Episode 237: The Five Areas of Your Business That You Need to Work On
There are a lot of things going on that keep us business owners so busy. But the question is, are you focusing on the important areas to improve your business? Especially when you’re just starting out. Because if you work on improving these areas, you will see massive gains and wins for you and your business.
In this episode, Adam Stott shares the five pillars of business that you as a business owner need to work on. He explains how to get your message out to your ideal client down to making sure you have enough profit to continue and grow your business. Adam discussed these five areas that they focus on during the successful three-day business event in Manchester.
Show Highlights:
- How Adam started his business with just one skillset
- Find out why it is important to learn the five pillars of business
- What are the skills that a lot of people avoid but need to understand
- How to make sure you have a consistent cash flow; and
- Learn how to put a sparkle in your business
Links Mentioned:
Join the Ultimate Three Day Business Event and learn more Business Growth Secrets
Be part of our Facebook Group Big Business Events Members Network
Connect with me on Instagram @adamstottcoach
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam Stott:
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Business Growth Secret show with your host, Adam Stott. Got a cool episode for you today. We’re just going to be chatting, we’re not bringing a guest on. And I really wanted to chat to you about things that we’ve been doing over the past few days. We’ve just come back from a fabulous event in Manchester, where we had 45 entrepreneurs, business owners come and join us at our Business Growth Secrets event. It was an amazing event, we really, really dug deep into the five pillars of business, which is your business owner.
Listen to this right now, there’s five areas of your business that you need to work on, and what most people do. And if I take you back to when I started my first business. What I did when I started my first ever business is I only really had one skill set going into business, that’s I had a background. A background in sales and kind of sales. And I was good at sales. The problem with just being good at sales, you can’t really cross sell. So you have a little bit of a problem. And so one of the things where I started business rapidly realized is that if you don’t know marketing, and you can’t get yourself new clients in the door, then you’re going to struggle to make any sales, of course.
So marketing and sales make up two of the five fundamentals that you need to work on in order to grow your business. So I was in this position, when I first started off, trying to grow a business. Great with the clients I had but not having many clients, I had to go to work and really start to master marketing. So anyone I mastered marketing, was able to really capitalize on the sales skill because they work together. They’re able to market, get new clients in, sell them products or services and start to grow their business.
There are two skills that can get you going and get you started. But the third skill, which you need to work on, and make sure you know, and this is a skill that I see a lot of people avoid. A lot of people try to get somebody else to do it. And that is of course, understanding the numbers. If you’re waiting until the end of the year for your accountants to tell you that you have made any money, are you running your business the wrong way? Do you need to understand the numbers, have your finger on the pulse and know what’s going on? And make sure that you’ve got a familiarity with the numbers.
I remember when I was first starting off, this was something I found difficult. The reason that you find it difficult is it can be a little bit overwhelming when you first start a business. So all of a sudden I’m worrying about PAYE National Insurance, corporation tax. Understanding Profit and Loss is understanding balance sheets. And all of a sudden, you got into business because you had a good skill set, you knew that you could grow.
Now you have to deal with all these other things. It is not enough to just have a good accountant. You need to make sure that you have a familiarity with these subjects as well. It’s really, really important. So you know, hopefully from this episode, what I want to show you is those five pillars, you have to be somebody that understands how to market your business, how to get your message out to your ideal clients, or why they should do business with you. Make inquiries with you, you have to be able to sell in order to close that business and make sure you get new inquiries and leads.
You have to know the numbers. Because knowing the numbers means that you can keep an eye on how profitable you are, how profitable your marketing is, how profitable your sales are, and actually make the right decisions on growing your business. Now the next one that we’re working on, we’ve been there for three days, we’re taking these business owners in depth through these five subjects, his business strategy.
Now business strategy is absolutely vitally important. Because you can be great at marketing. You can be great at sales, you can know your numbers, but if you’re not profitable and you’re not making enough profit, it becomes very hard to reinvest in your business, reinvest in staff to help you grow it, reinvest in machinery, stock, whatever it might be that you need to invest. Then, if you’re not making enough profit, it becomes really difficult to actually grow that and grow that business.
So one of the things that you really need to look at is, is your business strategy, making sure that not only do you make a profit, but then you retain that profit in cash. So every single month, your bank account is going up. And obviously, there’s going to be ups and downs. But a solid business strategy means that you are increasing the amount of capital your business has the amount of money that you’re actually making and keeping a lot of people focused on profit and loss, but they don’t actually focus on is my bank account going up? Am I making money? Is my bank account increasing? Right. And that’s really, really important.
