Time To Transform Your Business

If you read my last post on Blueberry Hill and how they found the strength to change from being risk averse in order to achieve their dreams, you’ll want to know what the secret ingredient was.

Time out

Time - that most precious commodity. Most business owners and drivers have the creative talent to take their business to the next level, but more than often they don’t have the time needed to let that creativity really breathe. To breathe like it did in the early days when great ideas built their business on the back of some hard graft. But that was then and this is now. Now all their time is spent running the business, keeping it on an even keel, fire-fighting, calling customers. Where did the creativity time slot go?

They've got the answers within themselves but they’re so wrapped up in running their business to think about anything else.

Creative thinking

Enter the commercially creative Financial Director for a few minutes. We set about facilitating ‘time outs’ where they can think creatively about their business for half a minute, half an hour or half a day. Time after time it’s fascinating to see how their old business creativity genes start kicking in and dreams start forming in front of your eyes. But then I like to make sure we act quickly and turn those half ideas into smart, solid plans for the business. From the plans come the strategies and I make sure that they’re held accountable to seeing that those strategies are executed within a set time frame. Dreams don’t get anyone anywhere – but plans do.

Now we’re talking business.

Ali

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Risk Averse Is The Biggest Risk Of All

Let me tell you about a company I’m working with. For confidentiality let’s call them Blueberry Hill for this blog post. Blueberry has five Directors and make decisions on a consensual basis. They are all hitting their fifties and when I first went to see them they all had a shared ambition to exit in three to five years time. But (and this was a big but), they had no plans to grow the business in a way that would enable them to realise that shared dream. Why? Because they were risk averse and their product offerings had consequently grown stale. They thought they were swimming hard but they were just treading water.

I sat down with them, and they talked me through how they wanted to realise X million out of the business. Then I talked them through how, on their current growth path, they were not going to get anywhere near achieving their dreams. 

Expanding horizons

That got their attention. Now they were interested enough to spend some time and energy thinking creatively. Thinking about what else they could do, what they could change, how they could capture more market share and crucially how they could engineer an increase in profitability. That led to a really fascinating session where they moved radically into widening their horizon from Business to Business commerce to include the Business to Consumer sector. That was new for them!

Blueberry Hill is now well on the way to taking those guys to the place they always dreamed about. That's the difference sitting down for a chat with a creative Financial Director can make.

Fancy a chat, FD Centre style?

Ali

Fuelled by Tinderblogs.com