Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is the mastermind for business podcast. It's the podcast that is designed to help you, the small business owner or professionally in private practice, to build a business that is way less reliant on them. And in this episode, we're going to talk about the three essential c's, three essential c's that are going to help you to scale yourself out of your business.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: 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.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Mark Creedon. Welcome to the latest edition of the Mastermind for Business podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about the three c's that I think are essential in helping you to scale yourself out of your business. One of the things that everybody that we work with in our mastermind business accelerator program is looking to scale themselves out of their business. Now, the concept of that varies for different people. So for some people, it's about scaling the business so that they can exit it and sell it.
For some people, it's about scaling the business so that they can maintain an interest in it, but not see be so heavily involved in the day to day operations, but still essentially own it. And for others, it's about scaling it for the next generation, whether that's team members or family members, but scaling so the next generation can take it over.
And that's what we're going to look at right now. So whether you, whichever, whatever scaling means to you, right, whether it means scaling it to sell, whether it means scaling it to just give you a little bit more freedom, but you still want to be involved in a good part of the business or whether you're scaling for the next generation, whatever it is for you. What we want to do is work out.
How do you do that and what are some of the steps that you can take? And in this episode, I'm going to talk about three steps, not really steps, but more essential ways of thinking.
Three concepts. Oh, it's a fourth c concepts. Three concepts you need to get hit around. Let's get that underway right now.
All right, so we're talking about the three C's. The first one. The first c is the essential ingredient. And all that little music interlude was playing, I was thinking about, are they concepts, are they ideas, are they factors? But really what they are, are ingredients. There are three essential ingredients that are really going to help you to move your business along the scaling line. And the first one is communication.
It's really interesting because of the hundreds of businesses that I've worked with as a coach or that I've worked in management positions or owned, if somebody said to me, name me the most common issue that a business faces, I would say it is communication.
We can talk about cash flow, we can talk about team members, we can talk about difficult clients.
But in each of those things, it is cash flow is at the root. So if we were to adopt Simon Bowen's concept of the iceberg model, then we'd say that all of those things like cash flow and difficult clients and difficult staff members or problems with staff members, they're on the tip of the iceberg. What is under the water? What is the primary concept is actually communication. It's interesting. I remember I did a number of parenting courses years ago, and one of the things we spoke about in the iceberg theory there was the concept of primary and secondary emotions.
And, in fact, at our mastermind intensive on the Gold coast in March, where we get all of our mastermind members together and all come in from Australia and New Zealand, we get together and we talk about something that's really relevant in their business right now. And we were actually talking about how people treat the symptoms as opposed to the cause. So that's, again, an example of the iceberg. People treat the symptoms, not the cause, in a lot of problems that come up for them in their business. And I think I recorded, I think I know I recorded a podcast episode on that recently, and communication falls into a very similar, into a very similar vein. Right. It's the underlying issue that often doesn't get addressed.
And so my challenge to you is this, if you were to think about right now, to stop and think about what are the issues? What are the top two or three issues you're facing in your business right now?
And then to start thinking about, how can you trace them back to communication?
And let's have a look at some of the most common ones that we see. And I'm going to start with cash flow. So one of the most common issues we see is cash flow. You know, people have got a great pipeline for work. They've got great assets. They've built the business really well, but particularly in the current economic time, there's a few little cash flow issues.
So my challenge to you is to think about this.
If you look at your cash flow situation, if you had communicated to your clients that you had stronger trading terms or tighter trading terms, if you had communicated to your creditors that you needed extended trading terms, if you had communicated to your team the importance of getting a project finished or a job done or something delivered, would you be in that cash flow situation right now?
If you'd had a better relationship with your bank, your financier, would you be in that position right now? And I'd suggest to you that in at least 80% of the cases, cash flow really comes down to a failure to communicate.
A failure to communicate. A failure to communicate effectively.
I can't impress upon you enough the importance of communication. And you'll see. Let's look at another one. Let's look at, if we've looked at cash flow, let's look at, say you've got maybe a team member that's not performing to standard, and we've got to ask ourselves this question. Did we effectively communicate what our expectations were? Did we effectively communicate time frames?
Did we effectively communicate what their role was? What their job was? Were they effectively inducted into the business in the first place? These are all examples of communication.
How you induct someone, how you bring someone into your business, how you give them a job description. God, I hate that term. But how you give somebody a position description, hate that just as much.
What we should be doing, of course, is just giving people a very clear picture of what we can expect of them and what they should expect of us. So one of the things I like in the metropol group is the concept of mutual expectation documents.
