Transform Your Business With the How to Grow A Business Checklist

The Step-by-Step Plan to Increase Profit: Part 1. Leadership

Businesses start with great ideas. But most business owners never actually learn the 6 critical areas of business. They make it up as they go along, and it costs them. Transform your business with the How to Grow a Business Checklist.

6 Critical Areas of Business Work Together

Business works like a machine. A money making machine.

Every business has 6 critical parts:

• Leadership
• Marketing
• Sales
• Products/Services
• Overhead
• Cash Flow

When the 6 major areas work together properly, it produces revenue and profit.

To make it easy to visualize and talk about, think about the 6 major parts of an airplane.

1. The Cockpit represents Leadership
2. The Wings represent Products/Services
3. The Right Engine represents Marketing
4. The Left Engine represents Sales
5. The Airplane Body represents Overhead
6. The Fuel Tanks represent Cash Flow

For an airplane to fly safely all 6 parts must be working properly and in the right proportion to the others.

Tiny engines won’t give enough thrust for a large plane. Even with massive engines, if the wings are too small they don’t generate enough lift to keep the plane in the air. If the body is too large and heavy the plane will crash.

The same is true in business. Marketing and Sales must generate enough revenue to overcome the cost of overhead or the business will crash. But keeping ahead of overhead isn’t enough. Cash is the fuel that keeps businesses going. If a plane runs out of fuel it will crash. If a business runs out of cash, no matter how effective every other part is, it will fail.

As a business leader, every decision you make needs to take into consideration how it affects all 6 critical areas.

Part 1. Cockpit / Leadership

Understand your leadership responsibilities. Anyone who leads people has 2 primary tasks. First, to cast a CLEAR vision for the team. Second, to set expectations to achieve success. This goes for C suite executives, Department Heads, Management and even shift leaders. Anybody who has team members under them should go down the Business Made Simple Leadership plan.

Clarify Your Life Plan

Your life plan and productivity system should accomplish the following:

• Define who you want to be and what you want to accomplish in your life
• Establish a ten-year vision defining a path you can take toward your life goals
• A five-year vision allowing you to assess critical priorities to reach your life goals
• Create a one-year vision defining the pressing objectives you need to work on first
• Define your goals through the Hero On A Mission goal-setting worksheet
• Utilize a daily planner to keep focused on your life-long objectives

Take back control and create a life full of direction and meaning.  It’s time to become a hero on a mission. The one day Hero On a Mission Workshop will help you cast a vision for your life and keep you on track so you actually achieve it. 

Clarify Your Business Mission

Without a CLEAR and compelling mission statement, your mission is doomed. Make sure your Guiding Principles package includes:

• A mission statement people actually remember and actualize
• Key characteristics necessary for the leadership and their teams to embody in order to reach their mission
• Critical actions that must be taken to accomplish the mission
• A story pitch allowing the organization to tell their story in a succinct way so they can attract more resources and get buy in from stakeholders
• A theme or a “why” for the organization so the organization is built on a firm philosophical foundation

Create Guiding Principles in the 8 week Business Leadership Group to motivate and inspire your entire team.

Become a Great Communicator

Every communication needs to accomplish 3 things to be effective. It must be memorable. It needs to be interesting and it must inspire change. Make sure you know the talking points of every great communication campaign must include:

• The controlling idea
• Agitate the problem
• Define the stakes
• Position yourself as the Guide
• Provide a plan
• Call to action
• Foreshadow the climactic scene

Understand and create the key components of effective communication campaigns:

• Talking points
• Speech
• Video
• E-mail
• Social media campaign
• Press release

Communicating a message to engage an audience and get them to respond isn’t rocket science. All you need is a formula. When you understand this formula and execute it in a cohesive communication campaign, you will become memorable, interesting and you will inspire change. 

Get Communication Made Simple from Business Made Simple University.

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Continue to transform your business with the How to Grow a Business Checklist in part 2.