Episode 190 – Stage 2: Become A Managing Director Effectively
Are you finding yourself running low on time, seemingly unending tasks, and about a million things on your plate? This is Stage 2 when problems start to creep in and if they go unresolved, it might cost you your business. In this episode, Adam Stott talks about how to navigate Stage 2 of growing your business where it’s important that you know how to delegate and direct workflow to other people. Listen to learn more!
Show Highlights:
- Situational awareness in your business
- Gain in control of your business and how run it effectively
- Remember your job title: Managing Director
- How expensive is getting new clients versus doing business with existing clients
- Strengthening and organizing your system for inquiry management
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 Stott:
Hi everybody, Adam Stott here. Thanks for checking out my podcast business growth secrets, you’re absolutely in the right place. This podcast is going to reveal to you all of the secrets that you’ve been looking to discover. They’re going to allow you to cure your cash flow problems, attain more clients, bring in more leads for your business and create systems and processes that give you the growth that you want. You are going to discover the business growth secrets you have been looking for that I’ve used to sell over 15 million pounds worth of products and services on social media and help clients everywhere to grow their businesses on the mark. So, let’s get started on the business growth secrets podcast.
Now as you move to stage two as growing a business will say stage two. And this is the stage where you’ve gone past being a beginner business owner. Now, stage two, is slightly different. This is where you’re running a business, you’ve got clients, you’ve got inquiries, you might have some marketing methods out there, you might have some ads go into bringing in clients, you might have some existing clients that you’ve got, and you might have transacted quite a bit of business you might have gone from six months to a couple of years, and you’re at stage two.
Now, this stage can be best described as where the business is horrible. It’s horrible like the thing is about business is on love running businesses, love the challenge, and I love these stages and understanding these stages because I think if you, if you understand this, you have that kind of situational awareness where we when you’re in stages, you can go on stage to and this is what I need to do right here. And if I do that right here and I work on this then I know that I’m going to push on and I’m going to get stage fright and of course we can go deeper into this but on sort of hindsight video again, give a bit.
But stage two is where the business owns you and what that means is you are really running low on time, you feel like you’ve got a million things to do. You’re wearing 17 hats, you’re trying to organize your marketing, you’re trying to organize your sales, you’re trying to keep up the client base, you’re trying to keep up with getting your products done, your services done, you’re trying to go back to everybody. You feel like you’re just under this never-ending avalanche of stuff to do. And some days you feel you know got forever. They don’t know where to start, some days you, you’re like oh my god I just crushed it I did everything I needed to do. And I’ve got it all sorted and, you know, and other days is like difficult for you.
Well, at this stage. This is where you’ve got to say to yourself right. And if I take you back I remember when I was going through this within my first business. And that’s how you back to 2008. A long time ago now. Okay, so tell you back to 2008 in one of my first pretty much my first business. I was at the stage where I did stage one really well. And the reason I did stage one really well is because I had been trained to do stage one. I had worked in businesses where it was my entire job to create my own business within a business. So I understood the principles of buying and building relationships, understood the principles of going out there and contacting people going out there having meetings, going out there and getting on the phone, and I just understand the general principles of looking after people and you know I’ve been trained in that spent by my training for being a Ford, from being an Amstrad for being a powerhouse, for being a BMW all these different jobs I’ve had that was basically what my role was to stage one was like, Oh my god, this is easy peasy, so it felt like easy peasy for me because that’s what I was trying to do.
When I got to stage two, right back into work about 2009. I was in 04:09 of my life. It was like, oh my God right so I’ve got an appeal and obviously being good at that I built it really quickly. And I got to this stage two. This is absolutely 100%, the stage where you are now starting to rather than having the business on you, you’ve got to start to gain control of the business. And if you gain, when you gain control of the business, means that you’ve got made sure the functions of the business are running and running effectively. Now the way that you get the functions and the functions that business run and effectively, is you have to build a team. You know you wouldn’t go out play football match with just you on your own we get 11 players you get absolutely hammered right, so you won’t do that or you build a team to go and compete in that football match. And you wouldn’t be trying to score the goal and try to run back to your own goal and try and save the dollar as well. You’ve been trusting the goal keeper to do that.
