Get your business back on track | QuickBooks Connect 2021

[Music] hello and welcome to this session dream plan do review i'm carl reader and i've recently written bossett control your time your income and your life and today i would like to share with you some of the models and principles that i explain in the book to help you get your business not only back on track but ready to flourish throughout 2021 and beyond now i'll share with you a bit of an introduction about myself and why i've been asked to speak here today but i think before i do that it's actually really important to just call out the fact that we are all going through some challenges at the moment you know coronavirus hasn't discriminated against any kind of individual or business it's um it's been a very real public health and economic crisis but we are all going through as we speak and for me what i want to do is to arm you with some tips and tricks that you can take away and implement in your business so that you can come out of this the other side fighting because regardless of what anyone says we've all had our own war stories through coronavirus we've all been a bit battered and bruised but we've got to this stage now and with an understanding of how we control the situation that we're in we will be able to come out with it having made sure that our business is set up for success so my journey and i will take it up to february 2020 that's very deliberate because not only is it a point where many of us realized that this corona virus thing that was hearing on this news you know the um the virus that was going on at the other side of the world was a real issue we started to realize that actually this isn't something that's um out of sight out of mind but we had no idea at that point i think it's safe to say of the impact that it would have on us all you know who would have predicted lockdowns who would have predicted the economic system effectively grinding to a halt now february 2020 was also the point that i completed the manuscript for bossett it's safe to say but when i got it back for first review in june the world was a very different place so as i said i'm carl reader and i fell into business by accident in fact as a 15 and three quarter year old i left school with no intention of going into business in fact all i wanted to do was earn some money to do the stuff that teenagers do you know to go out have a bit of fun to be able to buy stuff my friends couldn't and so on and the academic world simply didn't do that for me so i did what all budding entrepreneurs do and went for yts in hairdressing for those of you who aren't old enough to know what a yts is it was the government's apprenticeship scheme and i earned the grand total of about 30 quid a week and in the late 90s that is as low as it sounds and i'll be honest i wasn't cut out for it i lasted all of six weeks anyway went back to school muddled through my exams and had to get a real job unfortunately at that point i still had no idea what i was going to do and that's not unusual is it let's be honest who at 16 knows what they're going to do but i went to the job pages i would scan through the newspapers look for jobs ended up having three interviews two accountancy firms and one in the army i was apparently underweight for the army so ended up falling into accountancy but not knowing what an accountant was what they do how they do it and so on i didn't even know what a set of accounts or a tax return was hey i was a 16 year old kid and i realized pretty quickly that i didn't enjoy accountancy but what i did enjoy was the fact that i could go out to business owners and with the innocence of youth i could ask them the simple questions that perhaps others don't i could ask them why did you do this why did you do that how do you do it and before long something magic happened not only was i enjoying what i was doing but i was actually gaining a world-class education in business from the tens bend hundreds and thousands of business owners that i spoke to back to my journey 2007 bought out the business that i was in at that point it was ticking along but it was a fairly small business and in total in my journey in that business we scaled it up from a team of eight up to a team of 60 it's now a multi-million turnover blah blah blah we've um we've done all of the bits that you would expect to do within that business and not only did we learn from working within my own business but i learned from the combined experiences of the businesses that i dealt with i started to help give back a little bit as well as i stepped away from the operations of my business which was a process starting in 2009 accelerated in 2012 accelerated again in 2017 i started to give back and i started to write some content i started to talk on the radio write articles in the news appear on tv and so on helping people understand that business isn't complicated it might not be easy you know it's hard work but it's not complicated and the culmination of all of that is that i serve on a number of non-exec boards and ambassador to various trade bodies and charities and so on and i've had the wonderful opportunity to have three published books now the latest one being bossett and i've also been able hopefully to help the next generation understand how they can make business simple and to make self-employment or business ownership a very valid choice for them going forwards now i touched on the fact that we'd run up to february 2020 so manuscript finished march 2020 the world started closing down coincidentally my first speaking cancellation was this ferry event in london i attended the conference hall and it was like a ghost town because the event had been um cancelled due to the fears around coronavirus all of a sudden my future events were being cancelled paris was cancelled manchester was cancelled austria was cancelled new york was cancelled i'd never had so many cancellations within a week or two and it became very clear at that point the middle of