Step 1: Mastery

Short Version:

Here, we focus on making sure your business is actually commercial. The foundation of your success solely depends on your ability to master:

• Your Destination
• Your Money
• Your Time
• Your Delivery

7 Typical Challenges for Business Owners at this Step:

1. Poor or no planning in place
2. Poor or no financial reporting
3. employee turnover of 33% or higher
4. Lost productivity
5. Periods of running in the red
6. Inability to identify what's important/what's not
7. Poor or no understanding of break even numbers

5 of 11 Requirements for Graduation to the Next Step:

1. Daily and weekly Chaos eliminated.
2. Following a simple plan where you do some work on your business, in addition to working in it
3. Quality Assurance is in place and your work (product/service) is somewhat predictable with the majority of your customers leaving satisfied.
4. You have a fully staffed team, and have begun some basic delegation.
5. The business is able to run, make a profit and build for success.

Long Version:

The speed at which you work and focus will determine how long you are at this step. Small business owners who invite an ActionCoach into their professional lives drastically reduce the amount of time they spend down here. Yet entrepreneurs who go through this part of the jungle alone can spend years on this step, and sadly - even their whole processional lives without ever getting to step 2.

When we coach our clients, we follow a comprehensive and detailed Mastery Coaching Plan that I have simplified here for you to use on your own for free and without any obligation:

Destination Mastery

• The vital importance of knowing WHERE you are going.
• What is your vision? What is your aim? What are you trying to build?
• What are your goals? What are your more relevant numbers?
• And just WHY are you doing all this? Clearly state why you are self employed.
• Unless a business owner has their destination clearly in mind, they find themselves chasing their tails and running in circles.

Money Mastery

• Break Even Mastery
• Do you know what your break even point is?
• Use forms #1141A, X and C (if production), #MA442, etc.
• How much do you need to make each day, week, month year or even hourly?
• Use forms #1141A, X and C (if production), #MA442, etc. to do this correctly and quickly.
• Profit Margin Mastery
• Know what your revenue goals are to make your targeted profit margins
• Know what this margin % must be.
• Then work back wards from this % to know what your revenue target should be.
• If you attend any of our workshops, chances are you’ve heard us mention Our 5 Ways To Massive Profits. When we work with clients, we coach them on handpicked, "best of the best" from our vault of about 800 specific strategies that we've collected from our team around the world. A vault not accessible to stand alone consultants.
• Reporting Mastery
• Run accurate Income Statements, Balance Sheets, and Cash Flow Budgets
• Do you know the trick to run these reports so they provide the greatest value to you?
• Do you know what to look for and how to read them?
• This section of the Mastery Step also covers budgeting, forecasting, invoicing, AR management, bank statements and supply-AP controls, and the "standard pack" of ratios.
• KPI/Key Performance Indicator Mastery
• So now that the numbers are coming in, how can you use them to give your predictable future numbers?
• What are the KPI's for the business overall, the departments and they key roles
• Working with a coach will teach you how riveting running your numbers by KPI’s can be, so you'll know exactly where the challengers are in a matter of weeks, not years.

"Of all 6 steps, Step 1 - The Mastery Step is the hardest, takes the longest and is probably the least enjoyable. My job as their coach is to keep them focused on the specific tactics a client must take to climb this step. And just like when I coach my kid's soccer team, I have to keep the clients from getting frustrated and impatient... and giving up 5 minutes before the miracle." Coach Jeff Witmer

Time Mastery

• Self Mastery
• Your own Time Management/Self Management may not be using something sophisticated.
• Action Coaches work with their clients on assessing their own time habits first, then developing a one of a kind system so you can get more done.
• What do YOU need to be doing, to keep the building business not just putting out fires?
• Planning Mastery
• With a written plan identifing where you want to be and how will you know if you are headed in the right direction. This written plan should identify who does what by when.
• Understand the difference between working hard and working smart.
• My own personal opinion is the plan we as coaches bring to our clients is the single most valuable deliverable in a coaching program.
• Delegation Mastery
• Resist the common entrepreneurial temptation to do it yourself.
• You gain leverage for the long haul if you invest in training your team around simple manuals and "how to's" so that the business becomes more systems dependent than "you" dependent.
• This section is about delegation, not abdication and use your previously created KPI's to monitor the progress of the things you have delegated so your business grows consistently, profitability and productively.

