Episode 173 – Ultimate Success Mapping Guide Part 1
Understanding yourself will have a big impact on your decision making as a business owner. In this COVID-19 Pandemic lockdown, it is the perfect time to assess ourselves and identify what qualities do we need to improve on because as your business grows, you should grow as well. In this episode, Adam Stott will teach you how to be self-reflective and understand your skill set, strengths, and weaknesses. Adam will provide different skills and qualities that you will score yourself HONESTLY from 1-10 in order for you to determine your strengths and weaknesses.
This Success Mapping exercise is what Adam Stott uses to help his clients to get clarity as business owners.
Show Highlights:
- Why confusion and overwhelm are usually rooted in weaknesses in the skillset of the business owner.
- The more the business grows, the more it demands from you
- The best way to staying in control of your business
- Managing finances is one of the most important things that a business owner has to improve on
Links Mentioned:
Big Business Events Members Network
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam:
Hello everybody. You’re with Adam Stott. I’m really pleased to be with you this evening, hope everything’s going well and looking forward to having a good chat with everybody tonight. I want to give you a little bit of an intro into understanding yourself and if you like a little test, or you like a little bit of self-analysis maybe can go in the comments and comment “test” for me. So because that’s what we’re gonna be going through tonight. I’m gonna take you through an exercise that we’ve sort of people in the past through when we’re looking to take a business owner and building forward in a really good way. What I found is when I started obviously doing these business stabilizers I kind of expected like a lot of people to be in this place where they weren’t super positive because during the first lockdown like when we were coaching, we’re training.
Many business owners during that period and helping them and I’m really open my team up for lots of extra coaching for our clients to give them extra help where they needed it. And a lot of people were in kind of in the most positive place during that period but what I have found, you know, during these lives that I’ve been doing is that people are generally in a good positive mindset. They’re taking the right actions, they’re doing the right things and it seems like everybody’s handling things a lot better this time around and I was really positive to say, especially when you’re seeing so much negativity on the news you’re seeing so much. You would think that I’m not positive but actually there are a lot of business owners out there that are still positive, that are taking the right actions that are doing the right things. They’re trying to build their businesses in the right way, do she’s really good.
You know this is a thing, whether you think it’s great or you think it’s bad, you know it’s gonna self-evidence itself in how you think you know the way a business runs and the way a business grows is his or her reflection of the business owner all the time, especially when it’s small, as the business gets larger it becomes less dependent on the business owner and the business owners mentality, because you have your teams in place, you have your managers in place, as you’re going to grow but when a business is small, you know, it’s very much influenced by your emotions and the things that you’re doing and the mentality you’re keeping as a business owner, so hopefully you’re keeping super positive, you understand the value of that, and you put in the right things in place and hopefully you are.
So what we’re gonna do tonight is we’re going to look at some stuff that we’ve done, we’ve lots of business owners in the past. We’re getting them to be a little bit self-reflective and understand where they’re at. As a business owner, what are their skills sets, what is it that they need to work on. It’s being nice and alive is going to be a good test view. So this is what we’re going to look at a bit self-reflective on business we’re going to have a look at where we currently are as a business owner.
Now, one of the most important things is that we as a business owner understand our strengths and understand our weaknesses and if we understand our strengths and weaknesses and get a real good understanding of that, then we can create some good results so we’re going to go through this in a moment. What I want to say before I go through it is this which is really important is if you’re a business owner and you’re looking to go and grow your business and you’re looking to crack on and get better results. One thing that you need to understand is the things that you’re good at, you’re good at, right your strengths are your strengths and your strengths have got you to where you are right now.
If you’re really happy with where you are right now, or you’ve created the amount of wealth that you wanted to create in your business. If you build a business of your dreams, if you have bought lots of cash in the bank and you’re killing it right, then there’s no doubt that you’ve worked on multiple different skills and you have great skills which are helping you driving your business. But if you’re not quite where you want to be or you’ve had some struggles along the way or so things have held you back a little bit in the past or there’s some things in business that really overwhelm you maybe confusion or pressure on you, then we need to realize that usually that comes from a weakness in the business owner skill set.
The more you work on yourself as a business owner and you hear this, there’s a lot of people that throw out like, you know, invest in yourself, work on yourself as a business owner, all that stuff and it’s true, right, but this is the reason why what I always like to do is go a bit deeper and say what is the meaning behind that statement and the meaning behind that statement is frankly, this is, as a business the more you grow as a business, the more demands a business has on the business owner, it demands that the business owner becomes better at managing finance, it demands that the business owner becomes better about managing people, it demands that the business owner becomes better at managing staff, managing problems, dealing with conflicts, dealing with issues.