march that the landscape was changing we all remember then the announcements on the tv but we must not go out we must close our doors we must change the way that we live not just the way that we work the way that we live so it was a amazingly difficult time for so many people and before i dive into some of the practical tools and tips that i'm going to share with you i want to share with you some um inspiration i guess of businesses that have pulled through that have managed to make a mark using some of the um models that i'll share with you later the first was a menswear manufacturer now this menswear manufacturer had a factory based in china so it's safe to say that they understood the impact of covid but certainly before i did and before many of us did they were living it in january not just from a manufacturing perspective and it's important to be clear on this they also had challenges because they're big buyers you know they're a b2b seller and they sold their um their wares to major online shopping stores major offline shopping stores and their orders dropped through the floor they knew something was happening now they had to pivot they had to not only move their operations from china to the uk to be able to continue creating product but they had to change the type of product that they're making they specialize in men's outerwear how many people were buying coats during lockdown so they had to change they had to adapt they started first of all providing ppe for the nhs and then they transformed their brand and pivoted from a made in china wholesaler to a made in england b2c retailer through pop-up shops when they've been able to um you know they certainly haven't been able to be open for most of 2020 but they had pop-up shops they had a new website and it was a fantastic example of a business making sense of the situation that they're in you know this could have decimated their business if they stayed still in fact they had to look at the very first step of my um drone advise process restart they had to effectively reset their business they had to press the big red button and decide what they were going to do going forward they then had to rebuild and redesign how it looks to then flourish going forwards a second inspirational story i want to share with you is a martial artist who not only is a client of my business but he's also somebody who i count as a good friend and as you can imagine kids tuition businesses have been dragged through the mill during this they have been left with no choice but to pivot pivot quickly and hope for the best wayne he approached it in a much different way so the first thing that i want to pull out from wayne's approach was the stoic nature of his approach instead of moaning about lockdown instead of worrying about where the next dinner's coming from instead of spending his time with fear and you know panic about what the future holds instead he fixed within himself a very firm mindset i mean it was this i paraphrased because i don't know the exact words but it was along the lines of if i have to close my business that's absolutely fine because i've been doing this for 20 years and i can do it for another 20 years but the key thing is i've got 20 years experience so i'll do it faster and better so that mindset was what helped push him through now some of the things that he and others in the martial arts industry did lessons in car parks when they were allowed rather than indoors making sure they're doing online tuition now both of those would seem like obvious things third make sure that they leverage strategic partnerships they worked with football schools gymnastics schools and so on who were all going through the same boat they made sure they collaborated they shared membership so that they could each reach each other's membership lists so that they could provide more value during a virtual experience they set up a move from the likes of zoom and microsoft teams and so on through to specialized online learning systems which then help them develop courses there was a wonderful range of ways but these businesses adapted so they can continue to trade and make their money throughout this pandemic so i guess that brings us to a really nice point where i can remind you of the restart rebuild and flourish principle there is no shame at all in 2020 2021 or beyond having to adapt what you're doing we've all had some staggering changes happen around us and they're the kind of things that we've just simply not been able to control so what's important is that we identify the aspects of this that we can control we make sure that we control them and we make sure that we act quickly so within my book bossa i share the dream plan do review model dream what is it that we're going to do plan how are we going to do it do well that one's fairly obvious and then perhaps most importantly review i also share a number of other models such as the key pillars of scaling and so on and these have all been learned through my observations of speaking to thousands and thousands of businesses ultimately these are the things that i've seen that businesses get wrong often when a business doesn't work it's because of a failure within their dream a failure to plan appropriately a failure in taking action or a failure to review go back and start again and let me just assure you the review bit is the part that everyone flinches at it's uncomfortable let me explore just why that is you see i'm i'm a great advocate of a book called the emif revisited by michael e gerber it's very dated now it was released probably 25 years ago and i was fortunate enough to have the um pleasure of a lunch with michael gerber so i um i was able to understand a bit more about his thinking and the creativity that went into the design of his book and i would actually say that there's some analogies between the dream plan do review model and the personality profiles that gerber highlighted within that book you know he highlights the need for the entrepreneur the big