So if you've got a team member that's not performing at the right level, then we have to ask ourselves the question, have we properly communicated?
Have we properly communicated what our expectations are?
Let's talk about a difficult client. So if I think about the three to five most common things I hear, I've got problems with my team, got problems with cash flow, got issues with clients, and they would probably be the most common, most common ones. When we first start working with someone, we're talking about, what are their challenges or frustrations in the business? They would probably be be the initial three anyway.
And so what we can say is that in each of those cases, it comes down to communication. Let's look at your clients. If you've got a form of a better term, you've got a difficult client and you've got a client that's causing you some issues. Client doesn't want to pay, client doesn't want to take delivery. Client won't commit. They won't make their mind up. They won't adhere to the process.
Have you communicated clearly what the expectations are?
Have you communicated with them clearly what they need to hear? One of the things I talk to the buyer's agents at Metropole about on a regular basis is the importance of no news calls, and we've spoken about that before in this podcast. We talk about, you know, sometimes you've got to make, well, every time, you've got to make the invisible visible. And often what happens is we don't do that. We don't make no news calls. We don't ring someone and say, hey, just letting you know that there's not a lot to report on at the moment in relation to the progress of your particular matter or your project or your product or whatever it might be. But I really wanted to keep you in the loop and let you know that we're not sitting on our hands and doing nothing. It's just that there hasn't been a great deal of progress for whatever reason, and then you can give the explanation. But if you make the invisible visible, you're going to find that the likelihood that your clients are going to become pissed off because they don't know what's going on, number one factor that pisses people off, by the way, because they don't know what's going on, is just going to diminish dramatically.
And that right there is communication.
So just think about this. If you've got cash flow issues, or if you've got issues around clients, or you've got issues around your team, you've got issues around productivity, maybe you've got issues around quality of the product that you're producing. The product or service that you're producing and delivering.
Maybe you've got issues with the stickiness of your clients. In other words, they're shopping around.
I was having a conversation in one of our vip sessions on Tuesday of this week, Monday of this week, and I was talking to the guys about price and they were saying, oh, we're in a very price competitive market. But in fact, when they thought about it and when they realized that when they went to customers who are customers of their competition and offered them a cheaper price, the customers didn't move. They didn't move on price because they had a good, solid relationship. Great quality of service, great quality of product delivery, et cetera, et cetera. So they ticked all the boxes. So what was happening there was. There was very good, solid communication between suppliers and client. And so each of the things that we've just spoken about in the last ten minutes can all be tracked down to communication.
Now, the good news is that it's relatively easy to fix. So one of the ingredients you have to have is to be an effective communicator. That's a really simple process because you can learn to do that if you're not a good communicator. You can learn to do it. You can learn to do it by doing the following. Number one, listen. Learn to listen.
And you should be listening to understand, not listening for them to finish so that you can start. I'll say it again, you should be listening to understand, not listening for them to finish so that you can start. You thinking? You shouldn't be thinking about what it is that you want to say next. Actually genuinely listen. Right. The effect of listening. There's a whole bunch of skills we can talk about with effective listening. The concept of using, you know, door openers or minimal interrupters, where you're just acknowledging. Acknowledging what the person is saying to you. You're in a one on one communication or even in a group communication you want to acknowledge. Aha. Thank you. Yeah, sounds interesting. Ask open question, not closed questions.
Acknowledge. Ask open questions and use your nonverbal gestures to show that you're interested. Maintain eye contact where it's culturally appropriate. Maintain eye contact.
Maintain an open body stance. Don't sit with your arms folded, your legs crossed, and a big scowl on your face like you're not really interested in what they're saying. Cause they are all the factors that break down communication. Remember, we held a charity event back in. Goodness me, not in 2007, 2008. Somewhere around there, we had Alan Pease, the body language expert, come as a speaker at our charity event. And it was fascinating just to watch Alan communicate with people so easily. By using really open body language. And he was able to give examples of really closed body language, you could see how people would shut down in those communications.
So the first c is communication, and have a think. Now, how good are you at that? When was the last time you stopped and actually thought about it? When was the last time you thought about, am I actually listening? Do I listen to my team?
Do I listen to my clients? Do I go and ask them questions? Do I effectively listen? In other words, really listen? Listen for what they've got to say. Listen to understand, not listen for what you're going to say next. Let's get into the next two.
All right? The second one is, we've looked at communication. The second one is compromise. This is an essential ingredient in scaling your business.