As your business grows, you have to grow as an individual whenever you don’t grow as an individual and your business keeps growing and growing and growing. Then what happens is the business outgrows you, now you might have heard the phrase in the past, you create a monster right, so what that means is that monster is controlling you rather than you controlling it. Now, a good business and a good business owner understands and understands really well, that they have to be in control of the business and the best way to stay in control of your business and the best way to make sure your business is run as efficiently as possible, is to keep working on yourself, and most importantly, work on the areas that you might well be weak.
Confront those areas that you’re weak and say okay right you know this is an area I might not be great at, but I can choose to not be great, I can choose to ignore it, but later down the line is going to hurt me. I think it was, I can’t actually remember the phrase but someone says, ignorance is not bliss, right, it isn’t. Ignorance is potentially pain. Ignorance is where you’re going to fall down, ignorance of a subject or knowledge or not having the information is where you’re going to get hurt. So ignorance is what gets you hurt. So we need to make sure that if there’s an area that you don’t feel like you’ve got the skill set and if there’s an area that you feel that you’re going to struggle in business then that’s an area that you’ve got to tackle. You’ve got to go out there you’ve got to work on it, you’ve got 05:47 your hat on. Which is why we’re going to look tonight, a bigger view, we’re going to look at an overall view as a business owner, we’re going to look at what some of the skills are that you need to have. And we’re going to see where you stand up and you’re going to give yourself a score out of 10, and you get a mark these scores and if you want to you know we can mark them out and you put me in the comments 06:03 this one or one of these wherever you want, and actually go along with it so I think you get a lot of value from it. I think it’d be really good for you.
Let’s get started. Let’s start cracking on and let’s really have a look at where we’re at on these skill sets. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at a business owner so as a business owner, you need to be making sure that these skill sets are in your toolbox if you got. Imagine you got a toolkit of the things that you’re able to do you’ve have a toolkit of the things that you’re able to manage and you’re able to put in place. And then we imagine like how good you are actually using that tool. So, you know, are you 10 out of 10? Are you 1 out of 10? And what we’re going to do is we’re going to go through them, and we’re going to mark them up.
First of all what you are like managing finances, now this is one of the most important things in business. Business at the end of the day is all about numbers. And if you know the numbers, you can grow, you can scale, and you can drive good business. I’ve seen very talented business owners, I’ve seen very smart people, I’ve seen great marketers, I’ve seen great salespeople that have fallen down because they can’t manage their finances in the right way. So are you a scale, where are you? Are you a 1? Or are you a 10 out, you know, where are you? Are you a 7? Are you are an eight? Is this something that’s strength of yours? Is this something as a weakness?
The next one, let’s get to is raising money or being able to find money and this can go into so many different ways because as you grow a business you’re going to need to embrace raising money, you’re going to be able to raise money and raise finances for your business, you’re going to need to make sure that you are investing in the business in the right way, you’re raising money from collections or sales, all these different things is number one. So where are you on that? Are you a 1 or are you a 2? Are you a three? Or are you a four, a five, or six? What number 07:48 put that in as well?
Next one, what you like at managing stress? Because the thing I love about business and the reason I love business, and I love being in business I love running businesses and I love helping people grow businesses, is because I find it a challenge and I think it’s always challenging, it is always challenging because circumstances are always changing, goalposts always moving, you got different things happening all the time in business that change it up and you know you’ve got that constant challenge, you’ve got that intellectual challenge.
A lot of people, I think in a lot of areas are not so in a you know they’re not really very good at taking on that challenge so they get very they find it difficult to manage stress. If you find it really difficult to manage stress or you find that you’re very emotional when it comes to in business and stress is something you find very difficult then business is going to be a challenge for you. At the end of the day that is the case and you’re saying 08:46 two or three out of 10 of this area. What do you need to do well, you need to start working on some coping mechanisms for that and how you deal with stress because business is always going to build and bring you new challenges. I think that’s really important thing, give yourself a score on that one.
Next one is speed of action. How quick do you get things done? And this is the reality as a business owner, business about speed I tell people this all the time. The business is about speed, you know you can have the best idea in the world and be the most talented person in the world when you sit on everything you never do anything. You’ll never ever gonna get anywhere, so always remember one of the first business case we did we had a guy, come on he seemed like a really smart guy, really nice guy, you know seem really intelligent, and he started talking to me about something that he was doing and I thought fantastic, this sounds good, this sounds good. He says yeah and I’ve had the idea for seven years, actually seven years, you know, seven years you’ve built it. You’ve grown it and hopefully you’ve done the right things you’re probably selling it, and then you started it, right.
