Success is not magical! It’s not for the chosen few, the lucky ones, the extra tall or particularly beautiful. Well maybe in Basketball or Hollywood it is, but in the business world, success is very formulaic. If you follow the formula, you’re likely to find results.
Here’s some critical success formulas in business.
Mindset + Skillset +Activity = Successful entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart! To succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to know what you are doing, be consistently working, and make sure you’re keeping your mindset in a great place. Business owners who have the skills and the activity without the mindset work harder than they need to! Business owners with the skills and mindset but not enough activity, make very little progress towards their big dreams. And business owners with a great mindset, lots of activity, but poor skills have a hard time creating something that is sustainable or duplicatable. It’s kind of like throwing mud to the wall and seeing what sticks.
A good product + Marketing Plan +Sales System + great fulfillment= Steady business sales
Every company wants good business sales. And this success formula requires 4 parts. The good product might seem like the most important part to you. It’s actually not. Companies sell lots of junk all the time. But, repeat business does not happen with bad products. And it’s an integrity piece. So make sure whatever you are selling is high caliber. Marketing ensures that you are always capturing and nurturing leads so that there is always someone to close. The sales system ensures that you convert well with the leads you have. And great fulfillment protects you from chargebacks. When those 4 peices are working together in harmony, your sales are steady and consistent.
Hiring Process + Training Process + Management Process + Awesome Corporate Culture = A great team
Great teams don’t fall out of the sky! You build them one step at a time. The first piece is to get the right people on the team. This will involve how you post the job, what you look for in resumes, how you interview, if you do any type of skills tests, or personality profiles. Next comes the training process. Do you have clear instruction that can teach anyone how to succeed in this position? Do you have graduated performance scales to get the team member quickly up to speed? Do they have standard operating procedures to follow? Management processes involve team meetings, performance reviews, communication and conflict resolution strategies, and incentives. And the corporate culture is the energy that keeps your team cohesive and enrolled into working together. The corporate culture is what determines if people like showing up to work each day!
Once you’ve got all these pieces in place, you are ready to think about expanding your business.
Steady Business Sales + A great team + Business Systems +Financial Health = Scalable Business
One of the mistakes we make in business is thinking that if we just make it bigger, it will automatically be better and more profitable. That’s not true. In fact, if you take a business with big problems and try to make it bigger, the problems just become bigger!
Here’s what you want to have in place when you are looking to expand the company. Steady business sales. You want to have a good history that proves you have mastered your current level of sales. How long you need to prove steady sales will vary by industry and individual business owner. I personally like to see 6 months of steady numbers. You simply cannot run a big operation as a one man show. If you have not yet structured and built your team, do it first, work the kinks out and then start to expand! As your business grows, your systems have to grow with you. You don’t need to have 100% systemization before you start to expand. But you do need to have the basic systems in place. You need to have the right software and your team needs to be comfortable building systems. Finally, expansion is expensive! Make sure you know the business numbers, and have the money to make this transition. You would not want to find yourself running out of money before a project is done. Or increasing sales, but realizing that your profits are going down because it was just too expensive to grow! We have all seen great businesses go under because they tried to expand before they were financially prepared. Protect your business from unnecessary stress by getting it ready to grow!
Stop waiting for luck to kick in and build your empire. Instead build a business that will withstand the test of time by following these simple success formulas!