Perhaps you’ve been in business for a few years now and your business is doing quite well. Work is consistently coming in and you’re personally making some pretty good money out of this business. Does this sound familiar?
From the outside, it’s all looking pretty good.
But here’s the kicker.
You’re putting in the long hours, working hard, and yet, your family is missing out on the best of you. You know deep down things could be a lot better, but you don’t know where to start and there’s so many things that need to be done.
Running our own business, as well as working with hundreds of business owners over the past 18+ years, has given us a unique insight into what it takes to achieve a business that affords you your freedom, rather than robs it from you.
In one word – it’s FOCUS.
As the owner, your only job (yes, we literally mean that) is to focus on what is most important for achieving your business goals (Hint: It’s rarely what’s most urgent).
So, what should we direct our focus on?
To maintain our inspiration at Kaibizzen, we focus on the activity that drives the results of our business. Let’s use the analogy of sport to explain this further.
In most games of sport, two teams are at play against each other. At the end of the game there’s a final score. That score cannot be changed once the final whistle is blown. During the game however, the coaching team and statisticians are tracking the aspects of the game which they know impact the final score. For example, in Rugby League, they track how many line breaks, how many penalties given, how many tackles missed, etc. In the post-match interview, the coaches never discuss the final score. They only talk about how well or poorly their team did in these ‘impacting factors’.
Business and sport have many so many similarities.
The ‘final score’ of business is revenue, profit, and cash in the bank. Reading our financial statements at the end of the month is crucial to business. However, we are unable to go back and change them. What those numbers tell us is the RESULT of what we have or have not been doing over the month.
The coach of a sporting team will use the information they gathered about these ‘impact scores’ in next week’s coaching. For example, if tackling was poor, you can be guaranteed that’s where the focus will be.
In business, we too must know our impactor scores and put our focus on the activity that will improve them.
What are some of those impactor scores? If we want to improve the final score of revenue in our business, the activity we need to be focussing on is:
1. Where are the leads coming from, how many leads my sales team needs to generate, and how can we improve that?
2. The conversion rate at EVERY step of the sales process and how we can improve them
3. The average $ sale and how we can improve it
4. The repeat business/client retention numbers and how we can improve them
5. How much it costs the business to produce our product and service and how we can improve it
Like the sporting team, if you put your energy and focus in these areas, your results WILL change, and you WILL achieve what is most important to you and your marketplace. The result for you is less stress and more time to do what you want. You’re inspired to drive for more.
Here’s the challenge though, most people in business find this work tedious and therefore they don’t do it well.
In our experience as business coaches, it is the MOST IMPORTANT thing to focus on.
A-grade sporting teams focus on them.
A-grade businesses focus on them too.
When we focus our efforts and energies only on the things that are important to getting the results we want from our business, we have all the energy we could ever want for the other areas of our life.
Overall, you will be a happier person.
If you’d like to know more about how to develop a more efficient plan that is different to how you’ve always done it, contact us at Kaibizzen. We’d love to help you finally get the business and the life you deserve.
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