So, this stage, you’ve got to understand you got to look back to the lessons of stage one and so why were we getting inquiries. Where are we getting sales? Why are we getting people coming to us? Because you build that pipeline where you had those activities going out, creating those reactions. If that’s stopped at stage two, and you’ve kind of fallen flat on that stage it’s because you’ve got nothing in there. So you need to go and even bring some people in to go and perform those 05:30 of going out and making those activities happen to bring some people in to get your mark and gun to generate your inquiry. But if I might mean and you’ve got to make that gun happen. And that’s where you’re going to have to learn to manage your team and build your team and start to gain more control of your business by working from people. And I’ve always said it’s stage two, you got to remember your job title and a lot of people are watching, Hey man What do you mean, what’s your job title for most of you are business owners have a lot of you will be managing director, and this is the key right, managing means you have to manage the business and director. What does director mean, well the director means you need to direct the activities doesn’t mean you have to do the activities and you need to direct them. So, by you directing them. This is where you have to direct workflow for other people. And by directing that workflow for other people. That’s when your business starts to grow and you start to create these other parts within your business. Okay, so that’s how you’re going to start to grow stage two, and that’s where you got to start doing some of the things like looking after your low hanging fruit, so stage two business, and a business that’s already got clients, and it’s already got a small database, even if it’s a small database, you need to go and talk to that database needs to go and have conversations with that database. You need to be setting up mechanisms to be talking to them, and everyone’s like, well, should I be using automation to do this work independently if you have the time and the money to go and set up great let’s get it. If you don’t get on the phone, texting yourself, start working yourself and you are, you know, or get the people within your managing to go and do that and contact that database for you right, but low hanging fruit is when you’ve got opportunities, and I see business owners do this all the time. Instead of going back to the opportunities, you’ve got, instead of going and talking to the people that have inquired previously, instead of speaking to your existing clients. Instead of talking to your clients about new products or new services, you’ve got people that like you, people that know you, people that trust you, instead of going back to those people instead of emailing those people instead of texting them instead of ringing them, you go out and you try to get an entire new suite of clients from scratch, you know, and if you, if you’re doing that, you’re actually just making things harder for yourself.
And the reason that you’re making things harder for yourself right is because it’s been proven that it’s seven times more expensive to get a new client, than it is to keep an existing client. And I think that you have to have an emphasis in stage two on retention and going back to your existing clients and looking after your existing clients, and, you know, you go to existing clients first, because they’re often your best source of you having a relationship with somebody, and this is a thing, this how you messed up. You know how many of you honestly, you know, just be be honest and be transparent because every single person in the world has how many you’ve had an existing client, and you’ve messed it up a little bit. Even if you have, it’s still easier, and still cheaper for you to rebuild that relationship with that client than it is go and find a new one that doesn’t know you are, because people prefer to buy from people, and people prefer to buy from people they know and they prefer to do business with people that they know. And I think that’s really important, because one of the hottest things right now is freelancing is why actually Southern work out and get somebody to do some work for you and that way you pay them a much smaller proportion than having someone employed full time.
