6 reasons why business is like golf

golfTalking to a client today about how tiring her month had been with a roller coaster of ups and downs and good and bad, I found myself talking to her about my golf recently and how I was enjoying the ups and downs of it all.  It occurred to me that business and golf are similar in many ways. Here are just six reasons why owning your own business is like playing golf:

1.  You have to be passionate about it and it takes up a lot of your time.

2.  You can just get started anytime you like with no professional help, but you quickly discover that a bit of guidance is a really good idea

3. You won’t get any better at it if you don’t keep playing the game – practice, practice, practice!

4. One day everything will be brilliant and you’ll know exactly why you love it

5.  The next day it will all turn to s**t and you’ll want to give it up forever

6.  You can aim for the hole in one, but small consistent steps can win the game

And here’s one major difference:

With golf you need little balls. With business you need….

Enjoy the game!

laura-signature

From the desk of Liber8me. Business mentors and author of Liber8 your Business: The revolutionary business planning technique that will set every small business owner free

Some frightening statistics about small business…

lemonade standI’m about to share some frightening statistics taken from 2013 census :
  • Out of 469,118 businesses, 439,920 had less than 10 employees
  • That’s 94%! 
  • 74% of these are deemed uninterested in or unsuitable for expansion
  • 55% self employed people are age 40 – 59
  • Average wage small business owners pay themselves is $40,000
  • What does this picture say to you?  To me is says we have an economy largely made up of small business owners, who are not paying themselves enough and have no plan for growth.  Many of these will hit retirement in the next 10 years, having worked hard in their business their entire life, and will not be able to sell it (no one will buy a business which is unsuitable for expansion).  This is a bleak picture for the business owner and for the economy.  I think it’s time things changed.
  • The two statistics I’d like to see change first are the % of business owners deemed uninterested or unsuitable for expansion, and the average small business owner wage being $40k.  Both can be changed with education and inspiration.  Firstly, there needs to be a movement to change attitudes.  From a small business being more like a low paying job, to a belief that your business is an asset – there to feed you long term wealth.  With some careful planning, a lot of drive and some expert guidance – many businesses can be re-engineered to enable growth.  But it does take a willing owner.  There needs to be a mind shift.
  • Secondly, there needs to be inspirational education and a support network that gives business owners practical steps to follow once they decide they are willing to go for it.My book Liber8 your Business, together with it’s companion workbook, have been designed more as an at home small business course than a book.  The goal is to change attitudes and provide tools to enable change.  I’d now like to see facilitated study groups all over the country, to help take the lessons out of the pages in and into practice in small businesses everywhere.
  • If you’d like to be part of this movement in any way, as a participant, as a facilitator or supporter contact me laura@liber8me.com

Have you created a business or a job? 5 tips for turning your small business into a big asset

looking for a jobMy mantra for small business owners is simple:  Don’t create a job, build yourself an asset.  When you own a business you have the opportunity right there in your hands to build something that can create financial security for you in the future.  You are going to work hard anyway, why waste this valuable time just paying yourself to do a job when you could be setting yourself up forever?

If you are serious (as I believe you should be) about building a saleable business, here are 5 success factors you can be thinking about right now:

1.  Set your end goal. Decide how much you want to sell it for and by when, and work backwards. In my book Liber8 your Business, I show a simple formula for working out your potential end value, with a link to the online calculator.

2. Name your buyer. It’s important to have a good idea who might want to buy your business in your early planning. Imagine spending ten years building a business you intend to sell only to realize you have created something nobody wants to buy. If you build a business with a buyer in mind, you have a much better chance of building something they really want.

