How do you see your business future, optimistically, pessimistically, or is the jury out? Whatever your outlook, you cannot afford to stand and be swept away by inaction.

In this episode of ‘I Hate Numbers’ I talk about looking at your business future in terms of growth and using the MCP approach to driving forward and growing your business. To be fair MCP is also needed if you want your business to stand still.

What is MCP?

MCP is not some new medication or drug, MCP is shorthand for

• Mindset
• Capacity
• Performance

As words they mean nothing, or different things to different people. Let me give you a flavour of each, the podcast delves deeper

Mindset: It affects how we tackle anything, and spoiler alert, we need a combo

Capacity: Capability is another way to describe this, and no one business has it all.

Performance: Be less dog, do not chase your tail. Check & manage your progress

Set your Northern Star

You need to set your own Northern Star for your business. Your Northern Star represents your business destination, your business goals.

MCP is nothing unless you know what your Northern Star is. MCP is there to help you reach that destination point.

Good to Know

It is largely in your hands as to how your business and financial story unfolds.

This doesn’t mean that prosperity is guaranteed, though that would be wonderful if I could guarantee that. However, not taking MCP on board gives you that edge, that extra opportunity.

Do not over stress if your business growth does not go in a straight line. All of us in business make mistakes, if you have not then you are extremely fortunate or telling lies.

What Next

Grab a coffee, make yourself comfortable, sit back and listen.

I love doing this podcast and sharing my love of Numbers with you. Check out the link to subscribe and do not miss an episode. Help me spread that Number Love by downloading it, listening, and acting!

In This Episode

• Understanding the MCP approach for your business growth
• Knowing that progress depends on a destination point and setting milestones
• Appreciating that MCP is not just a checklist and it’s perfectly natural that flip ups will, and do occur
• Developing your own Numbers confidence and decisions
• Take more control of your numbers to help make you money, survive and thrive

Links

https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast/id1500471288

https://play.google.com/music/m/I3pvpztpjvjw6yrw2kctmtyckam?t=I_Hate_Numbers

https://open.spotify.com/show/5lKjqgbYaxnIAoTeK0zins

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast

https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business–Economics-Podcasts/I-Hate-Numbers-p1298505/

You are listening to the I Hate Numbers Podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

Hi folks, and welcome to another weekly episode of I Hate Numbers, the show that wants business owners to get a bit closer to their numbers, on friendlier terms of their numbers, so they can prosper, make money, and thrive. In this week's show, we are going to be talking about MCP and having gone crazy here, MCP is not some new fancy drug on the marketplace that I'm going to be talking about.

Rather, it's about mindset, capacity, and performance. What do we need to bother with mindset, capacity, and performance? Well, if growth, diversification, making money figures in your crosshairs, then MCP is something you need to pay attention to. Mindset is just a fancy word, another word that represents what we think about the world, our attitudes, our behavior, our assumptions.

We can't dismiss it because it really influences how we handle situations in our business and in our life. And we really got to have a look at what those different mindsets are because it plays a big part in our success, or unfortunately, things that we trip up on. It's often said that the biggest battleground that we have is the battleground, the space between our ears. Our thoughts, our assumptions, our behaviors, our mindset

were as much influenced by other people's voices. Typically, there are two types of mindset. You have a mindset that's called fixed, and the idea of fixed is that you carry on with the status quo. You’re risk averse. You're a bit reluctant, resistant to try new things, to try new techniques, different ways of working, and you can end up working in your business as opposed to on your business.

Nothing wrong with the fixed mindset. We're going to talk a bit more about that, but let's talk about the other type of mindset that's often quoted and called a growth mindset. And what does a growth mindset mean? Well, it means we look at things differently. We don't necessarily accept the status quo. We try new things differently.

So, in our business, it could be trying to sell to new customers. It could be a different way that we engage with clients. It could be a different way of working. In the world that I inhabit, it could be a different approach to how you view numbers and how those numbers are very important in your business.

