The Magazine for Business Owners
FLUIDBUSINESS MAGAZINE
SPRING 2016
Join us at
ness The Bus2i016 Show 1-12th May 1
Inside This Issue!
FOUR KEYS TO TIME MANAGEMENT MOTIVATE YOUR TEAM
GET FAST RESULTS
page 06
BUSINESS GROWTH WORKSHOP!
FIND OUT MORE INSIDE
THE BENEFITS OF COACHING
real account from a local business owner
Discover why
THE CUSTOMER IS KING!
CONTENTS
04 FLUID INSIDER A look into what we have been getting up to recently.
05 QUESTION TIME We ask the experts, what is the key to sustaining business growth?
06 THE BUSINESS SHOW We’re back to the ExCeL on 11th & 12th May for the The Business Show 2016
08 MOTIVATE YOUR TEAM Hugo Heij discusses how motivating your team will produce quicker results.
14 GROW YOUR BUSINESS Are you an Essex Business Owner? Read how this free workshop can help you.
16 THE LEVELS Sam Edwards, MD of Success Recruit, shares his success story.
GREAT KPI’S 18 TWO 03
10 THE CUSTOMER IS KING Never has the old adage “The Customer is King” been more relevant or true. Discover what you need to do to keep your customers coming back.
Two great KPIs for every business can adopt.
NATALIE MOORE Managing Director of Fluid Business Coaching.
Welcome to the first issue of 2016! This last quarter has absolutely flown by and we’ve had some great successes and challenges to share with you.
In February we launched the Grow Your Business Workshop (page 15) for Essex Business Owners looking to grow their business. What a fantastic turnout we had.
In this issue of the Fluid Business Magazine we share our plans for The Business Show at London ExCeL - where you can find us and what to expect (page 6).
February also saw us welcome our first external guest on to the Fluid Business Podcast. Sam Edwards, Managing Director of Success Recruit joined us to go through the benefits of business coaching. You can read the interview on page 16.
Hugo discusses the importance of communication and how to motivate your team to get better results (page 8).
Natalie Moore FBM MAGAZINE 2016 | 3
FLUID INSIDER!
Fluid Insider y CRONEY BLAURA MARKETING EXECUTIVE
We have had another exciting quarter here at Fluid Business Coaching including welcoming Cheri back from Maternity leave in January and launching the GYB (Grow Your Business) Workshop in February.
I
t’s an interesting time in the world of social media at the moment. The everchanging landscape has evolved once more, and many brands are joining the live-streaming bandwagon using software such as Periscope, Meerkat and Blab (to name but a few). At Fluid, we’ve been testing live-streaming for a while now, if you follow us on twitter, you are likely to have seen our #FluidFishFriday’s and our weekly Making of the Fluid Business Podcast.
We have some exciting plans for live streaming at The Business Show (page 06), so be sure to follow us on Periscope @FluidBC to catch us live! On 25th February we launched our GYB Workshop, at the Fluid offices (page 15). The workshop was a huge success and it was great to see so many Essex business owners preparing their businesses for growth. If you missed it, head over to www.fluidbusiness.co.uk/workshops to find out when the next workshop is.
Laura
DON’T MISS
FLUID ON PERISCOPE
FLUIDBUSINESS.CO.UK/035
TESTIMONIALS
Make sure to follow us on Periscope to stay up-to-date with interviews with the coaches, the podcast, and of course #FluidFishFridays.
POWERFUL WORDS. Are you communicating with your managers and team effectively? Catch episode 035 of the podcast to find out.
Head over to the Fluid Business website and take a look at what our clients have to say about how Fluid has helped them achieve their goals.
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COACH QUESTION TIME: THE FOUR KEYS TO TIME MANAGEMENT
I don’t have enough time, what shall I do?
ANDY SLEET Preparing Your Business for stability and sale? Speak to Andy
HUGO HEIJ Lead and develop your team on an international scale with Hugo
ANDYSLEET@FLUIDBUSINESS.CO.UK
A:
How lean is your business? Do you have effective systems in place to prevent wasting time, or like many are you over delivering? The key is to look at the ‘non value adding’ processes throughout your day. All of your working day that does not involve your core service for your customer! Reducing nonvalue adding processes makes more time for value adding which is where you make money.