picture thinker the one who comes with the creative vision the forward of the you know the i guess the superstar of business but he also had two equally important roles the manager the one who makes sure that everything gets done for one who creates systems and processes the one who makes sure that order happens and the technician the one who actually does the work they say that those who can do those who can't teach and perhaps that's a relevant um comment here the technician is the one that makes the magic happen so the best way of analyzing these is but the technician is the bus driver the manager is the one who designs the timetable to make sure that the routes are all mapped out and the entrepreneur they tend to own the bus company so i think that most business owners who've ever attended a seminar or read a business book are probably relatively comfortable with that concept and a key thing to understand that concept is that each of us have a little bit of each personality type within us you know we could be perhaps 70 entrepreneur we could be 20 manager 10 technician or the other way around or varying percentages the trouble that we have and the challenge with that kind of allocation and the reason why the review stage of my dream plan do review process is difficult is because the dreaming is done by the entrepreneur the planning is done by the manager the doing is done by the technician but for reviewing holds us accountable to each part of our personality the bits that we're more comfortable with and the bits that we're less comfortable with so let me dive into i guess the nuts and bolts of this for practical section which is also a good part of my book the dream plan do review model what do we need to do to make sure that this works when we're adapting our business to come through the coronavirus lockdowns and out the other side successfully as we start to restart rebuild and flourish first of all with the dream we need to make sure that our dream is compelling and motivating but we also need to make sure that it's not so abstract that it's demotivating this is one of the very real challenges that i see within businesses is that if they are particularly entrepreneurial business owners have a dream of becoming the new facebook or um or perhaps changing the world in some way it might be a vegan revolution or a reduction in plastics or you know these wonderful initiatives and with that when there's a wonderful initiative and a wonderful dream tends to be wonderful goals but if that goal is too abstract and just too overwhelming in the early days it can become very easy to have a disconnect between that goal and the practicalities of running a business the stuff that we all find difficult rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it so we need to make sure that the dream isn't too abstract and out there you know nike as a great example their current dream is quite appropriate for them it's that they want to make sure that they kit out every athlete in the world and by athlete they defy define that as anybody with a body now if you were starting out sportswear brand trying to make sure that your t-shirts and shorts and trainers and so on were going to be worn by every single human with a body that is a horrifically off-putting dream in the early days because most of us aren't wired like that that just seems too far away and actually what we need is something that's a little bit more achievable funnily enough nike did have an original dream that was based around their um their target of um beating their competitors it's all in the wonderful book shoe dog by phil knight if you want to read a book that's an amazing hybrid of storytelling and inspiration i would highly recommend it so we know that the dream needs to be slightly less than being the next unicorn and making millions and billions and trillions but we also need to make sure that the dream is motivating enough and it's a very fine balance because if we under target where we're going we will find that whilst the motivation might be there in the early days it's very difficult to then maintain that momentum it's very difficult to um i guess as they say play football on a rainy sunday in stoke unfortunately when it comes to growing a business our perception of what's achievable and what's aspirational changes and if you are aspiring to let's say open a cake shop and you highlight the town that you want to open it in you highlight the types of cakes that you want to sell you hi you've already mapped out how it looks and it's um it's a great dream to have here's the problem what comes next once you achieve it six months in you've designed your recipes you've raised your funds you've created your business plan done all the stuff that the experts tell you that you need to do you've opened the shop you've got the keys great and no customers come in you need to start opening longer hours you need to start going door to door putting leaflets through doors knocking on doors begging people to buy your cakes just for dreams seem quite so attractive now so we need to make sure that the dream is somewhere between those two somewhere between being a billion dollar evaluation unicorn that sells cakes and a single high street store so we need to create that compelling dream that's achievable relatively realistic but not um demotivational or achieved too easily we also need to ensure that that dream is aligned with our personal self you see one of the other challenges that i've seen with business owners and this is perhaps more relevant with new business owners than those who've had some war wounds is but their business dreams and their personal dreams are totally misaligned they might dream of having let's say a 20 million pound turnover business that's creating i don't know a million pound profit and it's working seamlessly and they're going to retire they can have their feet up on a beach and live in the laptop instagram lifestyle yeah private jets and champagne and all of this stuff what's