Is your business serving you, or are you working for it?
Running a business can be complex and exhausting task.
This might sound negative, but a lot of hard work and personal effort are required to achieve success. When projects reach their destined conclusion and targets are exceeded, it feels like all your investments of time, energy and money have been worthwhile. However, there will be periods where this isn’t necessarily the case.
Frustration isn’t exclusive to failure; it’s most common when you feel things aren’t moving quite as fast, or are heading in a slightly unwanted direction. This can appear like a necessary step from A to B, but this doesn’t have to be the case.
As a coach I want my client to feel enthused at all times and confident that they’re making progress to where they want to be. If you recognise some of the situations and emotions in this article, I have a solution for you…
A limiting mindset – Bigger
Culturally growth is accepted as positive process. Children grow to be strong, healthy adults and personal growth represents the development of deeper emotions and empathy. Consequently, growth is the target everyone is aiming for, but over-commitment to this cause can be misguided.
From a business perspective, growing your organisation means adding further complexity: employing more people, diversifying your activities, increasing your turnover. These results aren’t inherently negative, but becoming fixated on them can be. I have encountered many business leaders who just want their company to get bigger. This can be a false reward.
Unless your growth is aligned with your true vision, mission and values, it will bring more frustration than fulfilment. The more meetings you attend and reports you read might tell you that your numerical goals are being hit, but the increasing amendments you need to make and the bumps in the road you encounter will begin to wear you down.
You will start to realise that something isn’t quite right.
A missing element – Embrace the plateau
The approach to growth I would advocate is taking your time to do it properly. By this I mean, ensuring that your people and processes are ready for the further intricacies and demand this will produce. Fail to prepare the ground first and you will find that your new operations will become unwieldy.
Constant, unremitting growth is something very few businesses can achieve (if any). Utilising quieter periods to instil the foundations for the next steps is essential if you want to remain consistent to your defining ethos. Rushed actions tend to be more ill-conceived than diligent consideration.
I liken this preparation stage to the climbing a mountain. Dash to the top and you will experience more perils and tire yourself out dangerously. Use the plateaus to rest, enjoy the view and decide on the best path ahead. For my clients, the programmes and coaching I provide represents them embracing the plateau. They’re taking time to think ahead and consider new perspective.
Far better to patiently reach your ultimate goal, than blindly hurry towards it and find yourself somewhere completely different.
A different perspective – Better before bigger
I used to be a frustrated business owner, obsessed by growth, but have realised that there are three guiding principles that could have helped me:
Alignment – Put your purpose front and centre so that you stay (or become) a more focused company, with all stakeholders working collaboratively.
Transparency – Keep the curtain up, so all stakeholders can understand and contribute to creating a better version of the current business.
Vulnerability - Spend enough time outside your current personal and organisational comfort zone so that you continually challenge the status quo.
Based on my experience as a business owner and now as a coach, I know that these three principles are an integral part of creating your ideal business. I have used them to design a programme specifically for ambitious leaders who want to create an autonomous company that can deliver on their aspirations.
This is the overview of the programme…
The programme runs through 3 phases:
1. Reframe – Where get curios around the changes you could make and the revised role you could create for yourself. This is you and me working 1-to-1.
2. Rethink – Where we work with your leadership team via a series of facilitated workshops to generate clarity and alignment on the changes required to run a future fit business.
3. Refocus – A tailored programme to transform your current organisation into an autonomous company, operated via confident and capable leadership team.
If you think the better before bigger approach might work for your company, please get in touch with me. I will be happy to talk through how this process works practically and we can decide whether this programme might be right for you.
Take action now. Running the business you have always wanted is obtainable, but only if you take that first step…