PETER BOOLKAH Experiencing Rapid Growth? Speak to Peter
HUGOHEIJ@FLUIDBUSINESS.CO.UK
A:
There is a recent podcast on this subject available here: fluidbusiness. co.uk/036. Whereby a professor fills a jar with rocks, gravel and sand. The most important things in your life are the rocks. What are the big rocks in your life? A project that YOU want to accomplish? Time with your loved ones? Your faith, your education, your finances? Remember to put these BIG ROCKS in first or you’ll never fit them in at all.
PETERBOOLKAH@FLUIDBUSINESS.CO.UK
A:
If you were to draw a picture that visually represents your role in your business, what would it look like? Are you at the top of a traditional Christmas-treelike organisational chart, or are you stuck in the middle of your business, like a hub in a bicycle wheel? A hub-and-spoke model is only as strong as the hub (you). The moment the hub is overwhelmed, the entire system fails. Take yourself out of the hub and back to the top of the tree.
RAY MOORE MANAGING COACH Expert in family business, succession planning and author of The Levels. RAYMOORE@FLUIDBUSINESS.CO.UK
A:
Consider, in your business who sets your priorities and those of your team. Surely the answer should be you. One of the major attributes of successful management is the ability to choose what is the right and realistic priority from all the competing priorities that confront a business. The setting of a clear goal focuses and aligns the energy and effort of the team to achieve stunning results. So often, short term goals and tasks are set reactively in response to an event or circumstance. Work
out what external factors are controlling your priorities and your time, it may not be what you think. And remember to let go, if you are running around like a headless chicken with all of the different hats of a business on, put the hats down. Your team have been employed to wear some of your hats so give them up and let them go. As a business owner it can be hard to give up control, I often hear “but I can just do it more efficiently” You may be able to do a better job, but it isn’t efficient for you to be doing it. Train your team and delgate, delgate, delegate! FBM MAGAZINE 2016 | 5
THE BUSINESS SHOW 2016
THE BUSINESS SHOW AT LONDON EXCEL The Business Show attracts over 25,000 professionals through it’s doors with this year being no exception. Join us at the most prestigious business exhibition in the UK.
STAND 2712
1
FOR TICKETS
Ready for the Growth Challenge?
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THE LEVELS CAN YOU STEP UP TO THE GROWTH CHALLENGE By Ray Moore
2
Business Growth and the Hat Show
3
SPECIAL OFFER: The Levels
Britain’s biggest business exhibition and conference, The Business Show is back at the ExCeL, London on 11th & 12th May 2016 and we’ll be providing a great wealth of expert business advice. For us here at Fluid Business, it will be our second time exhibiting at The Business Show! If you attended last year you may remember the mayhem the Fluid StormTroopers caused! This year we will not only be exhibiting at the show, but also holding 12 business growth workshops over the course of the two days. The workshops are perfect
for those business owners who feel they don’t have enough time, feel out of control, can’t keep customers, struggle to build the right team or no longer love their business.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED Sit Down with a Coach
The workshops will cover the various ‘hats’ a business owner must wear, and the different ‘Levels’ businesses go through. Delivered in a light-hearted and humourous way by the only Levels Certified business coaches in the UK. If you’re looking to grow or improve your business, don’t miss Fluid Business at The Business Show. Catch us on stand 2712 and the Fluid Masterclass.
DONT MISS the opportunity to sit down with one of our business coaches for a chat about your business. All of our coaches are Levels Certified and have extensive experience owning and running their own businesses.Visit www.fluidbusiness.co.uk for more information or call Lynsey on 01245 423377.
Fluid Business Podcast
WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT? The Business Show draws over 25,000 entrepreneurs and SME owners looking for inspiration, expert advice and the latest products & services to help their business grow, often at specially offered discount rates for the show. Packed with seminars, workshops and live features, the show is an unrivalled hub of business expertise carefully designed to help business leaders grow, expand and improve their business. This year the show layout has been designed into highly relevant sections – Finance, SME Marketing, Your Website, Startup, and Business Marketplace – with a host of expert seminars and workshops co-located with the most relevant and exciting suppliers.
