Author name: Marco Soares

I want to talk about progression. You’ll have people in your company, the bright stars out there who are very ambitious and want to grow and want to develop and want to be able to earn more one day. The challenge with some of those people is that they are all preconditioned to think that the only type of progression is a vertical progression where you become a line manager. That is not obviously the case. There are other ways of being able to progress, and that is horizontal progression. Horizontal progression is all about expanding somebody’s area of responsibility, so that’s about giving them more responsibilities or more important responsibilities.

This week, poor internal hiring decisions. Great news, your business is doing really well, and as a result, you’ve got additional seats opening up on your bus. But don’t worry, you don’t need to go externally in hire, because you’ve got somebody internally that’s doing a great job in the seat that they’re in, and they would make a great fit for this role. So what you do is you bring them into the office, you give them a high five, you tell them they’ve been doing a brilliant job, and then you say to them, do you want this new job, but what the person’s really heard is, do you want some more money? and of course, they say, yes, then you bring them into that role.

As a small business, it’s unlikely that you have the resources and the skills and the capability to be able to deal with all of the different things that everybody wants, so what you need to understand as you grow your business is what type of customers do you really want to build your business on and therefore what kind of pies do they like to eat so this is a general value pie as you can see these are all of the different things that a customer might perceive as important in their decision-making process.

This week, one of the most important K.P.I.s in your business! Do you think that your team is one of your most important assets? Do you believe that your team needs to develop in order to support the growth of your company? Do you think that people can be happier and more effective in their

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.