Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: If you want more time, money, freedom, and have a business that's not reliant on you, then you're in the right place. Each week, Mark Creedon, along with some of the very best business minds in the world, will take you through simple, practical steps you can take to create the business you always wanted. From his own practical experience, Mark will show you how to work less, make more, and get the business you always wanted, the one that you deserve.
Now, here's your host, one of Australia's most sought after business coaches, Mark Creedon.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Mark Creedon, and welcome to the latest edition of the Mastermind for Business podcast. In this podcast, what we want to do is to help you to get freedom from your business, to break the shackles. So if you are in your own small business, if you're in a professional practice and you'd really love to know how you can get some freedom so that the business doesn't rely so much on you, congratulations. You are in the right place. And today we've got a whole bunch of things lined up that we're going to talk about that are going to help you to achieve. Just, that's one of the big things that I see for most entrepreneurs. And by the way, today we're flying solo because we don't have any nick today. Unfortunately, one of the big mistakes that I see happening for most entrepreneurs running their own business is that everything falls on them and there's just so much to do. So, as I often say, at any given time, there's probably a hundred things that you could be doing in your business. But in fact, there's only a few things you should be doing. In today's episode, I'm going to show you how you work out exactly what those few things are. So if you're listening to this right now and you're going, man, I've just got so much on, so much on. And we're recording this as we lead into the Christmas break. And it's a time when there's massive amounts of overwhelm. So if you're listening and you're thinking, I've got so much on, and I'd really like to know how I can work out just what the hell it is I need to do next. Congratulations. You are 100% in the right place because that's what we're going to work through right now. I read this great book by the guys who set up base camp and they talk about how you can look at things differently, about what is the priority that you should be working on in your business any given time. And I came up with this idea that came out of it. I'm just looking for the name of the book. Shape up, shape up. Shape up with the name of the book. See what happens when Nick's not here. So I read this book, Shape up, and the focus was very much about what do you do next? And I took some really good ideas away from it. And in our mastermind program, we use this very cool little tool that I got out of the book called A Capture Card. The concept of the capture card is to help you to identify what are the things that. What is the right next thing. Now, one of the issues that we often have when you're running your own business is there's a whole bunch of competing interests.
Whether it's around revenue, whether it's around your staff, whether it's around your own big, hairy, audacious goals, things that you want to achieve in your business. There's a whole bunch of conflicting constraints and demands on your time.
So what we have to work out is what is the next thing? And I think that that comes down to a three step process.
The first step is to look at what are the areas of the business that needs the most attention. The second step is to work out what is the benefit of doing a particular thing within that area. And the third step is to look at how long it's going to take you to implement it. We're going to go through that right now. Let's look at what are the areas of your business.
I think there's six. I think there's six main areas that you need to look at in your business. And if you want to get freedom from your business, the best thing that you can do, ultimately, is to get other people responsible for each of these six areas. Now, it may be that you can get one person to be responsible for all six, or two people to be responsible for three each. But the main thing is to take the main responsibility for each of these areas away from you. Let's have a quick run through them. I think the six areas are this. There's lead generation. In other words, how do you actually get business in then? Once you get. Or prospects in is probably a better way of putting it. But once you get prospects in, how do you nurture them? How do you look after them? How do you get them to the point where you actually have a sales conversation with them? And then step three is how do you convert them?
Step four, now you've converted them, you sold them, how do you deliver your service or product to them. Step number five is how do you get them to either rebuy from you or return to you or refer.
And then finally, there's what we call the BS, which is the backstage. The backstage area. All of the admin things that need to happen that actually keep the business really functioning and working along really nicely. Right? So six steps. Lead, gen, nurture, conversion, delivery, refer, return, resell, and then the backstage.
So one of the exercises that I always do with our mastermind clients is I set up each of those areas, and I ask them to give themselves a grading in each of those areas. And the grading is really simple. It's a four step grading, it's a four step grading, and it's really bad.
Okay, good or great. Okay, so bad. Okay, good or great. And so just imagine that it's a graph, if you like, and you're plotting yourself in relation to each of those six areas of the business. Well, where am I at? How am I tracking with those?