Fluid Business Coaching is situated in the Business Marketplace section at Stand 2712. Our workshops will be held opposite our stand in the Fluid Masterclass area! The Business Show is an excellent opportunity for business owners to expand their network and make valuable new connections. In total the event will host 250 expert seminars, 170 workshops, 350 suppliers and a variety of funding and networking events to encourage and equip business leaders with everything they need to realise their ambitions. Tickets for this event are free and you can register for free tickets at www. thebusinessshow.co.uk
OUT NOW weekly advice and insights from the business experts on topics such as business growth, family business, team and efficiency. Available on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud & fluidbusiness.co.uk
GYB Workshop
NEW don’t miss the FREE Grow Your Business Workshop (full article page 15). The workshop is held at the Fluid Business Coaching offices in Chelmsford. For the next workshop date visit:
www.fluidbusiness.co.uk/workshops
FBM MAGAZINE 2016 | 7
COACH FOCUS
MOTIVATE YOUR TEAM TO GET RESULTS FASTER Would you allow your vessel to leave port without telling the crew where they’re going? Hugo Heij answers that question and more on how to achieve your mission even at a times of hardship.
CONFIDENCE>ACTIONS>RESULT How to lead your team to success
I’m going to look at this by the way of a metaphor to bring some clarity and understanding to the subject. Whenever we start a journey, we are normally clear about the destination. Our car’s satellite navigation can only give us directions if it knows where we are going. This is a simple fact of life – and common sense. Now translate this to your business? Are you clear what you are heading for with your company, or have you set out on
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a journey recently, or many years ago, without actually having in mind what you wanted to achieve? In my work as a business coach, I see all too often that business owners and chief executives have no clear idea of what the end goal is. Get a clear destination as a company and then determine the best route to get there. On any journey, there will be obstacles, storms and setbacks. But only with a final destination in mind will
you be able to adjust the course and get back on track. Now this might be all completely clear to you, if the goals or ambitions of your company are written down and documented. But how are you planning to achieve those goals? We are often not able to reach those goals on our own. We need our team and subcontractors to help us. So here is the question I asked at the beginning: would you allow your vessels to leave port without informing the crew about the destination? You certainly would not! Everyone on-board a ship knows where they are going and what they need to do to get there. If you hit bad weather, all the crew will work harder. They will adjust the schedules in order to ride out the storm and reach the destination safely. Unfortunately, I have seen all too often in the companies I have worked in – and now work with – that when, figuratively speaking, the storm hits, the owners managing directors or chief executives think they are the ones who know (or are expected to know) what to do and that barking out orders is the best way to get through it. The alternative is to be clear and upfront to all your team on where the company is heading. Share your goals, involve your team in the plan of action and give them responsibility for their part in it. In that way, you will empower your team and they will help you achieve your goals. And the simple way to engage your team is this: ask them questions. Ask them lots of questions about the different options, possibilities and maybe new opportunities. Our habit is often to tell our team how to do things, how to deal with problems and to sort stuff out. In that way, teams will just get on with it and do what they have been told. By asking questions, teams have to engage their brains, which often leads to new insights, further development and learning. Team members will in turn feel valued and motivated to go the extra mile for you and the business. Overall, this will lead to increased productivity, enhanced motivation, better results and reduced absenteeism. These are the ingredients to achieve our goals and ambitions quicker and with better results.
HUGO HEIJ Fluid Business Coach Team and Communication Expert
“Teams have to engage their brains, which often leads to new insights, further development and learning.”
- Hugo Heij
FBM MAGAZINE 2016 | 9
FEATURE
CUSTOMER IS KING Exceptional, consistent experience that keeps customers coming back.
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FBM MAGAZINE 2016 | 11
Ray Moore discusses why “The Customer is King” is only the starting point. How do you treat your customers?