the problem there the personal side of that dream involves no graft whatsoever no hard work hiding away in the sunshine and hoping that some magic pill does it for them it won't i hate to break it to you but it won't on the flip side what does the business dream of 20 million turnover and million pound profit and all of this stuff what does that entail that entails a lot of hard work that entails going through the pains of being a business owner having the best thing in your day being the fact that you can choose which 18 hours per day that you work that being that instead of working for somebody you find offensive or whatever you end up working for a maniac who can't stop those two plans those two goals are clearly incongruent one of them's going over here one of them's going over there and the reality is but if your dream has that level of incongruence in it then you will probably achieve neither so you need to make sure that not only is the dream compelling and that nice balance between realistic and aspirational but also that it's aligned with what you want to achieve personally and just finally one other point that i want to raise on that it has to be what you want personally don't do something because you believe it's what society expects of you or because it's what you believe will make others happy actually you need to make sure that this is spot on for you as an individual so that's the dream stage the next stage where businesses go wrong is in the planning stage and trust me this isn't just something that you do when you're starting or when you're going through a crisis like covid this should be a cyclical process the problem with business plans is business plans it's as simple as that we know what a business plan should look like we know that there should be an executive summary there should be swot analysis market research loads of financial projections and all of this stuff that we talk about that creates a business plan the problem that we have is that that business plan is entirely theoretical and with a theoretical business plan the challenge that you have is that it doesn't become a working document within your business instead it becomes something that's used just to attract funding just to impress the bank manager or the angel investor or the vc i mean it's tucked away never to be seen again so a strong plan within a planning process is what i like to call an operational plan and yes the process of producing a theoretical business plan is important in fact some things like the competitor analysis for swot analysis for they're pestici they're wonderful tools and they help inform the operational plans that you will create but ultimately to take your dream and convert it into actionable meaningful steps you need to have a plan so what does an operational plan look like well it's really simple and again i'll go through it in the book in more detail but you have to set out the steps level by level of what you need to do to make sure that you get from where you are today to ultimately where you're going to be so let's take an example business let's say that you are setting up a virtual assistant business and that's been a very hot trend recently and individuals looking to start a business to advise others what would you do well your first steps might be to create a brand a bit of a brand presence a website and so on so that could be step number one in your plan it's very important within your plan that you have deadlines accountabilities is it you or somebody else and also to understand any contingencies within your plan what do you need to do you know what are you relying on so that something else can happen because there's no point for example diving in and creating a social media presence before you've got your template website done now there's a whole host of other planning issues that i see so i would like to share with you if you give me permission just a few issues the live scene crop up in the planning process when businesses create their operational plans either to start or to adapt through a crisis the first one is that it's very easy to become a spreadsheet millionaire it's very easy when you're creating projections and trying to understand the nuts and bolts behind the business and whether it works to just press a golden button on your keyboard everyone knows what this golden button is it's a button zero and you can very easily add a few notes at the end of any number you like and it will make you a millionaire it'll make you a trillionaire if you click it hard enough so you need to make sure that you approach planning from an objective reasonable perspective and it's very important as well but if you're thinking of pivoting and adapting the products that you sell or or you know perhaps come up with a new product or a new service line that you want to take proper market research as part of a planning process so what does market research consist of very simply it doesn't consist of speaking to family and friends who will say yeah that's a great idea i'd buy that for reality for you as a business owner is that a sale is only a sale when there's pounds in the bank the other issue that i see with um i guess the hybrid between the planning and the next step which is action so for doing part of dream plan do review is that there's a tendency for us as humans to indulge in what i like to call creative avoidance so this is probably the part that holds up most businesses and i'm sure that some of you will relate to just part of this what i tend to find is that business owners enjoy the dreaming stage because it's motivating it it it really develops for creative juices doesn't it it it makes us think of new stuff what we want to do certainly i know for myself but when i would go through my dreaming sessions which were actually fairly regular i would i would do it possibly bi-monthly quarterly rather than annually or when i do my business plan when i do my dreaming i like to indulge in what the french call vr of laflanui which