So, lead generation, are you bad? Are you okay? Are you good? Are you great? Nurturing your clients. Again, the same categories, converting. What are your sales conversions actually like? If you're not doing the sales, and for a lot of people that join us in mastermind, initially, they're kind of doing, even if they've got a decent team, if they're not actually having the sales Conversations, they're managing the people that are. So break up each of those areas. Your delivery, what have you got in place to get your clients to come back to buy from you again or to refer their friends, family, other businesses to you? And then what about all of the admin things that go into the background? How do you rate on each of those? And that's a really good starting point, because what often happens is, I remember I had a conversation with a client probably about a year ago or more, and at the time, he said to me, I really need another salesperson. Right? I need another salesperson in my business. Because he felt that it was the conversion side of the business that was letting things down. When we went through this exercise, we realized, and we looked at the numbers, and we realized he was actually somewhere between good and great on conversion.
What was letting the business down was, in fact, the delivery of the service and product. So it was a little bit like filling a leaky bucket. Is this sounding a bit familiar to you? So what was happening is he was doing great work on lead generation, nurturing the prospects along, having really good sales conversations with them, and then getting them across the line his sales team were. But then when there was this gap, there was this gap between the time when the client said, yes, please, I'll take that product or service. And when the delivery mode actually started. And then during the delivery mode, the promises that were being made by the salespeople weren't really being matched by the delivery people. Right? So we were over promising and under delivering, as opposed to the other way around. So by pulling it apart and actually grading, it's such a simple process to simply grade those six areas based on those four categories. Remember, the categories are really simple. They're either bad, okay, good or great.
And so by using those gradings, he could see that, in fact, whilst he thought that there was an issue with the business, because when people were being sold, they were then dropping off. So his first comment was, well, they're not being sold well enough, right. They're not sticking. But in fact, they were being sold well enough. They were being sold with great expectations. It's just that the expectations then weren't being delivered upon.
By going through that exercise, we could see that the real issue lay in the delivery. So now we've taken, rather than going and hiring a new sales manager, we went and hired a new delivery manager instead.
Because now you could see that's where the real issue was in the business. So that's the first step, or the second step, if you like. It's the first step. Start again, Mark. It's the first step in the three step process. So, number one, identify those six areas in your business. Number two, or first in the three step process. Once you've identified those six areas, give yourself a grading on them. In each of those areas, are you bad, are you okay, are you good or are you great? And I think once you've done that, you will get a clear picture. Imagine if you were to have a piece of paper and on the left hand side, you had bad, okay, good and great from the bottom up. So at the bottom was bad, then was okay, then was good, and at the top was great. And then that's on the vertical axis. On the horizontal axis was each of these lead, gen, nurture, conversion, delivery, refer, return, resell, and backstage. So that's on the horizontal axis. You would see if you drew a thick line between okay and good. And you plotted each of those six areas on that grading, you'll see what falls below the line. In other words, what we're talking about here is, what are the areas in the business where you're either okay or bad? And once you identify those. Now you've got the start of a process of what it is that you work on next.
So we start, imagine it's like a funnel. We start at the top, and the top is by identifying the area of the business. The mistake that people often make is they jump straight into, well, what are the things that I need to work on? And they've got this big to do list, right, this massive to do list, and they pull this to do list out, and they just start randomly working from it or trying to work out what's the easy thing. They might look for a quick win. And we'll come back to that in a second.
What I want you to do is I want you to think instead about what's the area of the business that most needs your attention right now. And remember, the idea of everything we're doing here, what we talk about in our mastermind program, what we talk about in this mastermind for Business podcast, is what are the things that you need to do in order to break the shackles of the business?
Because most people start a business so that they can have freedom.
They want to be able to work according to their own choice. They want to be able to have the freedom to go and visit the kids at their school and see the school concerts or spend time with the family. They want to be able to take holidays. They want to have that freedom. And invariably, what happens is they become so enslaved to their business that all the reasons that they started the business for in the first place just kind of disappear and fly out the window.
So what we're doing here is work out. How do you get that freedom back? And how you get that freedom back is by making sure that you're working on the right things, and then that you are delegating and moving those right things off to the right people.
Now, by the way, don't stress if you're listening to this right now and going, but, Mark, I don't really have much of a team. It's great. You say you can delegate. You've got all these people working for you. That was never, always the case.
So when we first started doing this, it wasn't anybody working for me. It was just me. But what I learned to do is what are the things that I could outsource? What are the things that I could contract out, whether it's onshore, offshore, whatever it might be. How did I scale my time as opposed to scaling my business? Because if I scale my tiMe, our business scales, how did I scale my time? It was by working out what is the right things to be working on? And then the next stage is to get the right people working on those right things. So it's not just me.
