What’s the secret to building a successful business?

Steve Ball, The Process Guru, Founder and Managing Director of The Process Guru Ltd, created this Secret to Successful Business model because so often he sees business owners focusing on the wrong things.

You want to do what you like to do, right? Or perhaps what you are best at and this is fine to a certain extent. But if you want to have a highly successful business, you need to approach it systematically, and change focus according to which stage your business is at.

1. Focus on Trust. Focus doesn’t mean you only work on a certain area of your business or that you do it all by yourself. It means you concentrate your efforts on a particular area of your business at a particular time.

It also means that you learn more about that area. Of course, you can involve experts and you can delegate, as long as this area is where your mind is. Even if you do outsource, you inevitably acquire more knowledge in that area.

Focus on what you have to, in order to reach your objectives and fulfil your dreams!

So why do we need to think about Trust, simple really, you have a job that needs doing on your home and you need 2 quotes.

The first guy turns up in a beaten old white van, is wearing work gear and has no business card, no signage on his van, no logo on his overalls, looks at the job and gives you a quote on a piece of paper from a pad.

The second guy turns up in a smart vehicle with clear signage and their website address on the van.  He has a business card, carries out the inspection and gives says that the quote will follow later today via email.  Later that day the quote arrives as a PDF attached to an email professionally done.

Which one of these people would you get to do the work?  Exactly this is why you should focus on building Trust a soon as you start the business.  Invest in the things that build trust while you get your first sales in.  Get testimonials too, they also build trust.

The idea is simple: your focus, as the owner of the business, moves from:

Trust to Sales
Sales allows you to buy Things
Things build trust will leads to more Sales
Sales enables you to invest your time in ‘Thinking Systems’
Working on Process builds Trust and leads to more Sales
Then you can develop new Product and Service offerings.

As your company grows you invest in more Things these assets help you to add value to the customer experience.  This is the best business growth strategy.

Focusing on one part of the business does not mean that you only deal with that part. It means that you allocate half of your time to it, while the other half is split between anything else you would normally deal with. Above all, you, as the business owner, must focus on what needs your focus, even if it is not necessarily what you like doing.

Let’s talk about the other areas of a business:

2. Focus on Sales when you are at the beginning with your business, or when you launch a new product or open a new location. ‘Sales’ is split into two parts:

(i) selling your product or service;
(ii) selling your idea.

Selling your idea to current employees, potential employees, partners, suppliers, banks and any other person that is necessary to run the business smoothly is equally important as selling your product. You cannot create a business on your own. To achieve your objectives, you need people around you. And those people don’t join just because you think they should. It is tempting to believe they see and understand as you do, but they don’t. You have to give them reasons to opt in, just as you give reasons to your customers to buy your product.

During this stage, you have only a Scope. You know where you want to get to but not how to get there, but it is still vague. You need the market reaction and partners’ feedback in order to ensure you have the right product, the right offering, both for your customers and for your partners

3. Focus on Things once your product or service sells by itself; in other words, when customers buy your product or service without you having to convince each of them individually. By ‘Things’ I mean everything that enables you to deliver to your customer. That is your overall infrastructure: production facility, office space, logistics, as well as your employees and money to buy raw materials and invest in further growth. No point selling if you can’t deliver, right?

When you’ve gotten to this phase, you have a Strategy in place. Now that you know what and how you sell, and for how much, you can create specific objectives and a clear path to achieving them.

4. Focus on Process when you are confident that you have a product that sells and that you can deliver and satisfy your customer. By ‘Process’, I mean organisational charts, job descriptions, processes, procedures, policies, IT system, and  CRM systems. In this phase you consolidate what you have; you organise things internally and clean up your mess, using Kaizen 5s philosophy. At this stage, you and your staff have tried various ways of producing and delivering value and you now know who does what in your company, and how.

It is therefore time to document everything that is happening in your company, to put order in place. This helps you and your current employees to better understand how things are being done in your company and to become more efficient. Having these Systems in place also makes for an easier and more efficient process when you bring new people into your organisation. You have ‘machinery’ that works, effectively and efficiently.

If you think of your industry as a pyramid, there is only one company on top, a few on the second layer, then the third, and so on… until the bottom, where you find plenty of companies. Your objective is to get as close as possible to the top.

Why? Because if anything destructive happens in the economy or in your industry, or if anything happens that can adversely affect your business, you hardly feel it if you are on top. The crisis resulted in so many companies going bankrupt or being close to bankrupt – this is because they were at the bottom of the pyramid in their niche. If a tsunami comes, or the Council needs to do construction on the road in front of your shop or office, you need to be in such a strong position that your business does not suffer.

After Processes are in place, you need to focus on Innovation if you want to take your company to the next level, in which case you go back to Sales in another growth cycle Trust is taking care of itself after this point.

The next question is ‘When and how do I move from one area to another?’ Sign up to receive tips and tricks about successful business and The Process Guru will help you grow your business!