Because if you do everything one way, one way only, your way or the highway, and compromise does not form a part of your vocabulary or your modus operandi, then I'm going to suggest to you that's an essential ingredient that you're really missing. And compromise can come in all sorts of ways. Right? It might be compromised between you and your business partners, your associates, alliances, suppliers, clients, team members, my dad. You always used to say compromise, but never to the point of compromising yourself. And I think that's great advice. So you've got a certain set of values that you. That you insist on, but you have to ask this. And that is, are they values or are they just me being bloody minded? I often joke my mother in law love her to death, but, you know, often joke that, you know, there's. Kathy always goes, there's two ways of doing things right, her way and the wrong way. Is that you? Is that how your team think about you? Because here's what happens. This is where these two become inextricably linked. If you're not prepared to compromise, and that's the image or the concept that you deliver, then that is by, in and by itself. A breakdown in communication. A failure to compromise is a failure to communicate. If people think there's just no sense in talking to Marcus, he won't compromise anything. It's his way or the highway.
He won't listen to anyone. Once you get into that position, then communication goes out the window as well.
So compromise is not about giving in all the time. It's not about avoiding conflict all the time.
Conflict is healthy, right? Healthy conflict. Healthy, healthy. Conflicting communication is good. It's positive, robust conversations. I often say to my business partner, Michael Yardling, Michael and I will sometimes have very robust conversations, and it's okay because it means that we can openly communicate. And in that process, what happens is we each end up compromising.
He doesn't get everything his way. I don't get everything my way. Michael, if you're listening to this, I know you'd think you get everything your way, but it's not how it works.
As a result of those conversations, we find compromise, and that furthers the process of communication.
So, again, a little challenge to you. How open are you to compromising?
How open are you to seeing a different point of view? And by the way. Just a little flag on that. You can't be good at compromising if you're not good at communication, because if you're not good at communication, you're not hearing somebody else's point of view, somebody else's perspective, and you're never going to compromise on it. Now, you don't have to compromise to the point where you give up everything.
That's not the whole idea. And let's be honest, that's not why you entered into your own business in the first place, because you entered into your own business because you wanted to give the orders, right? You wanted to be the boss. You wanted to be the person that you wanted to have control over your own destiny. The reason why most of us go into our own business is so that we can control our destiny, so that we can be in charge of where we go and what we do.
But it doesn't mean that it has to be rigid and with military precision on every occasion. Unless you are in, you know, a life saving situation or a military situation, you know, it's the most of the things that we're talking about on a day to day basis in our business, not life and death. If you compromise on something and it improves the communication between you and the person you're speaking with or you're compromising with, well, what a bonus that is. No one's going to die. In fact, you're actually going to advance the ability for the business to operate without you. Because the advantage of compromising is you're giving the people the opportunity to learn. I was talking to caroline the other day, and she used this great term that she said she attributed to her grandmother was, don't clip their wings before they've had a chance to fly.
And that sort of leads into that compromised conversation. If you've got people that are giving something a try, it might be imperfect, but that's okay. Give it a try. No one's going to die.
And let's see what they can do with it. Let's see them learn, and let's see them learn from you. By watching you compromise, you can be a great mentor to the people around you again, whether it's clients, whether it's team members, whether it's suppliers, alliances, associates, referral partners, whatever it might be, or even your own business partners. If you can show the way by showing that you're compromising, you are open to compromising, you're prepared to compromise. That means you're open to communication. And that's why it's the second important ingredient in scaling your business, and the more that people around you learn, and the more that they can, they learn from you and they can understand that they can have an impact, the more likely they are to step up and therefore the more likely they are to take some responsibility or few, which allows you to scale out of your business further and further.
So we've looked at the first two, looked at communication, compromise. Number three. Number three is really simple, but it's one that people often miss. And number three is community.
You are not an island.
You cannot in business, operate as an island.
And the really, the really probably, I would think this would probably be the most common thing I hear, not around. You know, we ask some of our clients when they come to join our mastermind business accelerator program, we talked to them about, you know, what's your biggest frustration? Where do you want to be in twelve months time? We get all that sort of information from them. But if they talk about the most prevalent emotion they have, it's loneliness.
You thinking right now, that's you. You sort of thinking, do you know what it is? Lonely. It's lonely in small business, because unless you have people around you who are equally in small business, it's very hard to tell them. It's very hard to share with them. I mean, goodness me, I can remember talking to my brothers a number of years ago, and even though they'd known that I'd been in my own small business for many years, they still took the view that how good is it? You can sort of go to work whenever you want and you don't have a boss, and you can take as much holiday as you want, and you can pay yourself whatever you want. I mean, it all seems really naive when you think about it, but that was their view of the world. That was the lens that they saw things through. So, I mean no disrespect or criticism of it, but it just meant that it made it quite lonely.