Growth mindset is always seen as the sexy kid on the block here, the one that, you know, people aspire to, but don't diss fixed mindsets. Fixed mindsets have their place. A fixed mindset means that there are certain things, certain business pistols you should not abandon. Fixed mindsets typically involve cash flow.

Keep an eye on the cash. We've said it in previous broadcasts. Once the cash runs out, close the doors on your way out because you ain't going to survive. So, planning, appropriate risk-taking, making sure that your records are as up to date as possible. That way you can use that in your way to navigate your business, as well as keeping all these statutory authorities

happy, and we don't want to piss them off by any stretch. Your business is best served by having the appropriate blend of a growth mindset, that attitude, and let's get real here, stuff does go wrong. We all make mistakes and we all continue to make mistakes. Anybody who runs a business, who says we don't make mistakes is either deluding themselves,

lying, or they're extremely fortunate. I prefer to take handling setbacks, unfortunately is the inevitable part of a business life. I would probably say that actually having setbacks is probably a good thing. That sounds really weird, but unless we experience that pain, that discomfort, we won't actually learn and take lessons from there.

So, we don't obviously want to continue to make them, but making mistakes, learning, it served Thomas Edison very well when he invented the light bulb. So, if it's good enough for Edison, it's good enough for us. Capacity, the second ingredient in our mix of MCP. Capacity has a variety of meanings to it.

There's the conventional physical capacity. So, typically, if your business is making things for people to buy, do you have enough production ability to provide the volume of products that you anticipate to sell? If you are a restaurant and you are planning to grow the business, to have more customers coming into your restaurant, do you have enough capacity in your restaurant, enough seats, enough tables those people can sit down on? If you are doing a delivery service,

do you have the capacity in terms of people able to deliver? People coming in to pick the food up is not the issue, but it's delivering it to them. If you're running the service business and you are growing your business and you are running more workshops, do you actually have enough time in the day to actually be able to deliver those workshops, those services?

If you don't, that's not the end of things here. You can always look at ways of increasing the capacity through efficiency, increasing the capacity by getting more people involved in the business here, but that's one way of looking at capacity. Capacity is all about the ability to deliver what your business mission is, to continue to be sustainable, and to be effective.

Capacity also involves skills and abilities, so do you have those skills and abilities to actually carry out and execute your plan? Snitching the word plan in there, because for me, ultimately, whatever you do in your business here, you've got to have some degree of a route map to actually get to your end destination.

We're going to talk about route maps. We're going to talk about end destinations in more detail in future podcasts. But for now, let's get back to talking about capacity. Now, one of the key things about capacity, how we get it, is all about how you lead and how you run your business. You as a business owner, you as a business leader,

you are the one who sets the direction, sets the dial for where you want your business to go. Having some degree of clarity in your mind about where you want to go to and how you're going to get there is really going to be key to your business success and direction. A major area that is often overlooked, a major area that is often ignored, neglected

within capacity is information. Information floats all around, and let me differentiate here. There's lots of data that exists, so website traffic, financial transactions, social media engagement. That's lots of data. It means bugger all unless we convert that into information and information, to my mind, is the new gold. It’s that vital ingredient that converts a business that's chasing its backside

to one that actually wants to move forward. Information is a valuable commodity that we need to tap into. Consider for a moment all that rich untapped data that already exists in your business. Whatever size of your business, you are surrounded by data. So, if you go onto social media and who doesn't these days, whether it's on Facebook or LinkedIn, Twitter, I'm not going to recite every single social media platform here.

You've got interactions. You've got people who may come across you that may not necessarily comment all the time, but you've got the data of who visits you. Many of us, myself included, don't necessarily drill down and explore that data. It tells us a lot about who our customers are, who our potentials are, and they're already expressing an interest in us. Our financial transactions, what we're spending, money that comes in.

That's a large pool of data that we can mine and convert into something useful. If you've got a website, most of us do, not everybody does, then you've got people who might come on, visit pages, go off. That is valuable data that we can mine to use into information. Now, what to do? We're not talking investing huge chunks of money

into mining this data, but we're talking about a joined up system that actually converts that data and gives us something useful. Knowing what we're spending, how much money we're making, which customers are more beneficial, which customers probably might be a drain on our resources here, which customers that we should focus on.

