How does your business rank on the performance scorecard? In this special episode of The Scale Up Your Business Podcast, your host Nick Bradley shares with you the circle of seven business components circle of to help you start-up, scale-up and grow in 2020. If you’re looking to achieve success in 2020, this episode is for you.

Find out now if you’re building a high-value, exitable business (even if you have no immediate plans to sell it). You’ll get an instant PDF report with powerful insights specifically tailored to your business in just 4 minutes.

https://highvalueexit.scoreapp.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• What is the difference between start-up and scale-up? It’s the ability to lead, lead yourself, lead other people, it's the ability to build a team. It's easy starting a business in a garage with you (and maybe another business partner) but when you start to get success and you start to get customers coming in; you're starting to get some validation of what your product and your business is about. Then it's about working with people scale that.

The seven components circle of business or the circle of scale-up.

• Knowing where you are in your business, having that effective business map and when the world is changing so rapidly, you've got to have a vision. Have the vision, know where you're going and then when you work back from the vision; You're going to have the gap. If you haven't got a plan, you can't navigate any of the challenges that are coming ahead. You've got to have a map that you can adapt to a changing landscape.
• The next one is marketing. Are you constantly serving and adding value to your customers in a way that psychology is that it's without any expectations? This is because you want to sell your product and service; you want to provide a solution. The more that you show up and you serve, the more you help, the more that you build your brand around that, the more you're never going to have to worry about spending a heap of time and money on marketing because it'll all compound back.
• Bottom line, sales mastery through systems. Are you experiencing significant growth in your bottom line through the use of systems? If marketing is about making people want to do business with you, you get paid for sales. So you've got to create multiple channels to capture, convert and close sales. If your activity levels are strong, in other words, you're engaging, you're having conversations, you're managing people through a clear pipeline, the sales are going to fall through. You should have metrics around leads, appointments, proposals, and sales.
• Are you constantly and strategically innovating in the key areas of your business, so it's time to move now into a sort of proposition and product? So this is not necessarily just about technology, but it can be, it can be about your offers, it can be about your operations, it can be about the strategy. You could be throwing money out the window if you're not innovating and improving all the areas and the components of your business.
• Do you have raving fan customers and culture around this? It doesn't matter again, how big you are. It's an ideology, it's a philosophy, but the biggest mistake that companies make is that they fall in love with their business and all their products, and not with their clients or their customers. You need to know more about your ideal customer than anybody else, what they desire, fear, hope, aspire to be. The number one reason that start-ups fail is due to a lack of a need for their product or their service in the marketplace and the failure to meet the needs of potential clients.
• Are you tapping into the power of growth through optimization and maximization? Sometimes the biggest growth opportunities don't come from new initiatives, but rather from taking the existing core business that you have, the processes and executing them much more effectively than you are now. The way to think about this is a small incremental improvement made in just a few key areas of your business that can result in literally geometric growth to the business as a whole. One of the easiest ways to get leverage in this area is through technology, through automation, as much as it is also outsourcing the things that you don't critically need in the business. You’re looking at, how can I do this better? How can I do this easier? How can I do this more effectively? How can I do this more efficiently?
• Financial and legal analysis. As an entrepreneur, it's the thing that people get wrong the most. It all stems here particularly on the governance layer of your business. Do you know where your company is spending its money? It's easy to lose sight of the key measurements that can predict progress or demise. Being able to measure where your business is, where it's going, being able to see the blind spots that could get you into heaps of trouble are the factors that are paramount for any business. It's about understanding how the business is designed to generate cash for you to invest, ultimately, for you to be able to create value at some point, depending on what you want to do with your business. That's either going to line your pockets, it's going to take you closer to freedom, to wealth, living life on your terms, or it's going to allow you to exit the business and get investors or sell the business to investors.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Do not build a five-year plan because the world's changing so much, when you're getting into planning, you can go up to three years because it kind of gives you something to work with'

‘It’s all about what your customers would say about you to other people’

‘If you've got a great reputation, then you're going to have many, many more inbound inquiries’

‘If you want a business that's scaling and one that's going to be sustainable in the future, you've got to improve its marketing strategies’

‘Sales are the systems that are put in place that allow you to allow the conversion to happen, it's an expected outcome’

'Strategy is the greatest determining factor in the success of any sort of Innovation Initiative'

‘Problems come first solutions come second’

‘The second highest cause of business failure is due to cash flow’

‘If you start to have some basic frameworks and basic foundations in place, then you're going to be able to be significantly more successful in what you're trying to achieve’

`It's always good just to have a few frameworks, something to be able to at least, measure where you are today so you know where you want to go’

‘Be grateful, be brave, have faith and show up’

VALUABLE RESOURCES

Nick’s Twitter

Scale Up Your Business Podcast

ABOUT THE HOST

Nick Bradley is a renowned entrepreneur, investor, speaker, and business growth expert.

His background is growing and scaling Venture Capital and Private Equity backed businesses globally. Over the last decade, he has completed 117 acquisitions and 25 business exits with a combined valuation of over $5bn dollars.

His mission is to help business founders build valuable businesses and create life-changing exits so they can realise freedom, wealth, and impact. 

CONTACT METHOD

Nick’s Facebook page: https://scaleup.vip/FB  
Nick’s LinkedIn: https://scaleup.vip/LI  
Nick's Instagram: https://scaleup.vip/IG  
Scale Up Your Business, coaching/consulting: https://suyb.global

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