Although I work with many different types of businesses, there are several issues which clients experience time and time again, and I’m going to share these with you so you can apply them in your business.

Sometimes I’ll find myself saying this one several times in one day to different people.

“You might find it helpful to set some targets for your business.”

Now of course this sounds completely obvious (like many things I find myself repeating) but it surprises me how many businesses have only the vaguest targets.

Without a set of targets, you’ve no idea whether you’re doing well or not.

If you haven’t aimed for something, you don’t know if you’ve hit the right thing. Imagine a darts player just throwing the darts at the wall of the pub, with no dartboard. You’d imagine that he’s a madman, just throwing darts randomly – surely that’s dangerous?

There’s something strange about the act of setting targets for your business. When you set a target, as long as it’s realistic, you’re pretty likely to achieve it. Some people who have discovered this effect have thought that there’s something magical about it, something caused by the power of thought. But there’s nothing magical about it –

You’re more likely to achieve an explicity target if it looks like you’re not going to reach the target, you’ll do something about it.

If you’re selling shoes and you’ve been told that each day you need to sell £500 worth of shoes, and by 2 o’clock in the afternoon you’ve only put £65 through the till, you’ll know that you’d better be nice to the customers and sell some shoes. You’d pay attention. But if you think of your job as just standing around and making sure that no one steals the Jimmy Choos, it will be a different story.

Setting targets focuses your attention on what you need to do.

If you know that you need to do more networking, set yourself a target for how many networking meetings you’re going to go to each month, and how many catch up coffees you’re going to have with people who might send business your way. If you know that you need to get more clients of a particular kind, make that your target. If you have something which consistently gets pushed out of the way because other things are more important, then make sure it’s on your target list.

I’ll write another, more technical, article soon about how you set targets, and how to monitor them, but get thinking about what targets your business needs to set and reach.

I wrote recently about the businesses I can’t help, so I thought it was only fair to write about whom I can help.  It’s tempting to write this as a sales pitch, but I’ll resist temptation and try to be more objective instead. My strap line is that I help small businesses who want to be bigger businesses.  I specialise in businesses with less than 30 employees because the smaller businesses are the sexy exciting ones. The businesses where I can make the most difference are the ones where the owner is committed to growth, and knows that he or she needs some help and support to get there.  Where the owner wants to get to be a bigger business, but doesn’t really know how to go about it. Imagine a two-person design partnership.  They’ve developed some demand, and have some good clients, but they are uncertain how to move from doing all the work themselves to being able to manage other people doing the work.  If you’ve read any of Michael Gerber’s Emyth books then you’ll know that there’s a key growth stage in stopping doing the work yourself, and getting others to do the work, while you become responsible for developing and running the business.  The temptation for our design company is to carry on doing all the work themselves, getting more and more worn out by servicing clients, or by not spending any time on marketing, they risk running out of new business.  Or both. In this situation I can:

• Identify what sort of work the lovely designers need to go after
• See what how they need to price their work to remain competitive, but have enough to be able to afford to pay other people to do the production and improve their profits
• Help them work out what marketing activities are going to work best for them
• Refocus them on marketing, so they can attract new clients
• Make sure they do the marketing, by being there and reminding them of what they promised to do

Of course, my lovely designers could do all of this themselves, but what do they get extra by paying me to help them? I’d say they get:

• The courage to charge more money
• Some fantastic new ideas about marketing, which they maybe wouldn’t have been able to come up with themselves, because I spend all my time seeing what works and stealing other people’s tactics
• Someone to be accountable to – so they can’t just slip back to their old habits, but are reminded that now we’re doing business in a different way.
• Someone who gives a damn.  This sounds obvious, but how often do you have someone who actually really cares about whether you succeed or fail, and have that person be someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Let’s take another scenario, this time of a bigger business.  Here’s a company which has been running for a while.  They have 12 staff, so they’ve got over the delegation issue, and they’re nicely profitable.  But, the director knows that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life running this business – at the moment it’s still fun, but she wants to sell up in 3 years time.  And, she wants to have enough money to do something else after that, or to do nothing at all for a while.  In fact, she knows that she wants to sell for upwards of £1.5m. Why would she want to get the woman with the curly hair and glasses in? Our director (we’ll call her Alice) needs some help to achieve her target of a sale in 3 years with a price tag of £1.5m.  Where I can help is:

• Assessing how much turnover and profit she needs to bring in to make the business worth that million and a half, and make sure that the business is working in a way which will maximise the sale value.
• Working on a much bigger marketing strategy to build up the business
• Helping with the recruitment of a really hot sales director to bring in the big sales which are going to add up.
• Supporting Alice in all the little problems that come with growing a business, so she’s got someone to go through things with her.  Again, this is about giving a damn, and getting help from someone who has been through this themselves.