is to wander around aimlessly i would then stop have a steak and chips and a bottle of red and after one glass of red people watch him but not being distracted because i don't know if he i don't know the language i don't know her accent it allows me to get into a headspace to start dreaming so that stuff is really enjoyable and you know there's some good food that goes with it as well the planning is an opportunity for creative avoidance because we have a tendency for wanting our plans to be entirely accurate to map out exactly how it's going to go let me share with you a secret that no accountant will ever share with you but no business owner or bank manager will ever share with you but they all know it deep down and that is but projections are made to be broken i have never seen a detailed projection when i say detailed i mean detailed enough to be fit for purpose for getting a 20 000 loan or um ticking a box i've never seen a set of projections that are penny perfect a logic tells us but that absolutely should be the case nobody should have accurate projections because there are too many unknowns and coronavirus has taught us that there's some massive unknowns but wouldn't even be unknowns that we know that we don't know about but can be complete curveballs outside of our control so if you try to over perfect your plans your operational plans your theoretical plans and your projections let me assure you that you will probably be allowing the perfect to get in the way of the good so you need to make sure that you don't spend time obsessive so over planning and also that you don't spend time obsessing over things like designing the perfect logo yourself and procrastinating on social media and i know i'm a sucker for social media but it is a wonderful way to avoid the stuff that needs to be done why do we as business owners self-employed people entrepreneurs tend to avoid the action stage i believe one of the key reasons is the fear of rejection because whilst we might do market research and market validation and try to understand our product market fit and all of this stuff within the planning process the reality is but the market is the true judge and when we start trying to sell what we're doing when we try to go out there create some income make some sales pay the bills that's when we get caught out that's when people say no and that's the tricky thing that some business owners struggle to get on with so i'm a huge believer of taking action i'm a huge believer of even just making a small step in the right direction and sometimes but not all i'm actually a believer in the concept of ready fire aim sometimes you just need to go ahead do what you're going to do in a very limited and measured way but to test it see what happens and then adapt accordingly which brings us really nicely on to the review stage the all-important review and i touched on earlier the fact that reviewing is really uncomfortable it's really difficult for most entrepreneurs because whether you are an entrepreneur a manager or a technician at heart the review process is going to highlight what you've got wrong yes it will show you what's going well as well but the key concept of the review process is to revisit your dream was it compelling enough was it motivating enough does it need adapting do you need to change it in any way revisiting the plan how did your operational plan go how was the process is there a better method of planning is that better way of doing things do you need to widen your path or widen your team or think of different ways of approaching this action this is the toughy did you do what you said you would do because if you didn't you failed and if you didn't it hasn't worked you failed to plan and then adapt go back and start again now i mentioned that the dream blood do review process is a cyclical process it's something that all businesses should be continually doing in fact i believe that whilst in my book it was um originally pre-corona virus framed for just new businesses or prospective entrepreneurs looking to start up actually it's something that we can apply even within our own lives you know if we're looking to lose weight or get fit we can apply the dream plan do review process in just the same way as we would apply to our business and it's something that we need to do continually because if we were to apply this to losing weight we're not we're not becoming reborn are we we're just improving adapting and evolving as we grow and businesses need to adapt improve evolve so that's the fundamental topic of dream plan do review now i want to share with you very briefly some of the other things but it's worth just thinking about now as we come hopefully towards the end of a pandemic now nobody can make any presumption or statement or even really an educated guess of when this is going to be all over we know things are going to be fast moving we know things are going to be adapting and we know that we need to think on our feet but they are perhaps the only certainties that we can rely on everything else is unfortunately out of our control so i would start by saying it is vital as a business owner that you understand what you can control and what you can't control i like to think of it like a football match and you know i'm a football guy myself so it's a really easy analogy for me to share it's one that i was dreadful at football as well which is why i ended up taking over a football club i guess um but when you think of football and we think about how teams perform on the pitch all they can do is control the stuff that's done by the team with their shirt colours on they can't control how big the goal is they can't control where the lines are painted they can't control if the referee is going to be really unfair to them they can't control if the fans are going to be upset or and perhaps jubilant they can't control that stuff all they can control is how they perform which ultimately will have knock-on impacts both to the sentiment of the players the