Insights from a Business Mentor Brisbane based and experienced with businesses Australia wide and four countries in the world.
You don’t start a business knowing all about how to grow and manage it, there’s a BIG (often painful) learning curve to go through.
The good news is that you can get through the learning curve with far less paid if you consider someone who has been where you are now and that person is a business mentor.
In this post, I’ll share exactly how a business mentor can help you to grow your business under these headings…
Increase of Leads and Sales
More Cash in the Bank
Happier, More Productive Employees
Faster Growth
More Freedom as the Owner
Let’s deep dive into each one of these so you can understand the benefits of each one and determine which one/s are suited to improving your business.
Increase of Leads and Sales
A business and marketing mentor can make a significant, measurable difference to the number of leads and sales your business receives, keeping in mind not all mentors have a strong marketing background.
You may wonder why you would need a business mentor for marketing considering you can outsource Google PPC campaigns, website development, SEO and social media to marketing agencies so easily.
Often the quality of marketing is not awesome, and business owners aren’t aware of it. They feel that because they’re paying good money for a marketing service then it should produce good results.
If only that were true.
Unfortunately, marketing isn’t a simple topic. It’s possibly the most complicated, comprehensive topic there is related to business success. Most marketing service providers these days aren’t that experienced, or not experienced with anything outside of their immediate service delivery area.
That’s where a business and/or marketing mentor can make a world of difference.
Every website can be improved in numerous ways that when put together could potentially increase sales by 50% or more, in a matter of weeks or months, just by making minor changes through the Admin. Because that kind of a result is uncommon, it can make it hard to believe, but that’s because few business owners have invested in a marketing mentor.
On some websites they find people contact their business through web forms, but the web form only asks for their first name and email. Often these people who submit that data would like to be contacted within 30 minutes but after not seeing anything in their inbox they simply go to another website and get help by phoning them.
Websites have dozens of opportunities for improvements and by making dozens of minor, quick and easy changes the results can be seen fast with tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Not all business and/or marketing mentors can assist you with all aspects of marketing, in fact most can’t so its important to ask a marketing mentor you’re considering what sort of results they have previously achieved with businesses with results shown in figures.
More Cash in the Bank
Cash in a business is about two different factors and increasing cash flow can be different from increasing cash in the bank.
If a business doubles its revenue, then there will be twice as much cash going through the bank, however, that doesn’t mean there is more surplus cash in the bank or that the minimum cash in the bank amount is increasing every month.
Cash flow improving strategies are therefore different from increasing cash surplus levels in the bank account.
Cash Flow Improving Strategies
Improving cash flow is primarily about being paid on time, consistently.
When customers all pay on time then the flow of cash will be consistent and make it less stressful for the business owner.
Getting paid on time can require the training of customers. People often don’t like to part with their cash and not earlier than needed. That habit can be changed and broken with very good communication with customers.
The best way to get paid on time consistently is to have it stated when you want to be paid during the sale/delivery process in writing and stated verbally at the time of the sale.
If you have it in writing in quotes provided then that helps to change the habit of delayed payment people have. However, if you state your terms of trade at the time of the sale as well as in writing it will have 2 to 3 times more effectiveness.
Cash Surplus Increasing Strategies
Probably the best strategy to increase cash surplus levels in your business is to raise your prices.
This strategy is often dismissed or ignored because of fear. The fear or losing sales because of the price rise.
Like all fears, there’s a strong ingredient of illusion because fear is really…
False
Evidence
Appearing
Real
Looking at raising prices and losing sales more, does it matter if your business loses sales, if the net profit increases as well?
That’s what happens 8 out of 10 times and that’s a good thing. If you lose sales, make more money and free up time by needing to work fewer hours, why is that a bad outcome?
It’s important to understand the potential income drop from price rise and where the break-even point is from income drop and net profit increase.
A good business mentor can provide all the facts on prices rises and the allowable income/sales drop before net profit is reduced.
Through decades of working with businesses, 7 ways to raise prices, without lowering net profits have been identified. This is one of the many strategies included in the Business Mentoring Program.
Read more about profit margins in this popular blog post What is a Good Net Profit Margin?
Happier, More Productive and Autonomous Employees
An experienced business mentor can greatly assist with ’employee engagement’ and making them happier and more productive, with less need of your supervision.
Like a sports team, a group of employees can be staff who ‘don’t give a stuff’ about the business they work for, or be passionate about the Vision and Goals of the business and work hard to see them achieved.
Your workplace environment is a significant focus of employee productivity and happiness increases.
Weekly team meetings involving every employee is a great strategy to start with. Feeling heard and listened to along with a sense of belonging and contribution are all benefits of introducing weekly team meetings, especially when figures from the business are also shared and discussed.
Happier employees are more productive and become autonomous over time, freeing up hours or days in your week.
Introducing strategies to attract, select, induce and motivate employees create tangible, measurable improvements to your business’ efficiency and can seen with big increases in the net profit margin your business operates with.
Faster Growth
The average Australian business grows by 10% increase in income per year. Often its because there aren’t many new strategies being introduced.
A business mentor experienced with mentoring hundreds of businesses will have dozens of strategies to accelerate a business’ growth.
Increasing the Net Profit by 50% is the minimum goal of our business mentoring services.
That makes the cost an investment for the mentoring, usually producing way over 100% ROI and often 1,000% or higher returns on the investment.
Business mentoring strategies to grow businesses can include…
- Lowering the Lead to Quote Conversion Rates
- Increase the Quote to Sale Conversion Rates
- Raising Prices
- Increase Average $ Sales
- Increase Average Transactions/Buying Frequency
- Improve Current Lead Generation
- Introduce New Lead Generation
- Define KPIs for Employee Roles
- Write Job Descriptions
- Create Induction Systems
- Document Procedures/Policies
- Recruit New Employees
- Run a Past-client Promotion
- Introduce an Employee Engagement System
- Create a Client Loyalty Strategy
- Reduce COGS
- Develop a Pricing Formula for Gross and Net Profit Margins
- Measure and Share Gross Margins with Employees
Under each of these strategy “Types” there are often dozens of tactics that can be applied. For example, for Improve Lead Generation a website has dozens of tactics or actions that can be applied, thanks for decades of marketing experience.
These tactics have often seen lead numbers increase by up to 50% in one month.
More Freedom as the Owner
Would you like more freedom of choice with your life as a business owner?
To be able to choose where and when and how often you take holidays in every year?
Would you like less pressure and stress and dependency of your business and employees on you?
If so then you’re looking for more freedom as the owner and that’s where business mentoring can make a big difference.
The aim in business is to have a life as the owner, not feel controlled by your business and be thinking about your business at home at night and on weekends. That’s not freedom!
Having your business operating and growing faster, with less and less dependency on you is the key to loving both your business and your life.
There’s old saying, you systemise a business 80% and humanise it the other 20% and that’s the focus of business mentoring.
We’re not born with exceptional people, marketing, selling, financial and systems creating skills, but these are all skills essential for growing your business to feel fulfilled as its owner.
These skills are what business mentoring is all about and learning how to grow and manage a business, to have it one day potentially operate without any of your time or energy.
If you like the sound of that, book in for a 15 minute Explore Call to see if you’re a good match to our business mentoring where you’ll receive a high ROI.