This is the thing, as a business the faster you do things the faster you take action, the quicker you get stuff done. The quicker you grow. If you’re somebody that constantly say some things he doesn’t take any action, you’re not going to get the results. Other people are going to walk away your market share. So, are you somebody that’s sitting on things all the time not taking the actions you know you need to take? Is this you? You know, is this sound like you? You’re a bit slow moving? Do you find decisions really difficult? Are you indecisive, you know, because these sort of things stopping you from taking action gonna stop you walking away with a win. All right, you know, business is a game. And I’ve said this lot in the past to, business is a game. You need to play business like a game and if you play business and you don’t play business like a game I mean you wouldn’t sit there in a Monopoly board and wait seven years to take your turn, would you not you roll the dice you crack on you get on with it. That’s what you need to be like in business as well everybody. So speed of action is another one that’s really important.
Okay, so next one is networking and networking I don’t just mean can you walk into a room and walk out or business cards or I that might be someone’s definition of networking but for me, you know, networking, a one of the things that is was out shadow of a doubt super-duper important in businesses relationships, you know, the more you build relationships. The more you build relationships with good people and with influential people, and the more you spend time building relationships, the better business you build the better business you become. And I think this is incredibly important and it’s overlooked far too much.
I think I’ll sign on other on business the other day you want to be spending three hours a day going after new business so you end up going out of business right so you want three hours a day you’re not going off to new business or four hours a day building upon the relationships that you have in business, you know one relationship, one person, one chance, you know one meeting can actually change everything for you and a lot of people don’t put their time into building relationships with people where this is really important. And a lot of this can be sparked from networking and getting out there and meeting new people and having conversation some you’ll be like well I can’t do that a lot of them right now well you know you’ve got a phone, you’ve got zoom, you can start having those conversations, you start making things happen and you know I really encourage you to do that spend time building relationships because partnerships and joint ventures, things like this can really make a big change for you.
Next one is all you like a recruiting, I always remember when I first went first employee I ever took off. I’ll be brutally honest with you right, first, before he ever took off. Before I started my first ever business I’ve worked in sort of corporate environments, I’ve worked in the automotive sector and I’ve done really well I’ve been really successful. After my first employee and he’s a lovely guy, still friends to this day right but straight away, you know, up to this person I thought I must be the worst manager in the entire world because I just 12:32 get this guy to do what I want to do.
You know, sometimes, if you put the wrong person in the wrong box and you don’t follow the principles of recruiting, you can get a lovely person but you can very much get the wrong result so building the right people in your team and making sure you get the right people around your center is really important to want to make sure that you are recruiting the right way, you’ve got a good recruiting process, and you understand, you know how to do this in the right way because that’s going to help you.
The next one is leadership as a business owner, you are the leader you are the person that steps up, you are the person that grabs the business by the scruff of the neck and leads it in good times and in bad times, right. So leadership is a vitally important thing. And if you work on your leadership, being a good leader means that you step up you make things happen and you go out there and you build your business in the right way, right. So what’s your leadership like there we go management skills like, are you a good manager? Do you manage people the right way? Do you get the best out of them? And do you manage yourself in the right way? You know, do you actually manage yourself? You manage what you do in the right way that’s important.
So, what your sales skills like. And look, fundamentally, this is what I’ve always said and I always will say, one of the most important things in business it’s just one of the most important things is that you need to be able to sell; you need to have sales skills. I’ve seen people that lack in many areas in terms of the way to run a business where I grow a business but because they’re great salespeople they’re able to sell their ideas, oversell their vision, they’re able to sell their products or services, sell to investors. So everybody because they’re good salespeople, and this is a very important skill in business and for me, it’s one of the most important skills in business and if you don’t embrace this. And often, the question is well Adam, can you learn this? Of course you’re gonna learn it, you know, of course you can learn to become better at sales, you know, some people just need a switch in their mentality when it comes to sales, some people have this mentality that really holds them back around sales, where if you get this right and you start to be able to, you know, sell more efficiently and more effectively and communicate better. You see all the results in your business, actually go on in your life graph so this is really important sales skills are super important. Give yourself a score on that one.
So, you know, look, I know that lots of people suffer with sales like loads of people there’s somebody that 14:49 do anything except sell like, I’ll just give me anything else to do except sales so I don’t want to sell monster, you know, I certainly don’t want to sell themselves you get this all the time you get sphere of sales, very importantly basis, very important that you learn this topic, you know, it can be an absolute game changer in your success in business because at the end of the day what grows a business marketing grows a business sales versus a business.
If you’re not a great marketer and you’re not very sales person, you’re going to struggle to grow your business I guarantee you it and there two activities that you’re going to really struggle to sub out someone else well, you can sell stuff for me. You know, it’s like, well if you can’t sell it, how are you going to get the person to understand how to set it and how can you come to market my business 15:26 you use that the ideas, usually from the 15:29 that is the market and that is 15:31 salesperson 100% really important stuff there.