A splatter-gun approach to anybody out there is going to be inappropriate. It's not going to be a good use of your time and energy, and effectively, you end up talking to nobody. In a nutshell, get yourself a management-information system where all that data can be converted into something useful. Imagine you are making a meal. You've got lots of individual ingredients.

They in themselves won't create that appetizing meal, and that's what data represents. It's those raw ingredients that we need to blend into something more meaningful. So far, we've talked about mindset. We've talked about that fixed mindset, which serves its purpose. Don't dis it completely. We've talked about growth mindset

we need to blend with that fixed mindset. The growth mindset takes an element of risk, and risk can't be avoided even if you hide under your duvet, you are not going to avoid risk completely. It's about exploring, trying things differently if the things that you've got going on aren't doing it for you. We’ve talked about capacity, the ability to deliver what we said we would do.

What I want to finish up with is talk about the P, and P represents performance. There's an old cliché phrase, which is very true - clichés are clichés, cause they’re true - says that we manage what we measure i.e If we do not measure something, what we think is important to our business, how on earth do we know if we're actually achieving it?

Somebody who says, owner, I want to make a profit. Well, if you don't actually put a number to that figure, how do you know you're actually doing it? Will you ever be satisfied? Will you ever feel that you're actually getting where you want your business to go? There's another reason why it is important to measure things.

If we don't measure it, we don't make ourselves accountable. If we don't measure it, we have got no way of measuring our progress. And also there's a positive motivational reason for measuring performance. That reason is we need clues, we need milestones on our business journey path to know if we're actually getting anywhere.

It's not unusual to have lots of business owners feel they're not actually making any progress. Things really seem very overwhelming. You are working hard. You don't see any material success. It's extremely easy to think I'm working hard, expending all this effort, all this sweat, and I'm actually seeing bog roll coming back in terms of results,

and we can feel deflated. Any business owner will always go through a rollercoaster of emotions. You get that legal dopamine high when you make a sale, when you see things coming into your bank account. That's a great feeling. You'll get effectively a down when things aren't going quite well, you don't see those immediate results coming.

So, it's important to try and kick that into touch. One way to kick that into touch is to set yourself mini milestones. Imagine learning to ride a bike where you have stabilisers on in the beginning. At some point, those stabilisers will be removed. What this means for us is that if we set mini milestones, whether they're weekly or monthly, and saying, to get to my end destination, this is what I've got to accomplish at the end of week one, you do it, you tick that box.

It reinforces that positive feeling that we have and we're able to continue. But if you don't measure, if you don't come up with a number of sub-description, then there's no way of knowing if you're actually on the right path. Okay, guys, so let's wrap it up. Let's conclude. And what we're in essence saying, or I'm saying mindset, capacity,

performance are the ingredients that you need to have in your business, in your DNA to get the success that you deserve. Now, like ingredients in any cake, it's not saying 30% of this, 60% of this, 10% of that. My one takeaway tip overall in all of this is make sure you've got a plan. Now, a plan doesn't have to be a detailed

55 page document. It can be a simple sheet of A-4 a couple-sides and effectively have your end destination in mind and think about how you're going to get to your end destination. We've explored this topic on previous podcasts and we're going to return back to that theme. For me, have a plan, execute it.

Think about MCP and you are on your way to success. Thank you for sharing your time with me today. Hope you've got some value from this podcast. I'm not going to lie to you. Obviously, I'd love you to encourage, share this with your friends, your families. You might want to think about whether you share it with your competitors, but hey, why not?

So, spread that numbers love. Have a great week. Wish you success in your business. Make some money. Get some more number love in your life. And if you want to find out more about the world of numbers, who wouldn't, check out the podcast notes. There's loads of links to lots of resources. Guys, have a great week.

We hope you enjoyed this episode and appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show. We hope you got some value. If you did, then we'd love it if you shared the episode. We look forward to you joining us next week for another I Hate Numbers episode.