All right, quick recap. Where are we at? We've worked out what are the six areas the business need to work on. The next thing we've done is step one in the three step process, and that is we look at now we know which of those six areas falls below the line. In other words, what are the areas that are either bad or just okay.
Step number two is to look at the area that you've chosen that's fallen below the line. By the way, don't be too concerned if they all fall below the line, because if they do, I'm going to help you with that as well. So in each of those cases, in each of those areas, there are things that you should be doing or could be doing.
So I want you to grab your to do list, your brain dump, whatever it might be. I want you to grab it and I want you to go through it. And instead of going through and traffic lighting, we've spoken about that in previous podcasts. Instead of going through and traffic lighting, instead of going through and working out what's the easiest or the quick win or what can I get rid of? What I want you to do is work out which of the tasks that are on that list fit into the area of the business that falls below the line. Right. So in other words, now you're assigning the tasks to an area. You're assigning the tasks to a division, whether it's lead generation, nurture, conversion, delivery, et cetera. So we're taking our business, we're breaking it up into six areas of focus. We're then taking the tasks that we know that we'd like to be working on, our ideas, our brainstorms, the things that we've captured, and we're now assigning each of those ideas to a particular area.
That's step number two.
Step number three is to ask yourself this question.
If I am to work on this particular task, what is the benefit that's going to come from that? So in other words, how much Money is it going to make me? Is it going to give me more time, more freedom? Is it going to get me more clients? Is it going to get me a higher profit margin? Is it going to make my team more motivated and more engaged, stickier? What's the benefit? It doesn't have to be a monetary benefit, right? It doesn't have to be a financial benefit.
One of the things that we talk about in mastermind all the time is that if you can have your business in the position where in six months time or twelve months time, you're making the same amount of money, but you're only working half the time, how good would that be? I mean, in an ideal world, you'd be making even more money.
But for most of the clients we work with, one of the first things they say to me is, Mark, if you can help me to get my time back and I don't lose money, in other words, I'm making the same amount of money. I'd be absolutely delighted. Same amount of money in half the time. What a deal. Right? So you have to look at what is the amount of money that you're going to make from implementing this concept or this idea, or what is the other benefit? And it's great to actually document it.
Now, the next step then is how long is this going to take me to implement? In other words, is it something I can do in a day, a week, a month or a quarter? Is it something I can do in a day, a week, a month or a quarter?
What have we done?
We've looked at our business in six areas of focus.
We've then worked out which of the areas of focus do we most need to work on. In other words, which of those areas do we sit in? Bad or. Okay, we've then taken all the ideas that we've got and we've allocated them according to those six areas of focus.
We've identified what the benefit of each of those ideas are, or is what the benefit is of each of those ideas. And then finally, how long is it going to take us to implement it? So now we've got a whole bunch of data, right? So in terms of data, we've got areas of focus. We've got a whole bunch of ideas allocated to those areas. We know what the benefits of each of those ideas are, and we know how long each of those ideas is going to take. The next thing you need to do is you map all that out. And by the way, there's some really cool worksheets that you can use for that. There's the capture cards that you can use for that. If you'd like that sort of information, just drop me a line mark at Metropole, Metropole.com au Market Metropole and say, put podcast and say, I'd love to see a capture card. And we'll make sure that we fix you up with those worksheets.
Once you have all of that data together.
The final step in this process is so simple.
What you're then looking to do is imagine that you're looking for the big win, the easy win. So again, imagine that we've got this Matrix and on the horizontal line we've got easy from hard on the left to super easy on the right.
And on the vertical line at the bottom we've got difficult, sorry, we've got slow and at the top we've got quick. And what we're really looking for is something up in the top right hand quadrant. Right. We're looking for something that is quick to implement, that has the highest impact, because one of the mistakes, again, that I see people making is they go through this process and they come up with all these different ideas and they've allocated the idea and then they go for the idea. That's going to either net the highest result. Right, the biggest impact. But what they haven't looked at is the other side of the equation, which is that it's a really complex or difficult task to implement. And so what happens then is they kind of lose momentum for it. So you come up with an idea and you go, if I can put this idea in place, this is around the way I deliver my product. If I can put this in place and I get somebody else to do it for me, this is going to be amazing. It's going to free me up two days a week. I'm actually going to be able to see the kids. I'm not going to hang in a lamb chop around my neck so the dog doesn't bite me when I get home. This is going been a fantastic thing, but they forget to look at how complex it is to implement. And so here they are, three months in, they're still trying to make these changes happen and they just lose momentum, they lose interest and the whole thing falls into a massive heap.
