Create Focused Growth With A Business Coach

Create Sustainable Growth + Business Coach

Now it’s time for you to roll up your sleeves and get to work on the homework from your business coach. You must define how your business will provide a memorable experience for your customers that is consistent with the emotions you want them to feel and the experience you want them to have when they think about your business. To turn your ideas into a visual that can keep your company focused, take a moment to define the overall experience, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the interactions, and the emotions you want your customers to have when engaging with your brand.  Do this by filling out the Branding Experience Worksheet found at: www.Thrive15.com/BrandingExperienceWorksheet.

In order to turn your Branding Experience Worksheet into reality, you are going to need to create detailed business coach checklists for each aspect of your branding experience with a quality control / accountability loop to ensure that the “brand promise” you make to your customers is never compromised. To improve the quality of your life by 2%, we have made an example Checklist for Implementing the Branding Experience available at: www.Thrive15.com/ChecklistForImplementingTheBrandingExperience

5.14 – Business Coach Truth: The Customer Will Only Pay for Experience They Want

Now before you start getting “too mystic” about those elements of the branding experience you want the customer to enjoy, please understand that the customer is the boss. You must allow the customer and their emotional and practical needs to dictate how you brand your business. If you open up a quick oil change and car maintenance business and your daughter is obsessed with princesses so you decide to brand your quick oil change and car maintenance business based upon her love of princesses, you may be in for a rude awakening and a bad reception from your customers. Perhaps your customers will appreciate the fact that your team of technicians is wearing pink and the “Nutcracker Suite” is playing overhead at all times. However, if they don’t understand how the theme works in conjunction with the products and services you are offering, you cannot be offended or completely unwilling to accept feedback from the customer. You must provide a product, service and brand that your ideal and likely buyers love.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” -Sam Walton (American businessman and entrepreneur best known for founding the retailers Walmart and Sam’s Club)

One famous example of a brand no longer meeting the customer’s needs is Harley Davidson. In 1969, Harley Davidson was purchased by American Machine and Foundry. When AMF bought the company, they streamlined production, decreased the size of the workforce and attempted to build expensive motorcycles designed to compete with the Japanese high performance motorcycles. Owners of Harleys revolted and hated the look, the quiet sound, the feel and overall direction that the company was headed. The company nearly went bankrupt and AMF ended up selling it to a group of 13 investors led famously by Willie G. Davidson and Vaughn Beals. The new owners refocused Harley on producing loud and massive motorcycles. By the time they introduced the “Fat Boy” motorcycle to the market in 1990, Harley Davidson was once again the leader in the heavyweight motorcycle category. Remember, give the customers what they want and they will happily pay for it.

Phase 3

6.0 – Business Coach Advice: Taking the Limiters Off of Your Growth

Alright, now that we have determined what our ideal and likely buyers want, hopefully they are starting to buy our products and services from us often enough for us to be able to make a profit (although at this point, it’s probably a small one). Now it’s time to teach you how to quickly identify and eliminate barriers, limiting beliefs, and systems that are causing your business to become stuck or to grow at a very slow annual growth rate. After working with thousands of companies, the Thrive15.com Mentors and I can all confidently say that you will never do this if you do not consistently schedule a specific time in your calendar to intentionally compare the direction your company is actually going versus the direction you had planned for the company to go.

“Drifting, without aim or purpose, is the first cause of failure.” -Napoleon Hill (Bestselling author of Think & Grow Rich)

Schedule a weekly, one hour or 90-minute recurring business coach meeting where you look at big wins of the week, the status of your team’s key performance indicators, any big issues or burning fires that need to be solved, any low hanging fruit that your sales team needs to focus on, following up on the status of action items from last week, and assigning action items for the following week. To help insure that your weekly meetings have a concrete and definitive agenda, we have provided the Perfect Weekly Meeting Agenda Template at www.Thrive15.com/ThePerfectWeeklyMeetingAgendaTemplate.

The items to be covered during each Perfect Weekly Meeting include:

• Big wins of the week
• The vision of your company / why your business exists
• What problems are your ideal and likely buyers willing to pay to solve?
• The status of key performance indicators (quantifiable sales numbers and key performance metrics)
• Biggest limiting factors
• Burning fires
• Low hanging sales fruit
• Follow-up action items (did everyone get their assignments done?)
• Assign action items (who, what, when?)

Your commitment to follow this agenda each week will keep your company from ever drifting too far away from your core customers, your core vision, your core brand and your core values. However, there is much in the way of practical actions steps that must be taken after these meetings if your company is going to succeed and truly grow quickly. First up is the area of HR…ahh…human resources. From my experience coaching companies all over the planet, I believe this is perhaps the single most challenging aspect of running a business, once you have figured out how to consistently produce and sell a product or service that the marketplace wants. Without quality and well-trained people in place, your business systems and visions will eventually die. However, do not get overwhelmed by the “BIG IDEA” of hiring people. To improve the quality of your life by 3%, I have broken up the entire human resources system into four segments:

• Recruit
• Hire
• Inspire
• Fire Those You Cannot Inspire and Who Cannot Do What Is Required

[1] Fill out Branding Experience Worksheet

[2] Create Checklist for Branding Experience

[3] Create Perfect Meeting Agenda for use every week