Author name: Marco Soares

Processes are the key to supporting sustainable growth, They are the key to consistency, and they are the key to you not going completely crazy or upsetting all of the customers that you\’ve worked so hard to get in the door in the first place. Where do you need to improve your processes? Go on, have a look at this and see if you can build a better business by building a more process-driven business.

This week I want to explore the topic of micromanaging! I saw a post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago where someone had asked the audience what their views were on micromanaging and all of the comments was just so negative and in my view oversimplictic! I think micromanage has got to such a bad reputation and is miss understood. Instead of using the word micromanaging let’s think about it as being directive and having a directive management style. Do I think that it is appropriate to be directive all the time with everybody you manage? No, definitely not. I think it is also not okay to be non-directive all the time with everybody. It just doesn’t work like that.

If your business is growing and you have more things going on in your business, you have less and less bandwidth to understand and anticipate the challenges that you are likely to face. 

Why does this tend to happen? Well, in my experience, what tends to happen is as the business grows and goes from strength to strength, you have more volume coming through the business; there’s just simply more things to do and when you’re a smallish business you tend to have functional responsibilities as the Managing Director.

The more work that happens, of course there’s more to do within finance, operations, marketing, sales, and whichever bits of those functions you work within your time gets absorbed into those areas. 

This week on “Mind Your Own Business,” five signs that your strategy isn’t working, do you have a strategy in place in your business? If you do, is it working? Is it giving you everything that you need?.

Here are five signs that it may not be: first, is it difficult to make decisions? If it’s difficult to make decisions, then your strategy isn’t working. A good strategy acts like a compass, it should help you make your decisions because essentially it comes down to: does this thing help us move closer towards our strategy or further away?

Business is a team sport, I know it’s a cliche. Still, it really is, and if you don’t have the right bums on seats around you, you’re never going to fulfill your true potential and life is always going to be more challenging. “A players” get things done, “A players” have the right attitude “A players” are essential in helping you identify the right strategy for your business and implement that strategy.

The trouble is that while most people think they like receiving feedback, the reality is quite different. You’ll probably find that when you deliver feedback with some team members, they shut down, they get defensive, and therefore they don’t take the message on board in the spirit that it is intended. So what do you do?. Because if you have team members on your team, they do need input to improve their outcomes.

Well, I have got a gift for you, instead of using feedback which is pretty unhelpful in some ways because it’s about the past and nobody can change the past, I want you to use something called: “Feedforward” Now, feedforward is an excellent concept because it gets people to focus on the future.

How do you calculate your marketing budget? How do you know what that budget should be and how it should evolve over the years?

Well, it’s a question that I get asked all of the time. There are so many approaches out there, but which one works for you? Well, the approach that I like to take with my clients is really based around allowable acquisition cost So what is allowable acquisition cost? Effectively it is how much you can afford to spend in order to buy a new customer.

Does your marketing feel like a bit of a gamble sometimes?

Well, if so, then check out this week’s episode of “Mind Your Own Business” This week on “Mind Your Own Business” I want to talk about the importance of having a proper system in place to test and measure the effectiveness of your marketing function.

I bet you sometimes it must feel like you weigh the world on your shoulders.

Running a business is tough; we have challenges, but it’s just part of the landscape; the key thing is, how do you respond and deal with the challenges that come your way?

Many, many years ago, I was talking to my first business coach about a few clients that I was worried about; there were a few things that weren’t going well, and I didn’t really know what to do about it, and I was playing this tape over and over and over in my head. And I’ve spent loads of energy and loads of time thinking about this particular challenge.

Do you have the necessary financial information to grow your business, increase profit and manage cash flow?