I’ve talked to hundreds of companies this year. Most of them are making the same 9 mistakes which is holding their company back from growing. Or, even if they do start growing – the company isn’t resilient and could face a big setback.

Are you making any of these 9 big mistakes?

  1. Staff independence: the business dependent is on one or more key employees. If these people leave, and you are in a world of hurt. Think carefully about whether you have any key employee risk, and if so put in place a plan for what happens if they’re sick or quit.
  2. Employee Reviews: only doing annual reviews that go through the motions … vs involving the team in creating goals and plans (so you don’t have to do everything for the company to grow). A key to unlocking motivation is to not tell your team how to get things done, it’s to tell them where you want to go, and make them responsible for coming up with the plans to get there. Those plans become the discussion points for their reviews. They’ll be more bought in because it’s their plan – and more accountable to results.
  3. Marketing isn’t a process: treating marketing as a series of events or campaigns rather than creating a conveyor belt of prospects. If you treat marketing as a series of one-off activities, you’ll fail. Marketing is an ongoing process. Customers are the lifeblood of a business, and marketing is what gets those customers. Don’t treat it as an expense – treat it as a critical, ongoing process in your business. Because it is.
  4. Cost of Buying Customers: not realizing that the key to growth is being able to pay more for a customer than the competition. You must know the cost to acquire a customer, and the value of that customer, in every acquisition channel you use. If you don’t know that, you’re just praying for new business to come in the door. Unleash your inner scientist and collect the data – what’s working, and what isn’t? How can you find out how much customers costs, so you can buy more of them?
  5. Contracts with Suppliers: not having contracts with prices and supply obligations. What happens if key suppliers go away and you can’t replace them quickly? For many businesses, it would be a doomsday scenario. The only way to mitigate this is to plan in advance. Now is the time.
  6. No Referral Program: getting referrals without asking is nice and all. But if you aren’t treating referral marketing as its own process, you aren’t even scratching the surface of potential business. Many businesses can increase revenues 20% or more by just focusing on referrals.
  7. Cash Cycle: if you aren’t looking at ways to improve cash efficiency, you’re choking your own growth. You’ll end up in a cash crunch in your business.
  8. Benchmarking: too many companies have no idea how they are performing relative to competitors and industry norms. Good luck getting acquired or getting loans if you don’t even know what the market is.
  9. Owner Locked In: The worst offender of them all – owner is necessary to run the business. As long as this is true, your business isn’t a machine that generates you wealth. It’s a job.

All of the above are solvable. Quickly. With processes that you don’t have to develop (and test, and fail at)

You have two choices:
A) Take systems that others have done and install it in your business, or
B) Spend the next several years trying to re-invent the wheel and paying the “I didn’t know” tax.

Your choice.

Discover a weekly list of short, actionable steps to get out of operational deadlock, build a self-managing team, grow strategically, and increase company value in the Boardroom Bulletin™.

Categories: Crash Course