What can I do to improve my business – Part II

In my last blog, I put forward a few different pointers for you to think about for your business.

To recap, ask yourself the following:

1. How many people did you ask for business this week?
2. What new thing are you going to learn this month?
3. Which economy are you playing in?

A number of people have asked me recently, what do I do to stop worrying about things if the business isn’t going well.

Before I answer that I need to cover something exceptionally important. What you focus on expands. That is, if you’re worrying about not having enough business, then that’s all you’re going to see and that’s all that will show up. Your mind is like a Google search engine. What you search for, is what you get. Therefore if you’re worrying a lot about the business not going well – how’s that working out for you? Will it make any difference? When I was growing up, there was a saying in our house that 99% of worry is unproductive. This is so true.

Now that’s not to say that I don’t worry – I do. I’m an accountant at the end of the day, so we’re trained to be worriers! However you have to be very conscious of what you’re focusing on. Would you not agree it’s better to think about what opportunities you can take, rather than how bad things are?

So what do I do? – when I catch myself worrying about something, I make a decision and I take action. This can be a decision about what to do next to move a project along or making a decision about something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. What I’ve found in business is that by not making a decision in business, you miss opportunities and you move at a much slower pace. That’s why I love working with small and medium-sized business owners; we can make a decision so quickly and we can implement it faster.

On top of that, I take action. This can be as simple as going for a walk, making a phone call or carrying out the action associated with the decision. In this way, your mind moves on to something else, and you therefore stop running the ‘worry’ programme you’ve been running all along.

Next, the key to get out of many situations where the business is declining is to expand. The natural reaction for a lot of people is to contract when a business isn’t doing well. That is they start to lay off people, cut expenditures, and close departments…WRONG!

I discussed this many times before and it’s the totally wrong strategy to take. While I agree costs should be reviewed in order to remove the waste; when a business appears to be in a decline, it should look at expanding.

If the mentality is to contract your business – what’s going to happen? It will contract completely. After you’ve cut the costs and closed departments what do you do then? You’ve spent years building all these up only to incur a huge amount more in closing them down – pointless don’t you think?

In 95% of the business turnarounds I’ve been involved in over the years, I’ve turned them around partly on the basis of removing waste, but mainly on the basis of expansion. When you’re focused on expanding your business, that’s when you see opportunities. Expansion can take many forms as it did with my turnarounds – new products, new services, new markets, joint ventures, more stores, takeovers, mergers, and taking on other areas of the supply chain under the one business…

But don’t take my word for it. Read the biography of any successful business person. Take Richard Branson for example – when he was hit with a huge tax bill, he decided not to close the business, he expanded. Warren Buffet – he’s not contracting at the moment, he’s expanding – he’s investing heavily in the railroad industry. Duncan Bannatyne – as soon as he opened one nursing home, he opened another one – using all the methods he could to fund it.

There are so many ways of getting a business out of the doldrums. However human nature is to go back to the cave mentality and defend our own patch and beat off anybody that approaches us. This is repeated so often not only in business but in politics as well. When a sense of collaboration is adopted, amazing things begin to happen.

To recap:

1. How many people did you ask for business this week?

2. What new thing are you going to learn this month?

3. Which economy are you playing in?

4. Make a decision

5. Take action

6. Expand