This Week@Work I challenge the idea that retiring from your business is somehow an accomplishment. I met with 2 older business owners, both feeling pressure to hand the reigns to the next generation.
But their desire to stay on is not greedy, it’s fuelled by passion for the business they created, and the meaning they draw from seeing it grow and succeed.
As a business owner, the reward is often in the journey not the destination.
Once your business has achieved a ceiling of performance, your time and attention determine your future success. Habits formed whilst building your company will fail its future growth and value.
This Week@Work, purpose is paramount. I visited a successful tea company who now proudly display their original tea sorter (a DIY modified cement mixer!) in their reception area to remind the business about their heritage. In tough times, go back to what you’ve been through and come through to motivate you to get through now, and focus on what needs to come next.
This Week@Work I’m taking us off the beaten track, and I’m not going alone. In a tough business environment we can’t tackle every single challenge alone. Surround yourself with trusted allies to get out of your head – it makes the climbs more manageable, interesting and rewarding.
This Week@Work I’ve had a number of conversations about business valuations, and how to design your business so that you can generate income AND deepen value for a premium valuation for exit. If you think, plan and act both in the present and future, you can have your cake and eat it.
If you’re struggling to reach your customers, to tell them about your product or service, you’re probably focussing on the wrong issue.
First, you need to understand precisely what problem you solve… for who… and how you do that, consistently… which will enable you to figure out how best to reach them so that your message lands.
This Week@Work my meetings with long-established business owners have left me concerned about their runway to an exit.
They have spent their careers focused on operational issues to generate income to sustain the business. Only now are they realising they should have been focused on growth and capital value to secure a profitable exit. W
hat are you spending your time on?.
When you sell, what is it that you sell? Is it a product, a service, an experience that solves a problem? Or is it a relationship? In a world where we are all selling and getting sold to constantly, building a relationship will help you stand out.
This Week@Work I’ve had the honour of learning about some of the UK’s best Scale Up businesses as I’m a judge for the Business Leader Scale UP awards.
It’s clear which businesses are getting it right and what they are doing right. Watch to see what makes a business genuinely scalable.
This Week@Work a discussion around acquisitions as a strategy to accelerate growth gave me an opportunity to explore this idea in more detail.
Several types of growth make up your business growth recipe if you intend to grow revenue, profit as well as capital value that can be realised.
Accelerated growth is one of these, and has a number of elements to it but an acquisition of a business may not be the path to achieving it.
