Top 3 Priorities for a Start Up Business. In Blackboard Fridays Episode 58, Jacob talks about Business Lifecycle. 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.

Every business moves through the same lifecycle. EVERY. Business. Understand the business lifecycle, as it applies to your business and where every one of your clients is situated, is so fundamental an entrepreneurial skill that the lifecycle sits atop ‘The businessDEPOT Way‘ and was the topic of #BlackboardFridays Episode 1 way back in 2016.

Over the next 4 weeks, we’re going to dive deeper into each of the four phases in the lifecycle: Start Up, Scale Up, Step Up, and Sell Up.

Wherever you are in your business, one of these will have immediate relevance. If your clients are also business owners or businesses, then watching each of these will help you better understand, service, and sell to your customers.

We start this week with the excitement of new enterprise, and the Top 3 Priorities for a Start Up business. Watch the episode here.

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

It’s part of businessDEPOT advisory. I talk a lot about the business lifecycle. Now, it’s critical for you as a business owner to know where on that journey you and your business currently are. It’s also important to you understand where your team members are on their personal journey through your business. If you’re a b2b company selling into other businesses, understanding where your customers and potential customers are on their business lifecycle, gives you an opportunity to communicate with them much more clearly, speak to their motivation much better, and create greater conversion rates.

In other words, understanding all of the aspects of the business lifecycle gives you a competitive advantage. So, for now and across this and the next three episodes. I’m going to go deeper into each of the four aspects of the business lifecycle, start up, scale up, step up, and sell up, to help you understand how you can apply that to yourself, to your business, to your team, and to your clients to create better business outcomes.

Starting today at startup. I want you to think back to day one. Do you remember the day that your business began? A majority of business owners I talk to can actually still name the date even if it was 15 or 25 years ago when they began their business. Do you remember how you felt on that day? The word I hear most often is excited.

I remember the first day I started my business, and I was excited for it. Now, sometimes that excitement lasts for months. Sometimes it lasts for just a matter of minutes. But that startup phase is usually described as the journey from that initial excitement through the joy, the enthusiasm of having your own business, of starting this new venture, even if it’s not your first business.

Slowly, having some of that joy dissipate that franticness fade away, until you found yourself in a trough of sorrow, in a state of anxiety or uncertainty of trying to determine whether or not this business is actually going to be viable.

Now, that initial energy is fantastic. It gets you going. You need it to get out of the bed in the morning in those early days of the business when there’s a whole lot of wheelspin going on. Similarly, you want to make sure you’re putting in place the necessary things to get through that trough of sorrow as quickly as possible.

I’ve talked before about the business lifecycle being a journey of speed bumps, hurdles, and brick walls. Speed bumps aren’t that hard to get over, but you need to have some momentum. As a business, it’s exactly the same. To shift out of start-up and into scale-up, to shift your energy from that excitement and that sorrow uncertainty into confidence that this business is going to work. You need to put in place three key priorities to generate revenue.

The startup phase of business, the reason we color it in blue, is because it’s the revenue phase. It is the phase where it is most critical that you developed revenue strategy and systems for your business. The three priorities to help you to achieve that is number one a clear product market fit. It’s no good just building a product that you love, if there isn’t a target market for it.

It’s what I call a solution in search of a problem. What you need to do is identify a target market and understand their pain, their problems, and how your solution, your product can help to those clients. Getting that clear product market fit, and it’s normally an iterative process, did it back and forth and conversation with them, can help you to sell much more sustainably.

Point two is a business model. You need to have the process so that you can take on a client, service that client, deliver to their expectations, and do so in a systemized way, that is at the very least, almost profitable. There’s a saying in startup businesses that you need to do things that don’t scale. Sometimes for that business model, you need to do things that you’re not going to be able to do forever, just to prove that the product suits the market and that your business model can work.

Number three is sustainable sales. Can you generate new clients and new customers for your business on a sustainable way? Because I see a lot of startup businesses who don’t want to do sales and they think that their product is going to be so incredible, so successful that people are going to beat a path to their door. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality of business.

Sales isn’t a dirty word, particularly, if you apply the Gratitude Sales Model. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s recognizing the value that you’re delivering and the value that your customers are receiving. It’s building that machine so that every month, you can come in, you can put a dollar in the top of the machine, pull the business model lever, the sales process flows, and a dollar and then some comes out at the bottom.

If you can build those three things–a clear product that has a clear market it fits into, the business model to deliver profitably that product, and then the sustainable sales to keep your business fed, that will give you the revenue and that will give you the momentum you need to get through that speed bump. If you’re selling into startups, understand the emotional journey that they’re going on, if they haven’t got all three of those right. Maybe they’re feeling excited and joyful in the really early stages. Maybe some of that sorrow or anxiety is starting to kick in.

Take the time to understand where those steps they are so that you can understand how best to help them with what they need to do for their business, which is shift into that confidence in to scale up. Next week, we’re going to be talking about the three strategic priorities for a fast-growing business–your business your client’s business or your team, as they head into the scale-up phase of the business lifecycle. See you then!

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)
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