Business Coaching
Starting your own business can be a challenging, and time-consuming yet rewarding experience. Finally, being on your account, or perhaps something you are doing with a friend or partner (a Project). For Any of those reasons, at times you may want to speak to others who have done similar start-ups:
Some of the questions you may have could be
How and where to start?
What type of product or services will I be offering
What’s my business model and value proposition
You don’t need a major capital investment to start your business, you can start very low to validate your idea, figure out if the market is ready for it, and perform some customer validation and discovery. Will people pay you money to solve their problems with a product or service?
There are ways to start light and test your idea before you start pouring money into your business
If you have already established your business for several years and noticed that your market share is the same or decreasing. Or perhaps your sales numbers are flat, your expenses are growing, and your revenues are the same or less. It’s time to look at your overall business model and make some changes.
- Whether you’re looking at how to increase your revenues (by increasing your sales and/or reducing your overall expenses)
- Looking at your customer base, how to grow your base
- Retain your employees and your key customers
- Increase customer satisfaction and attrition risk
- Maybe looking at ways to increase Revenue per customer
I can help at evaluating those tactics and figure out which one is more appropriate.
- Either via your current operation, by increasing capacity, labor, your products
- Grow within your organization (Vertical integration) or perhaps you can evaluate a partnership with another organization or via acquisition
- Looking to open new offices locally in the same country or state or set up an international operation abroad
It’s important for your business operation success and sustainability to prioritize your key goals, evaluate them regularly say every month or 3 months and benchmark yourself at year-end to see if you have met them. Those goals need to be clear yet simple (SMART): Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and time-bound.
This will help your employees understand them, be inspired to meet them and help your organization be successful.
Transparency is key for organizational goals and continuous success.
I can help you prioritize your business goals, track them and communicate them to your teams.
An organization or a business has somewhat the same DNAs and requires similar foundations
You have a sales team, marketing group, operations, and supply chain. The team who installs your product or delivers to your customer post contract signature and the team who looks after your customer once the product or service is installed.
You may also have an engineering dept or team that’s in charge of creating new products or services used by your sales team to sell & renew.
Each company has an organizational structure set up, this organism is not set in stone and needs to evolve depending on the company’s goals or strategy. I can help evaluate your current structure and make recommendations where needed. (Matrix, functional, product related or type of structure) The goal is to have the right org. structure, most effective and efficient for decision-making & execution.
Marketing & Strategy are often confused, however, they both go along like this. They are strongly interdependent for an organization to be successful. A company and organization should have a clear vision and business strategy. Evaluated regularly based on the market, customers and your competitors. Marketing can be called many things, but many people confuse Marketing channels and tactics with overall Marketing. When a company sets their target or strategy: Marketing plays a critical role in strategy execution and helps the overall organization to meet it. Hence it’s important to set aside a marketing budget, along with Sales if you are planning to meet your targets and growth trajectory.
Happy to meet and discuss your current Market strategy, where your company sits today compare to the competition and where you plan to be in 1-3 or 5 years.
Other Areas of expertise
I’ve worked extensively with international teams, partners and companies. It’s important to get accustomed to other’s cultures and figure out how to conduct business internationally. This could be an area of growth for your business or perhaps you’re looking for a partner abroad. (Doing business in Europe, North America and Latin America are quite different)
In today’s world, it’s important to develop such skills and figure out how to work outside of your country and where your main enterprise is located.
International expansion can be tricky, are you looking to conduct business directly and open your own office in another country or perhaps conduct such business via Re-seller or channel? There are pros and cons to each and it’s important to choose wisely depending on your business strategy, growth plan and your own SWOT.
In today’s age, given that the customer has many options and choices. Suppliers and opportunities, your organization need to understand their customers and figure out how to create a long-term strategy for customer success, this is beyond your typical customer service approach. Land and expand, how to keep a customer for life.
Evolve your typical implementation and post-activation support.
It’s so hard to acquire new customers, keep them, and deliver ongoing value on a regular basis.
Do you have a strategy to retain your customers today? What if they leave you, can you sustain your salaries and expenses? Knowing that 20% of your customers could be 80% of your revenues. What’s your tolerance for attrition risk? 1%, less than 1% or 5%, no matter what your target is, you need to have a strategy in place to sustain your customers and prevent them from switching.
I’ve also worked with several government entities as customers, and partners and even worked for healthcare authorities. I understand what they are looking for from a vendor or supplier and how best to work with them to meet your business objectives.
Operations are the engine of your company and it’s important to have a well-defined operation flow and structure (Pre-sales, RFP, contracting, Sales operations, implementation or services, support, logistics, Account payables and receivables and finance). Having spent time in all those key departments, I can provide perspective and guidance on how they are run in different organizations and how to optimize them.
Someone in your company should be keeping an eye on your Revenue & profitability, forecasting accuracy and bookings from your sales team. Whether you are privately or publically traded those numbers dictate how your organization is being run and its track records. How it’s trending. Let me know if you need some insights into this area.
Culture and employee engagement are key for the CEO or management team to deliver on their promises to their customers or market. But how do you achieve this consistently year after year? In today’s market given the labour constraints and work-from-home/hybrid, are your employees fully engaged, inspired and delivering their best work to their organization? Do they feel accountable, do they have autonomy, and are they trusted with their work?
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a famous quote and having worked in many departments and organizations. I can certainly say that culture and environment make a huge difference to results and the bottom line.
How do you create a healthy culture in a small or large company? Let me help you in this area as I spent several years building high-performing teams, cohesive and diverse across multiple departments and I truly a company makes a huge difference compared to other organizations or competitors. At times that’s the secret or competitive advantage that a company may have compared to others.