A potential buyer could be a larger player in your industry looking to grow through acquisition. This growth might be regional – they want a presence in your city or town and it’s easier to buy you than start from scratch. It might be strategic – you have a smart product or service they could add to their existing infrastructure to create additional revenue streams. An example of this might be a large accounting firm buying a small book-keeping firm to add value to their client base. Your service or product could become a ‘nuisance’ to a competitor (read more on a strategy called ‘kicking sand in the gorilla’s face’ in my book, Liber8 your Business) and they buy your company to prevent it competing or to regain lost revenues. It could be a management buy-out, when senior employees raise the funds to buy you out. It could be a competitor of a similar size wanting to grow and willing to invest to gain rapid growth through acquisition. I’ve sold businesses to two types of buyer. A multinational bought my advertising agency and a local competitor bought my pet care company. My father’s photocopier business sold to his senior management team. A good friend has built three recruitment agencies. The first sold to one of the original partners, who bought out the other partners. The second sold to a multinational looking for regional representation in her city. The third is in its early days of growth and I’ll watch with interest who buys it (I have no doubt it will sell because I know the founders expect this and will build with this in mind). Another type of buyer could be a private equity group or even an individual who sees great potential in what you’ve built.

So who might want to buy your business? What are you building that could add huge value to someone’s offering? Now is the time to start thinking about these things.

3. Remove the dependence on you. To make your business attractive to your future buyer, it cannot be dependent on you. That’s a key message I want you to learn from this article:

No one will outright buy a business that’s dependent on its owner.

If the buyer takes you out of the picture and no business remains, they will either insist you stay in the business or they will walk away. So whatever your strategy is, whatever your end goal, whatever your vision for the future … it needs to not have you in it. I did that at my agency by making sure the clients loved the business but weren’t dependent on me. In the last few years, I hired two senior guys and put them in charge of our biggest clients, so my buyer could see the clients were not reliant on me.

4. Start building a team as soon as you can. I couldn’t afford to bring in those big guns until later in my business growth. I started by hiring people I could afford, with a couple of youngsters straight from college. I trained them to do things exactly the way I wanted. I call it ‘training your clones’ – teaching people to follow your example and do things your way. I kept building my team that way until we could afford to hire more senior people. And then we had to make sure we had a really strong culture to manage senior people.

5. Secure future earnings. Getting all our key clients on fixed-term contracts was another critical strategy that worked. They all had two or three year contracts so when the buyer looked at my business they saw a high level of spend committed for the next three years. This was an important lesson I learned from my businessman father. Remember I told you about his photocopier business and how he sold it and retired soon after his fiftieth birthday? One of the best secrets to success he shared with me was, ‘you’ve got to have a back end.’ To explain, he gave the example of his own business. While the sale or lease of each copier was worth a lot of money (especially in the 1970s when these huge machines were a relatively new addition to business productivity) the real value came from the additional contract that went with each machine. This locked the customer into buying all their ink, toner and paper for the life of the machine, as well as regular paid servicing – which meant that, for every machine sold, my father had income guaranteed for the next 10 years, enabling him to predict with complete accuracy his future income. You can see why this made by father’s business attractive for a buyer. They could see a guaranteed return on their investment. It made sense to me when I started my own business, and I hope it does to you too. It will get you a higher price when you come to sell!

   A business with committed future revenue that is not dependent on its owner to deliver that revenue is a business worth investing in.

You’ll find these 5 factors, and a whole lot of other ideas, tips, stories and exercises about creating freedom from business in my book – Liber8 your Business: The revolutionary business planning technique that will set every small business owner free.

What’s the best weapon for world domination in business? A brilliantly simple tip…

DictaphoneCylinderGuest story with Mike Brunel

How did we take a small Wellington based radio sales consultancy business and turn it into a global success story servicing 400 worldwide markets and selling to 320,000 people?  It all started with a Dictaphone. In the early days we worked out that we could show radio media companies how to move advertisers from a small two week campaign into a 52 week commitment.  I watched my business partner in action and realised that he always did the same thing.  He said the same words, made the same offers and got the same results.  I spent a week watching him, recording him and taking notes.  I created a sales system around what we did, with manuals clearly outlining every single word and action taken.  We then packaged up the system and began selling it to other media companies… all around the world.  In effect we turned a commodity into a system.  Now my business partners and I live in Wellington, our CEO is in Atlanta and we have offices in four different countries… all doing things exactly the way we would.

