Make Your Business Run Without You - Predictably, Efficiently, and Profitably and Position Yourself to Sell it for Top Dollar!
When you apply the methods offered by National M&A Group and the Business Mastery System, you can:
- Make your business run like a franchise
- Make your employees eager to give you what you want
- Replace yourself with processes that you can teach to others
- Mine the untapped profit centers hiding in your business
- Design foolproof "systems" that eliminate mistakes and frustrations
Not only will you enjoy more sales and profit, you’ll finally experience the freedom you’ve worked so hard to achieve. At National M&A Business Development, we work one-on-one with business owners to teach you the skills and systems required for you to build a successful, profitable business that works with or without you.
The Business Mastery System defined below will help you get your life back and receive top dollar when you want to sell your business.
I recently sold my Company in a strategic deal to an industry player. I put myself in a position to do that three years earlier when I hired Clint for Business Development, to help me get the pieces in place. At the time I knew we weren’t broken, and we were doing a lot of things right – but I was working too many hours, feeling extremely frustrated with the way my team was responding to my direction, and unable to put my finger on what was missing. Clint came in, helped me put a plan together and then guided me through it to completion. Following the Business Mastery System I was finally able to get the price I wanted. The deal closed last month and I’m looking forward to spending more time with my family before my next big challenge. I have recommended Clint to many other entrepreneurs since, and if you are truly interested in selling your business, I know Clint would be a big help in guiding you to increase its value!
Ted Gross – Previous Owner of Derkach Manufacturing
A 6-Step System To Building Your Business So That It Works With or Without You!
Before you can begin to work "on" your business, you need to have the right mindset.
Success Requires an Entrepreneurial Mindset
Successful entrepreneurs focus on customer needs. They see the opportunity as a better way of serving a customer need and they see the business as the solution. Entrepreneurs have a clear vision of how the business must look and act at maturity to stay ahead of its competition and they build the business that way from the outset.
Marketing is an Investment
Your accountant will tell you that marketing is an expense. The entrepreneurial mindset views marketing as an investment. The greater the difference between what it costs you to acquire a customer and the lifetime value of the goods or services sold to that customer, the greater your profit potential and return on investment.
Test and Measure
The basic difference between successful businesses and poor performers is that they test and measure everything that they do. It is impossible to play a game or manage a business without keeping score. The coaching process will test and measure everything of significance in your business. It will then build a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) tailored specifically to measure and continuously monitor all the key factors that determine growth and profitability.
The Power of People and Systems
Systems run businesses and people run systems. Systemizing the routine tasks in your business is the key to overall efficiency. People, however, are the business and contribute most to the success or failure of your organization. The coaching process focuses on building a team with a common cause and shared vision; a team with well-developed interpersonal and communication skills, trust, support, commitment and energy. Only when the systems and people are effectively in place, can you, the owner, graduate from working in the business to working strategically on the business.
Having worked with Clint over the past year, we have seen our business efficiency standards rise, our business volume increase and our gross profit climb. It has been a tough learning experience for us as owner-managers to put into practice some of the techniques recommended by Clint but the results speak for themselves. Always ethical, always on target, Clint has more than exceeded our expectations and the best part? It’s been fun! We have now sold the Company to one of our employees and are actively enjoying the fruits of our retirement.
Sam and Jacqui Conroy - Conroy Exteriors
The Business Mastery System
1. Foundation
Putting into place a strong Foundation is the basic process of gaining control over the chaos in your business, like clearing your desk before beginning an important project. It involves: clarifying your destination, ensuring you have adequate reporting systems in place to test and measure key areas of your business, completing an audit of your time and activities to ensure you are being most effective, and a survey of current service levels in preparation to drive in more business, without creating a line up at the complaint department. Perhaps most importantly, we begin to work on the owner’s personal skills in areas such as delegation, communication, management and leadership.
2. Money
Serving a lucrative target market and living by the 5 step profit formula is critical in creating long term predictable cash flow. You occupy an effective niche if your business has little to no price competition. Revisiting your vision and mission for the business and developing your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) your customer’s view of what sets you apart from, and keeps you ahead of, your competition creates the niche. Your USP defines the competitive advantage of your business and is the cornerstone of your strategy. USP’s can be based upon features such as image and prestige, quality, exclusivity, safety, industry standard, speed, guarantee, customer service etc. The Business Mastery System will show you a systematic way of developing your USP and a strategic planning process that is dynamic and anticipatory to enable you to keep leapfrogging the moves of your competitors.
3. Time
Time is the most level playing field in the world. The best way to increase your time is to apply the concept of Leverage to yourself and your business. This is the process of doing more with less and is the key to growth. The only ways to leverage your business are through: people, systems and technology, finance, and marketing. The Business Mastery System will show you how to use these categories to achieve leverage in the proper order. For example investing in people before adequate marketing, systems and technology, and finance are in place could crash the business. You need to create your own "franchise prototype". This is where you systemize your business so that every team member does the exact same work the same way every time. Far fewer mistakes and much less re-work! If you really want to make your business work, change the work you do! Going to work "on" your business, rather than "in" your business, is the secret to creating a business that truly works.
4. TEAM
Building the team is the process whereby you replace yourself in the business. An effective team must share the vision, mission and rules of the business, and, ideally, should contribute to their development and statement. It must be motivated and function without boundaries to get everyone’s mind into the business to solve problems and innovate. The basis for building an effective team is to develop an organization chart for the business at maturity using the positions of a public company (Chief Executive, Chief Financial officer, Vice President Marketing etc.) with the roles and position contracts clearly described. Initially you will occupy several of the positions, but as the organization grows and people are selected and recruited for the specified positions, you systematically replace yourself until you are only working on strategic functions. The Business Mastery System will show you how to develop an appropriate organization chart, develop position contracts and select, recruit, motivate and reward a highly effective team.
5. SYNERGY
Synergy occurs when the performance of the whole business is greater than the sum of its parts. When the vision, mission and rules of the business are clearly defined, the systems are implemented, and an effective organizational structure and motivated team is in place, it becomes possible to work on synergy. The Business Mastery System will show you how to integrate functions, develop creativity and build synergy in the team that, in a well-tuned business will extend to win-win relationships with customers and suppliers. Synergy ensures that the business has the capacity to constantly reinvent itself to maximize profits and stay ahead of the competition.
6. Growth
At the growth stage, you should become “Chair of the Board” strategically directing the business and with a stream of passive income. You now have the time, financial resources and organization to pursue growth strategies, such as: diversification, opening new locations, mergers and acquisitions, broadening ownership, or investing in and running multiple businesses. You have also positioned yourself to sell for top dollar if you wish.
“When I first started looking for a business coach I was being run ragged by the new company I was building. Every day there seemed to be a hundred things to do, all of them urgent and most of them keeping me away from the work that really needed to be done. There seemed to be so little information available to make the really important decisions that at times I felt paralyzed. I was at my wits end. After openly discussing my situation with Clint, he seemed to instinctively know how to breakdown the problems into bite-sized pieces. He offered a fresh perspective and constantly challenged my thinking. Today, I am well on my way to the goals I wanted to achieve; my business has grown by 300% and is on a trajectory to double again by the end of this year. I am also far more relaxed today. Make no mistake; Clint did not do the work to make this happen. I did. What he did, as any great coach does, was to help me develop into the person that could accomplish these things.”
Ron van Steenoven, P. Eng.Ron van Steenoven & Associates Ltd.
