part0016

I hope this book has been revealing and rewarding, and has enabled you to reconnect with your original dreams and aspirations which, if nothing else, has served to remind you that, hopefully, you began your own journey from a position of having a growth mind-set. I’ve been at pains to show you that I recognise how it feels when the going gets tough, as clarity fades under the daily pressures of keeping heads above water. It’s all too easy to forget the reasons that originally drove you to set up in business in the first place, or to step up to that promotion into a leadership role. The insights, tools and advice I’ve shown you should now encourage you to believe once more that you do have the potential to achieve more and to grow and scale up your business. That’s why I’ve prompted you to face some of the barriers head on, with brutal honesty, and to accept that where there are gaps in your knowledge, you need to make time for learning to overcome them. Assuming you’re ready to learn more, this is a sign that your growth mind-set remains alive and healthy. Remember: working on your own self-development is an investment you can’t afford to ignore. The more you can grow as a business leader, the more your business will grow in spades as a direct result. Having refreshed your perspective on yourself in relation to the business, you can examine the key areas where the processes I’ve described connect in a flow that stems from embracing your growth mind-set. That includes identifying and articulating your vision, mission and values, through to creating processes and rhythms to facilitate recruitment, sales and marketing while always understanding the importance of money as a key indicator of future business growth. These are the lifeblood of your business which keep its heart pumping.

I guarantee that once you start to learn, you’ll be pulled towards learning more – not just about your business, but about yourself. Your imagination will be fired up as you spot new opportunities that ensure your business disrupts and stands out from the crowd. What were seen as barriers to growth are now challenges that you’ll face with increased confidence, relishing the chance to experiment and take more risks, allowing yourself to fail fast. That isn’t the same as failure, it’s the product of a growth mind-set abundance rather than scarcity. The more opportunities you spot, the more you’ll work and the luckier you’ll be. That’s the sum of my experience and the pathway to success I wanted to share. Like you, I know I couldn’t have done this on my own. I truly value the mentors and meetup groups that have supported me and opened my eyes to learning. Some were already ahead of me in the game and they’d trodden the same path I was on. It’s so much easier to navigate your way through the jungle when the person ahead of you has cleared a path. Through them, I realised my own potential and where I needed to grow if I wanted my business to do the same.

Mentors don’t choose you – so be proactive in your search and you’ll find the ones that are right for you. For example, if you’re intending to scale up in the technology sector, it makes sense to select a mentor with a similar experience of scaling up in that industry. The magic of joining a mentoring mastermind group, in which a variety of business sectors are represented, is that you’ll also learn lessons from other leaders whose experience will be valuable for your own. From my perspective, I gain as much satisfaction from helping entrepreneurs through the processes I’ve described in this book as I do when I witness their own businesses transform as a result.

CASE STUDY: JAN

Jan runs a web-based and wholesale concern selling novelty gifts and homeware. When she asked me for advice, she was undoubtedly very talented in sourcing products from the Far East and then shipping them to the UK market. Jan had great products, but she was literally doing everything in the business. As a result, its annual turnover was stagnating at £300k per year, and worst of all, Jan was paying her employees before herself. That didn’t stop her from working all hours and ensuring her small band of employees were looked after, but she was totally involved in all aspects of running the business. If it was growth she was hoping for, it wasn’t happening, and her business was stuck. The first thing we did together was to deconstruct what her business actually was and identify what tasks she was doing. We also made sure that she took a wage straight away because, in actual fact, the business could/would find a way to bear it. Although Jan had great processes when it came to sourcing and developing products, she had none in place whatsoever in respect of marketing and sales, or for any other back-end part of the business. Taking on board the same advice I’ve described throughout this book, we set up a series of processes and fired those people who were, frankly, taking the mickey and only turning up for their pay packet. Jan’s problem was that she was fiercely loyal and very ethically minded towards her employees, but by the same token there were one too many who knew that and took advantage of her. Until, that is, she changed and asked herself some brutally honest questions. She took time to reconnect with her woefully underused growth mind-set and started to learn more about business from other people’s experiences.

She worked on identifying the vision, mission and values of the business and for the first time created a strategy. Jan also learned how to attract and recruit the talent that could best serve the business and, as a result, she saw marketing and sales performances improving and a significant increase in turnover. Appreciating the role of money now played a critical role in Jan’s understanding of the business and within three years it grew from being stuck at £300k per year to £3m and a seven-figure valuation, ready to sell and making her able to consider embarking on a new business opportunity. It might come as no surprise to discover that Jan is now a mastermind mentor.

Outcomes such as this are one of the biggest reasons that get me out of bed in the morning. If I hadn’t taken the plunge and embraced my own growth mind-set, sought insights from others and engaged with my own learning opportunities, I might never have been in the position to grow and scale up my own businesses and I might just still be all at sea.