Delivery Mastery

• Supply Mastery
• Supplying the product service you said you would on a consistent, reliable basis.
• McDonald's may not be the best food on earth, but none of the competitors can match the consistency they deliver their products.
• Failure to fulfill the obligations will spell early failure. See forms #MSF 1 through 7.
• Because they are only looking at their business with one set of eyes-their own - some small business owners never realize that their lack of success stems from the simple cause that they have not mastered what it is they do. It's like going into a diner when it's not busy and having to wait 45 minutes to get a tuna sandwich and chips.
• Quality Mastery
• Now you have supplying the product/service down, but how’s the quality? What if you deliver the goods from your production plant so that you can point to it and say "There's your widget" but because the widget is lousy, you are no further ahead with terrible quality.
• You go back to that diner and it only takes 8 minutes to receive the sandwich but the tuna is terrible.
• Graduated Coaching clients have worked through this roadblock and have mastered their quality on a consistent and predictable basis so they could move onto the other, more life changing steps.
• Easy to Buy Mastery
• How easy is it for a customer to make a purchase? Did they have to wait 120 seconds for graphics and flash introductions on your web page, only to have to click through 42 web pages to make a purchase?
• (Ask us about our Mastery Checklists)
• Does your customer feel like they must jump thru hoops?
• No parking, phones not being answered, messages not returned, scratch the surface of making sure it's easy to buy from you.
• Service Mastery
• And the service in which you deliver. Is your entire team courteous and polite?
• What training must you give them so that customers want to come back over and over, not leave and badmouth.

A few of the ActionCoaches are available for tailor made customer service programs. Contact Coach Brian to see how you need to prepare for this 1/2 day events.

How an Action Business Coach can help:

• This is a pretty big check list, and completing everything on it before you can move onto the remaining 5 steps is not easy. Simple-yes? Easy-no.
• You're not alone-100% of our clients have some mastery issues when we start coaching them.
• After a small business owner realizes that coaching can pay for itself, their coach's responsibility is to asses the entire landscape and decide what should be fixed first.
• ActionCoaches work off 13 week plans that focus relentlessly around a set of goals to eliminate chaos. Coaches' work with clients on a regular basis and tell clients what they should be focusing on in between sessions to reach their goals.
• In addition to a coach's expertise on say... calculating revenue goals to reach the needed profit margins - they also bring the single most lacking element to small business today: Accountability. Our clients know they will be held accountable in each session for following through on the action steps that will bring them closer to their goals.
• In some cases our clients don't need to pay attention to the bigger picture - that's our job-so instead they focus on the weekly "homework assignments" that will achieve the specific objective. And by working diligently with their coach, clients achieve success with steady, week by week, session by session progress.

Here is an actual example of follow up action items taken from one of my graduated clients.

TO: FROM: Coach Thom RE: Action Assignment/Homework due by our next coaching session. Our Current Goal: Increase leads by 15% or 21 well qualified leads a month as one of 3 strategies to hit revenues of $ 130,000 per month by 5/1/07 The Homework assignments from the April 10th coaching session for the owner were: Make sure the newsletter we co-created in session gets out to all 412 people on our database. Finish the advertisement from today's session to include a special promotional offer to get fence sitters to buy. Consider using the Buy 1-Get-1 that our Testing and Measuring Analysis told us was a hit back in January. Find out the cost of an oversized post card-both printing and postage- and using the "ActionCoach Break Even Calculator for Marketing" that I got from the Coach in Canada, figure out how many leads and how many jobs we need to land for the postcards to be worth it. We will discuss your results next session and decide if we should go ahead with it. Review the separate email I sent to and (employees of his) and spot check them to make sure they are asking each caller and drop in customer if they want to sign up for our electronic newsletter. You are slipping on the number of leads we need to get and I won't be pleased if we have not made up ground by next session. Get the ad into black this out (publication we advertised in.) This was due last week and I MUST have it in by Friday. Sent me an email by end of this week so I can hold you accountable to getting this critical step done. (That's Strike 1...)

Interested in learning how to get through the jungle faster with a trained guide? It all starts with our No Strings - No Hassle Free Advice Sessions. During your private session, a certified coach can help pinpoint what you should be focusing on first and make recommendations on how to get rid of some of the chaos in your business.

Coaches also bring the single most lacking element to small business today: Accountability.

Click NEXT to continue with Step 2!

Please contact us if you would like permission to reprint any of this content.