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Passion is a powerful force, no doubt about. It’s what gets many of us started in business, and the love for what we do is what keeps us going when business life kicks us fair square in the you-know-where. But is passion enough for a profitable, successful business for the long term? Hell no. Beyond passion, a business needs strategy, forecasting, data and logic, and my clients are people who reach out for help when they know they can’t keep running on passion alone.
Speaking of passion, I absolutely love my work. For 20+ years I’ve worked with people in small business. The people I work with are driven and motivated. At the crux of it, they do work they love and they want their business to be a tool that supports them financially (but of course!) as well as being a way to make a difference as they deliver their zone of genius to their clients and customers. They are amazing at what they do but running a business may be something that they ‘have' to do in order to ‘get’ to the good stuff, the elements they love. This is true of both product-based business as well as service-based businesses, and it’s people across both types of business that reach out to me for my mentoring or workshops.
I work with people who know that their business isn’t as successful as it should be. Some are new to business. They may have made the transition from side hustle to business or want to scale their hobby to a money-making business model. Others have been in business for many years and the momentum and traction achieved in the early years got in the way of them actively working on their systems and processes- rather they focused solely on delivery. They work hard, perhaps too hard, but their bank account doesn’t reflect their efforts. In fact, when we deep dive into their data, some are barely breaking even, or are paying themselves an hourly rate that in any other perspective would be quite literally criminal. Burnout is another trigger for people reaching out for help- and while it’s not pleasant at all it’s often avoidable through boundaries, structures that serve and removal of processes that damage.
Poor organizational culture (and it’s symptomatic cousin, retention), is another reason people reach out to me for support to make their business profitable and sustainable. Retention in a small business can be a catastrophic expense. Recruiting and onboarding new people to your business does not come cheap, and so we need to put it place all the bells and whistles when it comes to avoiding turnover in our teams. By ‘bells and whistles’ I mean a combination of meeting your obligations while creating an exceptional organizational culture.
Some clients have back ends that can only be described as an absolute mess. Orders go missing, their paperwork is non-compliant (to put it mildly) and they’re keeping everything together with a paperclip that’s seen better days. There has to be a better way, surely? There is indeed!
I have just wrapped up my lasts lot of Business Planning workshops and why do people sign up to my Survive to Thrive Business Planning workshops I hear you ask? Well, for a number of reasons:
They feel stuck and don’t know which way is up, let alone how to move forward
They’re demotivated and bored
They’re overwhelmed
They want the sense of community that comes from group learning
Education- they know there has to be a smarter way to run a business
They want to articulate with clarity a dream for their business
They want tangible advice, education and support to grow a business
Bottom line, as the name suggests, they want to go from surviving in business to thriving, and with a whole lot less angst, burnout and stress. They want a bottom line that represents their hard work AND their expertise and they want their business to be a conduit to their lifestyle, not the other way around. They want to move past the triggers that led them to the (incredibly courageous!) place of reaching out for help, and they want to unleash their potential, and their business’ potential too.
I’ll be back with the next intake in mid-Feb 2023, so feel free to hit the waitlist button and pop your name down.