That should give you an idea of the sort of businesses I work with and how I make a difference.  If you would like to talk about how I can help, you know where I am.

I see a lot of businesses of all different shapes and sizes. Some businesses I can help, and some I can’t, and I’ve been thinking about the ones which I can’t help, and why not.

Sometimes, someone comes to see me and their business is a tiny little thing.  Now, that doesn’t mean I can’t help them – after all, everyone’s business starts from a little shoot, but not everyone can or wants to grow into a powerful oak tree.  The people I can’t help are the ones who only want to earn 20k a year from their business and are happy with that.  Actually, I often can help with a one off session which my friends at Business Link will fund.  But if your desire is only to run a little business (and there’s nothing wrong with that, little businesses often suit someone who has other priorities such as raising children or sitting in the sunshine) it’s just not worth paying me money to help you.  And I’ll tell people that, and I’ll tell people whether they have a business which could be expanded beyond that lifestyle business level.

Sometimes I see people who have the potential to grow their business, but they are incapable of giving up doing the work on a day to day basis. If you are dead set against outsourcing, or employing people, or if you already employ people but end up doing the work yourself because you don’t trust them, then this might be you.  I can often cure people of these ideas, but sometimes this is so firmly set in that I can’t do anything.  I once went along to a meeting with a client, and when I got to the office he couldn’t see me because he was peeling potatoes.  I thought that the important thing was to talk about setting up a new part of the business which was worth about 100k per year, but he thought the important thing was peeling potatoes.  He couldn’t free himself to think that he could phone someone else to help with the spuds, and he missed out on a great opportunity.  You have to want to develop what you’re doing – otherwise all of my bright ideas are wasted.

The other group of people I can’t help are the ones who just have a rubbish idea.  Often, I’m the first person who’s been brave enough to tell someone that their business is a pile of poo (although I phrase it more tactfully than that, of course.)  Sometimes people just need help to see their business in a different way, so that the idea becomes a good one, so I can help with this, but for someone who is so in love with the idea of a gorgeous shop selling lovely things to all of 4 people a week, or a blog which is covered in google ads which no one ever clicks on, there is sometimes no hope for them.

This goes for the people who think that they’ll get investment for their business, and that their wages will be paid by the investment, with no thought of how the business might ever make a profit.  Sometimes investment becomes the end in itself, and the idea of actually selling some stuff and making money on it is completely lost.  For entrepreneurs like this, a reality check from Julia can make all the difference, but some people just don’t want to hear the truth, especially when the truth is that investment is hard to come by, and almost impossible unless you can show how you’re going to sell stuff at a profit.

Does all of this sound a bit harsh?  Well, maybe it is, but when I’m taking people’s money for my services, I have to be completely sure that I am going to make a real difference, so there has to be the potential for real growth in the business and the willingness to make it happen on the part of the business owner.

I advise people who are serious about what they want to achieve and I can tell when someone is ambivalent about their business.  If you’re not serious about it, why would someone bother to buy from you, or do business with you?

1.      When your voicemail message is BT callminder, so people calling you don’t know if they’ve got the right number or not

2.      When you never answer your phone or get back to people

3.      When you use a hotmail or yahoo email address rather than your own domain name

4.      When your website is obviously out of date, and hasn’t been changed for ages – this means that google won’t take you seriously either

5.      When you have are consistently late for meetings.  Being late shows a disrespect for the other person, and makes you look disorganised and sloppy – which is not someone that people want to do business with

Does any of this sound like you?  Any of it sound like people you do business with?  Time to get it sorted – your business can never grow until you take it seriously.