I couldn't talk to them about the trials and tribulations of being in my own business. I couldn't talk to them about the frustrations of being in my own business. Community is something which is vitally important, and I think when it comes to community, and obviously we talk about our mastermind business accelerator program a fair bit in this podcast, but that's not what this is about. This is about finding a community of your peers. I think there's some really simple rules around that. The first is you want to make sure the community is reasonably well curated. In other words, you want to find a community of like minded people, because what you're looking for out of a community is both collective momentum and shared wisdom. You're looking for people who are all heading in the same direction as you, people who are looking to achieve the same things as you. Maybe they're further down the path, maybe they're further behind you on the path, but they're all looking to get essentially in the same direction.
And then you want to make sure that you're in a community with people who are happy to share their wisdom. In our mastermind, we often say people come for the content and stay for the community because there's this great shared wisdom. People are so happy to share their knowledge to help each other step up to the next level to help improve things for people around them. It's just. It's one of the things that kind of gets me out of bed is knowing that that's what we're doing within. Within the program.
You have to be very careful to curate your community and make sure that your community is going to be people who will applaud your successes, support you in your difficult times, guide you through it where they can, and stand alongside you in your business. And that takes away that sense of loneliness that comes from being in your own small business or professional practice. So community is vitally important. One of the problems with community, I find, is that as business owners, we often end up finding ourselves in communities of people in the same industry. Right? So we go to community events. We go to industry events. And the difficulty with that is that often in those industry events, there's a high degree of. Of anxiety or professional jealousy or whatever you want to call it. And so often people aren't really, really honest. You know, I mean, I'm not suggesting that they come there with the intention to bullshit, but. But they do because they either they're so protective of their turf, or they don't want to be vulnerable because. In that, because it's not safe, which is the other factor you need to look for. So you want to make sure it's carefully curated. You want to make sure they're like minded individuals. And then the other thing is you want to make sure it's safe because you want to be in a community that, as I said before, you know, applaud your successes and supports you in your difficult times and stands alongside you. But you want to be in a community that it's perfectly okay to say, man, this has just been a tough week.
This has been a tough time. And I feel very privileged with my. With my fellow directors, you know, I. I can say that I go, how you doing, Mark? You know what? Just having a pretty rough day, to be honest with you, or a rough week or a rough month or whatever it might be. And what I'll get is a lot of support back. So I think community is probably underrated and people don't take advantage of community enough.
I mentioned before that we were talking about treating the symptoms, not the causes, at our last intensive. So three times a year, we spend two days in the Gold coast, get our clients to come in and spend. The truth is, whilst our members love what we do in that community every bit as much, they love the amount of time they get to spend with each other.
And it just reminds me every time I see it, of the importance and value community. So there you go. They're the three c ingredients. You've got to have very open communication. Hone down your communication skills and ask yourself that question, hey, whatever's sort of, you know, causing me issues in the business right now, can it be solved with better communication?
Second one is compromise doesn't have to be your way or the highway. Sure, you can have negotiable. I always look to have negotiables and non negotiables. There are some things that I am absolutely non negotiable on, but there are some things I'm negotiable on. They're the areas I'm prepared to compromise. And as long as we've got open communication, again, doesn't matter whether it's internal or external, with your team or with your clients. If there's open communication, you'll find that those levels of compromise will increase quite dramatically. And finally, the third one is the importance of community. And making sure that you belong to a community that's carefully curated, that's going to support you and that's going to help you in your journey. The more that you can do that, the more you will learn from those people in that community. And that will also help you to scale out of your business. So those three C ingredients are really designed to help you to move to the next stage of scaling out of your business, whatever that scaling means for you. These are the sort of things we do teach in our mastermind business accelerator program, metropolemastermind.com. dot au love to have a chat to you about it. Hey, if you have enjoyed today's episode, you've got some value at it. Please like the podcast, share the podcast and subscribe. Because subscribing makes it so much easier for other people to find us. And that's our mission, to help small business owners and professionals in private practice to spend a whole lot more time in their life and a whole less, lot less time in their business. Until next episode, this is Mark Creedon saying please, whatever you do, make sure you spend time with those who matter most. See ya.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: 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 or have a chat with Mark and the team at all the W's, see what's possible today.
