you can then move over and make key strategy decisions. Three areas of strategy within your business you need to make decisions and communicate. Your capacity engine. Right now, how big is your engine? What’s your utilization rate? Are you focused on being better and getting more power out of the current engine or being bigger, growing into a bigger engine? It’s the only decision you need to make, be better or be bigger. From there, you can start jumping into the specifics on each of those. The other key part of strategy within a business is your brand promise.

Now, remember brand is separate from branding from marketing. Those are important elements that your brand is what you’re famous for. It’s how people describe your business when you’re not in the room. What’s the strategic approach you’ve taken to determining which archetype your brand stands for and how you and your team consistently deliver your brand promise?

In the third element of the strategy layer of context is the customer journey, which overlaps with the sales hourglass that we’ve discussed. Again, in previous episodes of blackboard Friday’s, thinking customer centric. How is your customer finding you? What’s the journey that they to become a client of yours? How do you make them a client for life and ideally, a paying client for life? It all starts with understanding who your ideal client even is to take them on that journey.

So there are the three elements of strategy–capacity, brand, and customer. Once you’re clear on that, you can start moving the conversation into the resources. Now, the resource layer within a business is where a lot of business owners start to feel they’re really getting bogged down. What we want to do is make it as simple as possible for them. R&R stands for roles and responsibilities but more importantly for you as a business owner, it means rest and recuperation. If you’ve got the right team around you, if you’re investing your time appropriately across these four areas–wealth, growth, revenue, and administration, then managing your business will be easier and you will have more time.

Key part of those resources is the learning and development aspect. Not only do you need the right people doing the right jobs, but you need them to have the right skills. There’s the great saying when we talk about culture and you start to see the integration in these different conversations that if you hire the right people and train them for skills, you’re going to go much farther in business than if you hire four skills and ignore the culture for the culture sits above the learning and development plan that you have.

Lastly, dollars have to come into this. You can’t be a business adviser without jumping in and talking revenue, costs, and profit with your clients and you as a business owner can’t ignore those either. So, what’s the profit formula? How do you break that down? How well do you understand your numbers and not just as the diagram talks about things like fixed costs and revenue, but also your break-even point, your cash break-even point, and your cash flow? Because if you can manage the dollars, that goes a long way to managing the energy of you and your team.

So, they’re the three big areas. Strategy which is informed by the vision guiding the resources and then we jump into a little bit more of the content. Systems can be a long conversation with your business, and you want to do this right. There is no way to shortcut the systems, but I will point out that too many business owners can go too far. They trying to over document, over complicate the systems especially if you’re in the startup or scale-up stage of your business life cycle, you don’t need to go as deep into these as other businesses.

Here are some of the things that we’ve talked about these in blackboard Friday’s episodes. What are the roles and what are the responsibilities? The ideal week for your key team members? The momentum meeting schedule you’ve got to get communication flowing between the different areas of your business. That then feeds into workflows, documented policies and procedures, training, and reviews.

Getting all of that clear will often mean losing team members. I warn clients when we do this as a strategic project, 10% of your staff will leave but that’ll be the 10% of your staff that don’t actually fit in with the resource mix that you need to strategy and vision that you’re building. This is a great way to shine a light on the people who maybe aren’t actually supporting your business for the future.

Now once you’re clear on the systems that are documented and they’re communicated, the last element of the businessDEPOT way is the expectations for your team, for your customers, and for yourself and your family. Where’s the energy within the business? Are you meeting expectations you’re kind of feeling okay? Are you failing on your expectations? Are you’re feeling down around your business? Ideally, we’re creating the wow and that’s what the businessDEPOT way manages to achieve for businesses. We managed to create the wow for the business owner and from the business owner, their team all the way down.

This is the most colorful business strategy you will ever see, and the color is there deliberately and designed to help you make those key decisions communicated into a team and fully practically implement. It’s not rocket science. It’s 12 key questions that you as a business owner need to answer. If you can answer those for your business today and recognize that as your business grows and develops, you get to have the discussions again, you get to make different choices, you can answer just those 12 questions then you will have a contextual business plan and an integrated approach to making sure that your business runs smoothly. Those bright ideas that you have are fully executed to create the value you know you can create for the world.

Thank you so much for your support across 50 episodes of Blackboard Fridays. We’re looking forward to bringing you the next fifty and even more because as we dive into the specific application of the businessDEPOT way, there are always more conversations. There’s always more stuff in business but don’t let the stuff hold you back from making your choices, climbing your mountains, and taking your bright ideas and turning them into reality.

Next Steps

Want to learn more about how this can apply to your business? It costs nothing to chat:

• Email me jacob@jacobaldridge.com (I read them all)
• Call, Text, or WhatsApp me +61 427 151 181
• Or just Subscribe https://jacobaldridge.com/about/subscribe-to-jacob-aldridge-com/ to stay in touch