confidence levels etc and then at the end of the day how many goals they score and how many goals the other team scores so we need to focus on controlling what we can control and being aware of and mindful of the stuff that's outside but not being consumed by it now i explore within my book as part of the practical sections you know is a combination of checklists and cheerleading i will warn you so some motivational but some of it you gotta get down to business and in the checklist practical stuff we talk about the swot analysis which is strengths and weaknesses but then opportunities and threats the strengths and weaknesses at the top of the matrix are the bits that you can control what are you good at and then double down on them what are you bad at and then patch them up but the stuff that you can't control the opportunities and the threats are the bits that you need to be aware of but not consumed by you need to make sure that you're mindful of the threats that are outside there but you're not obsessing over watching sky news 24 7 about all of the bad things that could potentially happen instead focus on what you can control secondly i'd like to share with you a little bit about my scaling model which is the four pillars of scaling now i won't go into it in anywhere near as much detail as the dream plan do review but what i've observed both in my own business and the process of scaling it to a point where i've been able to step away from the business to a non-executive chair um what i've noticed is that there are four pillars of any business that help ensure that they can scale successfully the first is the financial pillar how are you going to fund your growth are you going to be looking at debt finance asset finance are you going to be looking at any kind of strange schemes and so on how are you going to make sure that you've got the capital base to make sure that your business is funded for growth secondly what's your growth model going to be are you going to be looking at organic growth and continuing what you've done or are you going to look at acquisitions are you going to look at licensing franchising distributorships all of this stuff you know different models of growing your business the next one is your management model how are you going to structure your business so that the management within the business is not left to chance you know often as we grow our business up to about 20 to 30 staff management is left by chance isn't it yeah i i certainly admit that and for us if i look at my core business dnt our management was those who had been sat around the longest and that's no way to choose an effective manager so you need to have a process and a system to identify nurture train and develop the management team and then finally the leadership model how is the business led now this could be both from a second tier of management which by the way is for proof that a business is scalable it's not about having a management team but it's about having two tiers of management that's the acid test of when things are going great or at all and but also the leadership from the founder the owner of the entrepreneur themselves even when they step away and are sharing the book my journey to chairman and almost having to be taking a not not just a relegation down a notch or two in the business but down to a very bottom of a business serving the team and it's a humbling step but an amazing step an amazing process to go through now those pillars are underpinned by the vision which ultimately is created by the dream that we touched on earlier and the vision is helped yeah supported by things like the values of a mission statement and all of this stuff which intrinsically builds the culture of the business so i would say that this is the perfect opportune moment for you as a business owner if you as an entrepreneur to think about not only what you need to do to survive but actually what you need to do to five what do you need to get in place to make sure that all of the boxes are ticked of the four pillars of scaling model what you need to do to set yourself up for success in safar was your leadership team what do you need to do to set yourself up for success to make sure that you've got a staffing model that works to make sure that you're never in a position where there's more month than money to make sure that the business challenges that you get as a startup or growing business aren't replicated and scaled out of control because if you try to scale a business in an uncertain environment and just add zeros onto the end let me share with you it won't happen all you do is scale the challenges in your business at the same time so what was currently a i don't know a hundred thousand pound problem if you multiply your business by ten times guess what that problem's multiplied by unless you fix it and again i'll share all of this stuff and a bit of a deep dive into things like systemization processes procedures and so on in the book and i would like to leave you now with just one quote and again i paraphrased the quote i've got a horrific memory but i know exactly who told me the quote and it was a guy called brad d smith who some of you might have heard of he's actually the executive chairman of intuit who are hosting us today and i was really fortunate to have the opportunity to have a chat with brad probably two and a half years ago and in fact he was very kind enough to review my book in the end and i asked brad you know i said i said look you've probably got an amazing culture into it the team will point in the right direction you're doing some amazing things you're really innovative how have you done it because i want to rip this stuff off and put it my own business and his answer was so so simple but has stuck with me ever since and he said leadership is really simple all you've got to do set the vision show them the path clear any hurdles and get out of the way and with that i would like to leave you for today thank you

2021-03-08 02:06

Other news