You could do that we do database, you could do that getting people to call your database, you could do that getting people to text database. Look how easy this is, have you heard of me. Put easy again in the comments I can see it right, because this is the thing. If we make business fun, and we recognize it doesn’t have to be hard all the time, then it actually isn’t that hard it’s actually quite easy. All you’ve got to do is say is this is so true. All you got to do is write out a text message that you would like to say to your existing clients about new product or a new service either a text message or an email, wherever it might be, and you write it out, and you put a little bit of thought into it and you communicate what you want to communicate in a nice way, you keep it simple. And then you go and employee VA someone’s gonna cost you virtually nothing to go and talk to the 700 people that you’ve ignored for the last year, out of that VA who you kind of say 10 pounds an hour. If you get one in the UK, whatever it might be. If it takes them to go and contact those 700 people individually. Even if you ring them, text them, email them, and they go out and they contact those 700 people for you. How many inquiries will you get from that 700 people? You got to see you got to list the 700 people, we get the 10 pound that I had to go and contact them to they say the lady does too and they do the gentleman must be correct it, does 10 hours’ worth views it costs you 100 pounds. Or maybe they do 20 hours’ worth 200 pounds. Before those 200 pounds they contact 700 people for you. How many inquiries will you get from those 700 people? Take a guess in the comments. But let me tell you, you’re going to certainly be able to go on more than 200 pounds that you invested in new business and new sales and new relationships from the work that you put in, and again, this is prospecting through someone. Remember the concept Managing Director not managing I do everything. All right. And if we employ these kind of techniques and strategies. It really is very easy to go out and make these things happen, right so existing clients, and then guess what, this is another thing that a lot of people ignored as well, is any recent lead? You’ve had any leads that you’ve had that you haven’t gone back to and it all the inquiries. And I think this is something that people really need to get organized on a lot of the time was when certainly when I start coaching or training a bigger business, one of the things I will always look at you quality management.
You want to be making sure every time you receive new inquiries, you’re making those new inquiries you’re following those new inquiries, and you’ve got a process for moving them along. So you continue to contact them and you don’t lose the trail with those people, and you want to have a organized system for keeping up with your inquiries in your management, and the management of your inquiries. Now some of you, you’re going to use CRM system for this. Some of you are going to be okay on one computer system. There are going to be some of you that, and I know this because I personally still use written word in addition to a CRM system, there’s some people that only remember things if they write things down. And if you need the written word in order to remember things you want to be writing down every inquiry, every person you speak to you want to be setting up a follow up date for those people. You want to be following them through because organization is very important. I bet there’s quite a few of you that are watching tonight, let a few things slip through the net. In the past, where you’ve let inquiries that were really interested in your products, really interest your services, you let them slip through the net and if you do that, you know, you’ve got to start from scratch again to go and generate that interest again. And this is the thing when you let someone slip through the net and you’re done, go back to them, and you don’t take the course inquiry seriously, even if you wanted to, but you just get really busy there say, that person really doesn’t want to bother you down the line so Oh, yeah, I want you to do 12:56 and even come back to me. And then you kind of saw that scene.
Now if you’re a much bigger business or a huge business. And, you know, then that might end you have lots of systems, you have sales teams and people to deal with this stuff then that’s understandable. But if you’re in the beginning stages, you should be treating every single lead, you should be treating every single contact, you should be treating every single inquiry as absolute gold dust right in the beginning, every single inquiry you get is an opportunity for you to go and build a relationship with that person. And this is a thing that the reason you can’t overlook that. And the reason this is so important is that you never know who that person is that made that inquiry to you they could become your biggest ever client, they could be the person that goes and recommend you to like 10, 15, 20 people, they could be the person that you know makes an introduction for you there’s completely life changing. You didn’t go back to him. You know you can’t do that and you got to make sure you stay organized and you have a real process for staying organized. That’s really important and organizations also a little bit about organization there. A couple other things I’ve got in here, which we’ll just say from from the actual book itself is, you know, your activities, one of the things we document in here is your activities. What are your social media activities going to be? What your story activities going to be? What are your new lead activities? What are your activities that you’re going to put in place? And what are the five relationships that you need to touch base with? Who are the five people that you have a relationship with that you’ve missed that you haven’t touch base?
I designed these around the way I think and the way I think is I always think about relationships, like, if I’ve got a relationship with somebody who’s important. I don’t want to just let that fizzle out. I want to make sure that I’m touching base with those people on a regular basis and if it’s been a little while I’m going to put that in there and I’m going to say right and it’s been a while, you know when you have that feeling, how many you had that thought before. And it might not even be in business model I really need to speak to 14:56, I really do need to speak to them, how many of them that before. You tell me in the comments. A lot of you will. And I certainly have, you know, some of that I certainly do. And for me, having a note that down and making sure I do touch base with them is a really good habit to practice a really good having something that you can do on an ongoing basis.