What is the best thing I can do for my business right now?
This week has been somewhat magical because it finally dawned on me how I can help so many more people, so much faster, and with lasting impact.
I'm talking a lot. A lot a lot.
For years I have wanted to find a way to take my stuff – all my ideas, strategies, tools – and condense the outcome into a framework that helps any small business owner easily see what they should do next.
But the core idea never came. It was like looking for something that didn't exist. I now knew what Alchemists must have felt like when they could never make gold from lead after years of experiments and searching.
And after almost a decade it was really starting to get me down. I was doubting myself and wondering if what I did was even helpful. That's why a few short weeks ago, I was considering giving up altogether - like literally shutting down all my Deep Dives, all my one-on-one clients, everything.
I was on the verge.
But then I left for Scotland and left behind my computer and all my work responsibilities. I turned off my work brain for 9 straight days.
And then on the last day my pen just started moving. I wrote down as many thoughts as I could catch as they flew through my head: all my scattered ideas, all my wishes for my clients’ success – how I wanted them to see their own exciting possibilities through my eyes.
(I get so excited for my clients. I'm their biggest cheerleader - at least I'd like to think that.)
I wrote down all the patterns that I saw, all the strategies that went sideways, all the talents of my clients and how those gifts showed up in their business.
I wrote for hours.
It wasn't a straight line. There was no single path through any of the words in my little orange notebook, but I kept going. It was circles of logic and feelings that assembled no coherent story.
But then... all the pieces gently began to fall into place on a single piece of scratch paper. I was making a table that would help a business owner decide if they should address cost or sales, but then I realized I was asking the wrong question.
In fact I knew it was the wrong question because I've been raging against this question for years, decades!
It's not a Revenue versus Cost question. You can’t “Fix” Revenue without messing with your costs, and you can’t “Fix” costs without messing with your revenues.
And what about cash? We know revenue is meaningless, profit is a theory, and cash is king. So why on Earth would this ever be part of my framework?
It's not. It never has been. And here I am trying to shoehorn it into an “easy-to-understand” tool.
Well pthtpfhtt to that.
The right question is much easier than that to answer. It's much simpler. And you don't even have to “know your numbers" to answer it.
Ready?
This is it. This is the question that every small business needs the answer to:
“Should we be working on Growth or Profit?”
As I started playing with this Growth/Profit idea I noticed a few things as I thought back to my clients’, my friends’, and my own experiences.
It seems that every time I / we / they tried to:
do all of the things that fix all of the things,
didn't do either, just chugging along without specific growth or profit strategy, or
we're concentrating on the wrong one,
the results were abysmal at best.
The entrepreneurs who were killing it?
They were specifically focused on Growth or Profit... And it's also just what their business needed (not the person, not the people, the business).
Your business has very specific needs and these specific needs are different for everyone, but there are only two types of needs: GROWTH and PROFIT.
And here’s the paradox: You can only get both by focusing on one. The right one.
Sure — this is essentially what my Deep Dives have helped my clients with all along, but we were taking the Long Way Around by cleaning up their numbers, making them usable, forecasting the future with different strategies and options, visualizing how the time and money was going to work in the coming months, and – holy cow – did they know their business from inside out and backwards at that point, but ultimately we were getting to the answer of the question:
“What is the best thing I can do for my business right now?”
For years I struggled not being able to serve more people because there is no way I could lower my prices and get all of those businesses data ready for one-on-one Deep Dive, and commit all that time. I was so stuck in the belief that if your books aren't clean we can't get answers.
I’m an accountant by training, for Pete’s sake! The numbers HAVE TO BE IMPORTANT!
So here we are: The Growth/Profit Paradox™:
Turns out that the best way to get both GROWTH and PROFIT harmoniously in your business is to focus on the one your business needs.
How can you tell what it needs? It’s really quite simple. If you want to find out which type of your business falls under go take this quiz: growthvsprofit.com.
In the past few weeks I've talked to quite a few of you and many others to stress test my theory.
And each one of you/them had a moment. A beat where they can see some scenario from their past so clearly. Here’s some that I jotted down:
“I wish I had this pounded into my brain sooner.” (That makes it sound like I had to force feed the concept to him. I didn’t. This was 1.5 minutes into our conversation.)
“This made me understand all of my missteps I’ve made in my businesses.”
“I literally drove my business into a wall.”
Susan said: “This is exactly what I needed to know. That was so easy.”
So go take the quiz. It takes about 45 seconds. At the end of it you can even get a sample of a Profit Action Plan or a Growth Action Plan, and find more information on both types of strategies so you can align your results with great strategies.
I am so excited for you and so many others to have a short cut design to designing better tailor-made strategies for your business
After you take the quiz, maybe ask some of your business friends if they agree with the results, and let me know how it goes!
I am rooting for you!