A solid business strategy will help you do that, because it will increase the profits you make, therefore increasing the amount of money you retain. Now, the fifth one, that we went into massive detail, which is really the for me, is the sparkle that you put in your business, which is branding. And for a long time, I’ve been teaching my clients how to build a brand that makes them stand out in a market that makes them dominant, that makes them be the logical choice where clients come to them, instead of them chasing clients. And this is something that in the UK, I feel that business owners don’t take seriously enough, don’t work on.
If you ask people what’s a brand in the UK, they’ll tell you the logo, or they’ll say, my website, my logo, these sort of things. But the reality of branding and good branding is it’s the perception you create in the marketplace. It is the way that you get your message across. And the way that you show your success. Show your success stories, get third party endorsements from other people saying you’re great. So your branding comes down to the awards or winning the case study job, the testimonials, the success stories, and actually showing through a third party that your business, your product, your service makes an impact and works. And we really, really need to focus on that as a business owner, and not enough people do.
I had a special guest in Manchester, who just won the apprentice. We did a big interview and we’re doing a Q&A after. And one of the questions from the audience came in, they said, look, what was the first thing that worked with you when it comes to your business. Now bear in mind, she went out of business, she’d already been running her business. Her business has had some moderate success. Before she partnered up. She’d been running for many years and then okay, with a swimwear brand. And she was doing okay. She said the first thing that made all the difference was sat down with me. And he looked at my brand new shade. He understood branding, why I didn’t understand it.
And this is the thing. If that’s the first thing a billionaire works on in our business, do you think he’s saying that you should pay closer attention to your business? Now these five things we go deep into, we show case studies and examples of our clients, how they’re made out to build brands that took them from being a, you know, a player in the market standard player to being the number one choice, we show how you can actually use your marketing to get you an avalanche of leads, increase your sales, how to put solid business strategy in place that gets you more money, keeps you more money, and how to sell your products or services in a sales process.
That means it’s repeatable and transferable that other people can do it for you. So you don’t have to be doing everything. You no I had a great time. The feedback was amazing. Over the course of the three days, everybody there was absolutely buzzing. We’ve got some great new clients joining me on the gold circle and inner circle, which is going to be fabulous to watch their journeys start to see how they grow.
So overall, really, really productive three days, we got a few more of these Business Growth Secrets events coming up. You can drop me a message on Instagram, if you’d like to understand how you can get access to that. And you just go to Adams stock coach, as at Adam Stott coach, drop me a DM. Be happy to chat with you about this event, which is changing so many people’s lives.
So hopefully, today’s Business Growth Secrets episode, we’ll keep it fairly short. But these are the five things that you need. You need to work on your marketing, you need to work on your sales, you need to work on your business strategy. You need to work on your numbers. And of course you need to work on your branding. And if you work on these five things, all of a sudden, they start working together and you improve in every area.
One of the things I explained is that business is a game of percentage gains. And some people have already gotten really busy. I don’t know if I’ve got time to work on all these different things. But this is the reality: can you improve by just 1% a month in your market? If the answer to that question is yes, and years later you’ll be 12 percent better? Can you improve by 1% a month in your sales process and the way you sell your products or services? The answer again is yes. I mean, should be 12% better, they’re improving these five areas, you’ll be a 60% better business in 12 months, just improving 1% a month, you know, and it’s so easy to do.
And once you do that, you can start to get some massive gains, massive wins, and start to see your business thrive and grow in any economy. So hopefully, you got lots of value out of today’s episode. Thanks for listening. I look forward to catching up with you soon and bringing some more coal, little snippets. And I’ve got great interviews lined up as well as weekly people coming on. So if you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, and leave us a five star review. Be very, very kind of you if you do. They want to get their message out to more people, but they can grow their businesses. And you can get permission to do that. Thanks, everybody.
Hi, everybody, Adam here. And I hope you love today’s episode. Hope you thought it was fabulous. And if you did, I’d like to ask you a small favor. Could you jump over and go and give the podcast a review. Of course, I’ll be super grateful if that is a five star review with putting our all into this podcast for you, delivering you the content, giving you the secrets and if you’ve enjoyed it, please go and give us a review and talk about what your favorite episode is perhaps every single month, I select someone from that review list to come to one of my exclusive Academy days and have lunch with me on the day meeting hundreds of my clients.
So you want that to be you then you’re going to be in with a shout if you go and give us a review on iTunes. Please of course do remember to subscribe so you can get all the up to date episodes. Peace and love and I’ll see you very very soon. Thank you.