If you understand business, you can apply that knowledge to every industry. Every business owner has the same four areas they need to work with: Revenue, Marketing, Sales, Team (time management/leadership). Gather knowledge in these areas and then customize and tweak it to fit whichever industry you are working in.
Growing vs. Scaling
Growing: The start of your business when you really need to focus on sales. Growing involves getting clear on who your target market is, your avatar, getting your revenue streams figured out and bringing in the sales to bring in the cash.
Scaling: When you’ve reached your bandwidth. Scaling involves figuring out the right scale formula to use. In Allison’s new book, Scale or Fail, she outlines 17 scale strategies (find the link to a free download below) of which you pick one or two to scale your business.
Scale Acronym
Strategic Vision: Know where you are going and get your whole team on board.
Cashflow: Big numbers doesn’t mean an endless cashflow – you still need to plan it carefully.
Alliance: It’s all about your team once your business starts to grow beyond you.
Leadership: Shifting from being a boss to being a leader – from telling people what to do, to inspiring them to action.
Execution or Exit: Make it happen!
Systems Acronym
Saves You Stress, Time, Energy and Money
The secret to successful business lies in building your team. You have to take a step back and figure out how to get the right people on the bus. Great leaders inspire people instead of telling them what to do. When you inspire people, they treat it as their own and can run with it. But, that means you have to trust them, let go and accept that it is not done exactly your way. But, better done than perfect.
Although Allison is at the peak and has years of experience behind her, she still has struggles, as the saying goes, “New level, new devil.” Allison recently struggled with letting people go soon enough. She sincerely cares about her employees and wants them to thrive, but she ended up in a situation where a new employee was not a fit for the culture of her company. How could Allison maintain the culture in her company without a nasty conflict with her new recruit?
Allison came to the realization that she had to tackle the elephant in the room, not because she wanted conflict, but because she had to deal with it before it got bigger. She made a firm resolution that she had to fire this new employee but she did so with a caring and honest conversation.
To do something like that, Allison needed four prerequisites:
- Be crystal clear on what you need in a new employee.
- Have a strong culture so it is immediately clear when someone is not a good fit.
- Be self aware enough to recognize and acknowledge the problem.
- Have the courage to do something about it.
Make decisions from where you are going, not from where you are at.