R
ecently we have seen many corporates realise they can only take their customers for granted for so long. Arrogance has been replaced by contrition which even their public relations teams have struggled to spin. Perhaps customer power has finally re-emerged as more and more have shown their feelings by moving to other suppliers for their products or services. That old adage “The Customer is King” has being rediscovered but in reality it never went away. It should never have lost its prominence in every business leaders mind. Surely understanding what your customers expect and then providing that consistent customer experience is the holy grail for every business owner. As many corporate businesses and indeed industries that have fallen from grace since 2008 have recently found it is much harder to regain customer trust than it is to lose it. Yes, put the customer back at the epicentre of your business universe but please, please ensure that what you put out in PR and in your marketing message is backed up in how you interact with your customers. Make what you promise and what you deliver totally aligned. Your words and actions need to be congruent. As the owner of a small or medium sized business you may be closer to the coal face and be better placed to understand what your customers expect but never become complacent
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that your customers are yours for life. Keep your finger on their pulse and always seek to improve their experience. Remember, as your business grows and you take on more staff all that hard work nurturing and growing a relationship can be tainted in a moment. Don’t think that a long term relationship can excuse taking a customer for granted. It will only work until a better alternative comes along. Great experience in the past depreciates in our memory and if replaced by current poor experience we will soon be looking for the way out! Consider those times you have felt aggrieved as a customer. It may have been something minor such as hanging on the phone to a faceless call centre or being ignored by a shop assistant who is on a very important call to a friend rather than serving you. How do you feel when you have experienced a poor service? It’s personal isn’t it, often it’s not logical it’s emotional. Learn from the mistakes of the old guard. Take time to reflect on your own business. How alive is your business to what your customers expect? Remember, “The Customer is King” is only the starting point. Exceptional, consistent experience is the end game.
STOP, REFLECT & REVIEW Invest your time wisely
“Remember, ‘The Customer is King’ is only the starting point.”
- Ray Moore
FBM MAGAZINE 2016 | 13
FREE
GROW YOUR BUSINESS WORKSHOP Don't have enough time? Feel out of control? Can't keep customers? Struggle to build the right team?
EMAIL: tee@fluidbusiness.co.uk
BUSINESS GROWTH Our FREE invite-only business growth workshop has been created for business owners who want to learn how to grow their business the right way. As a business grows it must evolve its structure to meet the challenges that growth brings. Interestingly as this growth is over a number of years it seems to be a relatively slow natural process. The transition from a small to a medium sized business (around 35 to 50 employees) entails the largest and hardest changes that a business owner will face. Up until this point changes have been brought about by reaction to the growth. New equipment, systems and staff are forced on the business by the need to keep up with growth and demands
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from customers. The owner is ‘chasing tail’ just to keep up and decisions are left until there is no choice. The cycle is growth and then invest. The hardest change is to move from this reactive way of thinking and doing to a proactive way of thinking and doing. At Fluid Business Coaching we have developed a free workshop for business owners struggling with business growth. The GYB workshop a 2 hour workshop at the Fluid Business Coaching offices just outside Chelmsford. Business owners attending can
NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY FEEL OUT OF CONTROL STRUGGLE TO KEEP YOUR CUSTOMERS STRUGGLE TO EMPLOY THE RIGHT TEAM FALLEN OUT OF LOVE WITH YOUR BUSINESS ARE YOU READY? FLUIDBUSINESS.CO.UK/WORKSHOPS
expect to have their businesses assess by one of the Fluid Business Coaches. In the free workshop we teach you how to you work ON your business, instead of IN your business. The GYB workshop will give you total clarity about what you want to achieve and why you want to get there. Now is the time to forget the fear of being found out. Invest the time it will repay you over and over again.
100% FREE BUSINESS GROWTH WORKSHOP
FBM MAGAZINE 2016 | 15
The Levels: A Story of Success Sam Edwards, MD of Success Recruit, talks to us about how Fluid Business Coaching helped his business grow using The Levels Model.
Success Recruit is a business that my wife Vicki and I run. Vicki started it in 2012 with the aim of changing the recruitment industry. In short, we want to provide a level of service that recruitment consultancies aren’t offering, we aspire to help companies find the perfect people for their team. Going back to the early days we wanted something special. My background wasn’t in recruitment, but it was ambition to own a sucessful business. Thankfully Vicky had the same ambition and she was the driver for getting the business off of the ground. Fluid Business Coaching invited us along to one of their seminars in the summer of 2013, a lot of the things that were said really resonated with the both of us. For example, how important it is not spending 60 hours a week working in your business. We really didn’t want to fall into a trap of working all the hours of the week and not having the time to enjoy what we were doing. It’s easy to just keep working away but that’s just creating an job and not a business. That is what really resonated with us, creating a business that really worked for us. Our coach asked the right questions and by sitting down and answering those questions, it opened up more questions. You realise that there is so much to it, it’s a process and I honestly don’t think it will ever stop it brings so much benefit, I don’t see why every business owner doesn’t utilise a professional business coach. We’ve now been working with Fluid Business Coaching consistently ever since, who still continue to challenge
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us! What was our mindset? What did we want to achieve? Where is the business in relation to our dream? Looking at the different areas of the business and where the strengths and weaknesses really were. It gives you in a buzz about your own business, the notepaper comes out the drawer at 10 o’clock at night and you start writing all these ideas down – that is the initial win I would say. If someone asks you, ‘what are your dreams?’ you assume you know what they are but very rarely are they actually set out on paper and there is no real detail around them. The process of actually saying in 10 years I would like to have ‘X’ is really positive, and then from that you can work back to the present day to see what you need to do today. Over the last 18 months we have had annual business plans, which we’ve achieved and we’ve got short and long-term plans that we want to achieve, having already met some of those short-term goals that we can tick off, it’s really positive. As a business owner you haven’t got anyone to pat you on the back, so sometimes you need to know that you’re doing well and you’re on the right track and having plans is a guide for that process. It definitely helps to have someone, at the very least ask you a direct question that you have to sit there and answer. It’s very easy to be in your own little cloud as a business owner and everything is fine until someone actually asks what is going on in your business, you don’t answer that question yourself.