The way you get momentum in this is to look for something that's going to have a reasonably high impact, but that you can implement quite quickly. So now we're looking at with that data, what's something that's going to bring about a great result and something that we can kind of get across the line in a day or a week, not a month, not a quarter, certainly not any longer. What's something that we can implement in the next seven days that's going to have a reasonable impact? Now, if you look at the other issue around that will take that and put it the other way around. The other thing I see people do is going, I can get that done really, really quickly. I know that I can get this done in a day, but what they forget is it's super low impact. It has really no great impact on the business, on their team, on them, on their time. And so, sure, they might spend a day putting it together, but you know what? The next day, they're in exactly the same position. I mean, that may have changed around some of the processes, but they're not making any more money, they're not getting any more time. They're not getting to go home any earlier, they're not taking days off, they're not spending holidays. That's not happening.
And that's what I really want for you. I really want for you and your business that you have the business. We talk about having the business of your dreams and photos of people lying back on Lamborghinis and all that sort of bullshit. That's not what this is about. This is about having the business of your dreams that enables you to do what you want to do and enables you to spend the time with the people who matter most in your life. Because time is one thing you can't get back. You can lose money and you can make it back. You can lose friends and you can make new friends, or you can repair relationships, but you cannot get time back.
Once it is gone, it is gone. And if we work on the basis that there's probably only one shot at this thing we call life, then I think we want to make sure that we look after time as best we can.
And so focusing on something that is super quick to achieve might seem expedient because it's not taking up a lot of your time. But if it's not having a high impact on you, on your freedom, on your lifestyle, then I question whether it's the right thing to be doing next. And remember, this is all about what is the right next thing.
Most people, when they're first joining our mastermind program, they come to me and they go, Mark, I've got all these ideas, I've got 100 different ideas. I just don't know what to do next.
And they get themselves so overwhelmed that because they don't know what to do next, often they just don't do anything.
And that's not we want, not what we want for you. So the purpose of this episode was to talk to you about how do you work out what is the right next thing. And I think it's a really simple process. Understand the six areas that you need to function in your business.
Take the tasks that you have and allocate them to those areas and determine which of those areas are a priority. Right. So it's just that what are the areas of the business that I'm just either bad or okay at? That's the area you need to focus on. That's you need to push them up above that horizontal line.
Take all the various tasks you've allocated them to an area that you're bad or just okay at. Pick one of those tasks and ask yourself the question, what's the benefit of it? What money is it going to make me? What time is it going to give me? Second question is, how long is it going to take me? And then you can then plot that out by going, okay, the very right. Next thing for me to do is something that's going to have significant impact. So that's where I look at what's the benefit? Something that's going to have. Something that's going to have significant impact that I can do in the shortest possible time. It may not be the shortest possible task, so you might find something that's going to have great impact, but it might take you 30 days to do it. But you're better off doing that than a whole bunch of things that are only going to take you a day or a week that have low impact.
There you go. A nice simple process to be able to understand what is the right next thing in your business. It's probably the biggest question that I get asked most often is, Mark, can you help me to wade through all this quagmire of things that I have to do? And in coming episodes, we'll talk to you a little bit more about the concept of your to do list, a not to do list and all those sorts of things. Little tools that you can use so you get more value, the highest and best value out of your time. As we said, remember, time is something you just can't get back. These are the sort of things that we talk with our mastermind members about all the time. If you'd like to have a chat about that. Metropolemastermind.com Au hey, if you like what you've heard in today's podcast, please help us to get this information out to more people like the podcast, share the podcast, comment on it, give us a review, and go to our socials. If there's a topic that you would like to hear more about, let us know. On Facebook, on YouTube, on Instagram, tell us something that you'd like to know about how to get back in control of your business. I'm Mark Creedon. Looking forward to chatting in the next episode of the Mastermind for Business Podcast. In the meantime, please make sure you spend time with those who matter most.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us on the Mastermind for Business podcast. If you're ready to have a business that you're not a slave to, check out Metropolemastermind.com Au or have a chat with Mark and the team at all the W's. See what's possible today.