And so my tip for business owners who want to decrease reliance on you and create a leveraged business is to take time to document exactly what you do.  Use the microphone app on your iphone/android and record yourself as you go about your day… every single little thing that you do and say. Then get it transcribed and turn it into a manual… paper or computer based, whatever works for you.  It may seem laborious – and it is – but this is ultimately what will set you free.  Turn what you do well into a system.  Then train others to use it.

Mike Brunel is co-owner of NRS Media, currently working with over 400 major television, radio, and newspaper companies in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe, the United States, South America, Canada, South Africa, the African continent, Australia, and Asia, NRS Media has offices in London, Atlanta, Toronto, and Sydney and employs over 175 staff. Mike is available for sales training and consultations, email mike.brunel@talkingmediasales.com

 

From the desk of Liber8me.  Small business mentors and publisher of Liber8 your Business:  The revolutionary business planning technique that will set every small business owner free

Are you brave enough to have a powerful brand? Find out here…

brandingAs anyone who has worked with me will tell you, I’m an avid fan of branding.  I look at a client’s brand and ask myself, does it tell me something exciting, original and impactful about their business?  Does it set the foundation for everything the business stands for?  Does it place them instantly a head and shoulders above the competition?

Often times the answer is no and I recommend that they engage a brand specialist to help them.  One of these specialists, Steve Bailey features in my latest book The Liber8 Disciplines.  Here’s an excerpt from the book about a conversation Steve and I had about branding and bravery:

“Over lunch recently, Steve asked me if I thought the readers of this book would have the courage to create a powerful brand.  I stopped and peered at him over the bowl of hot soup I was enjoying.  “Why do they need to be brave?”  I asked.  To which he replied, “Because if we succeed with creating the right brand for someone, they will get noticed… a great brand doesn’t let you hide away and be safe”.

Steve gave me an example of a small business client he had worked with recently.  They came to him wanting a new brand, something that would build on their existing business but take it to a whole new level of excitement and attraction.  He and his team came up with a new name and brand approach that was so perfect for them, when he told me I laughed out loud. “That’s great!” I cried.  From the name alone I knew exactly what this business did and I could see their growth plan ahead of them in an instant.  I could see a chain of stores nationally or globally; or a franchise model.  The name was so catchy I already knew what the brand would look for and what they stood for.  “But they weren’t willing to change their name,” Steve told me, “which I understand – it can be too big a step for some, especially when they’ve been around for a while. So we did a new brand strategy working with their existing name.  We came up with a positioning platform and graphic device that shifted them into the next league almost as well”.  Steve described this new idea to me and once again I laughed out loud.  “But that’s great too!”  I cried.  “That really works. I can already see all the marketing ideas that go with that idea”.   Steve shook his head, “They were too scared to do this too” he said. “They’ve gone back to their original logo”.  I knew the company he was talking about and I knew that they really needed to change their image in order to become more relevant in the marketplace.  I felt sad for them. They had missed an opportunity to evolve and they didn’t even know it.  Now I understood what Steve meant about being brave.  Being willing to have a powerful brand might mean you have to let go of what you already have to a certain degree.  Or you might even have to change it completely.

I realised from listening to Steve that it is almost as important to understand what a brand isn’t as it is to know what a brand is.  Why would someone go to a brand strategy agency if they were not willing to change their brand?  I wondered if perhaps they just hadn’t really understood what there were really asking for”.

Do you know what it really means to have a great brand?  Do you have any idea how powerful it can really be for you?  Would you like to know more about branding?  I’ve dedicated an entire section of The Liber8 Disciplines to this topic – it’s that important. If you’d like a sneak preview of this chapter, before the book is published – just email me (laura@liber8me.com).

From the desk of Liber8me.  Business mentors and publisher of Liber8 your Business:  The revolutionary business planning technique that will set every small business owner free.