My wife Vicky is an amazing people person and she is incredible at building relationships. One of the things that any business is going to find difficult, is finding people who are naturally good at that. Our coach asked what is it that makes Vicki special, and I always just assumed it was just something that was ‘in her’, but we wrote down the qualities and once you get that down on paper you realise there is a process behind it. Not everyone can be relentlessly positive, but everybody can make sure they are following up frequently and make sure they are making their clients feel special. There are things that everybody can do, they might
not be as naturally wonderful at it but you can put processes and procedures in place that make everybody better at it. That has phenomenally helped us and having these processes down on paper means we can achieve consistency in the business, which is key to helping us grow. Working with Fluid has helped us be proactive and efficient, rather than reactive. It’s all about delivery consistency and as a small business that is the cornerstone of what we are trying to achieve, 18 months on it’s going very well.
“I don’t see why every business owner doesn’t get a professional business coach.”
- Sam Edwards
FBM MAGAZINE 2016 | 17
TWO GREAT KPI’S FOR EVERY BUSINESS By Ray Moore, originally posted on thelevelsblog.com
I’m not a great one for business platitudes but there are a few that are worthwhile revisiting. Here’s one to consider, ready?
Put simply gross profit is what is left of the cash turnover once you have paid all the costs directly associated to those sales.
Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity but cash is king! Hope that didn’t send you scurrying for the sick bowl. However, the overuse of these sayings can diminish their underlying sound wisdom.
Gross profit is the true value added which in turn is the lifeblood of any business, it’s what pays for everything. The resulting profit then ultimately provides security for all the stakeholders of the business, the owners, employees. customers and suppliers. Profit is the pump primer required to build long term sustainable wealth for you the owner.
So, what measure do you use when you want to indicate to someone else the relative size of your business? I have found that the commonly used measure is turnover or sales. The reason being it an easy measure that really does not give away too much information to anyone but actually when comparing businesses we soon run the risk of comparing apples with pears. Interestingly, the majority of owners I meet through business coaching can state the sales figure but struggle when asked about their margin, gross profit or the mysteries of the balance sheet. Indeed many owners believe that if the sales are forever rising everything will be fine and dandy. The economic driver of every business isn’t turnover, it’s gross profit. 18 | FBM MAGAZINE 2016
In fact go one step further and strike the gross profit before ‘direct labour’ and you then have a value add measure that can be used to compare your business with different industries side by side, service industries compared to retailers compared to builders……(often the only variable portion of direct labour that is directly attributable to sales is overtime or productivity bonuses). The added value per £1 you spend on employees (including direct labour) and the value added per £1 you spend on overheads gives you two easy measures that will allow you to quickly benchmark your business against other industries allowing you to challenge your beliefs about the profitability of your company.
COACHING | E-LEARNING |
ACADEMY
Can You Step Up to the Challenge?
Fluid Business Coaching, experts in business growth, are returning to The Business Show 2016 to teach you how to grow your business using The Levels business growth model. Come and meet the experts to get your business where you want it to be.
FAMILY BUSINESS READY YOUR BUSINESS FOR SALE TEAM & COMMUNICATION
Find us at: stand 2712
www.fluidbusiness.co.uk
RAPID BUSINESS GROWTH
@fluidbc
fluidbusinesscoaching
01245 423 377