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Customer Loyalty

Customer Loyalty

Understanding your customer base, its drivers and motivations is key to growing revenue. Everyone knows that for almost all businesses, it’s cheaper to get repeat custom than find new customers. Despite this, many companies spend very little time getting to know and...
Be Certain about Uncertainty

Be Certain about Uncertainty

If there’s anything we should have all learned over the last couple of years, it’s that uncertainty is certain. Yes, in recent years it may feel like we’ve had more than our fair share of uncertainty, what with Brexit, Covid and recession. In actual fact, uncertainty...
ESG and the SME

ESG and the SME

ESG. It’s the new normal ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) criteria; it’s the hot topic right now and unlikely to be a passing trend. The world is rapidly catching on to climate change and social inequality has been thrown into stark relief through the...
The Last Straw?

The Last Straw?

I have been founding, running, and selling businesses since 1996 and I reckon I have seen a crisis or two. Once again following Covid, a war in Europe, logistics and supply problems and the cost-of-living crisis, fear, uncertainty and doubt will be in the minds of...
Make It Easy for People to Buy

Make It Easy for People to Buy

Attracting new clients is a challenge for most businesses. Yet attracting new business is pivotal to ambitious growth plans. Which is why it’s important to make it easy for those prospects to buy. Let’s use a fictional company to demonstrate… Company A has a...
Why We All Need to Champion Female Entrepreneurs

Why We All Need to Champion Female Entrepreneurs

The UK is a hot bed of entrepreneurs. British entrepreneurs have been household names and celebrated across the globe for decades. From Branson to Dyson and the youngest ever Dragon to recently join the Den, the ‘Happy Sexy Millionaire’, Steven Bartlett. Our...
Don’t Confuse Purpose with Goals

Don’t Confuse Purpose with Goals

How easily can you answer this: why did you get up this morning? It’s not meant to be depressing, annoying or inferring that religion is the answer, although maybe it is! However you feel about this question it gets all of us thinking about a topic that’s as relevant...
Stages – The Business Lifecycle in Emotions

Stages – The Business Lifecycle in Emotions

The business lifecycle is not based on revenue, profit or employee numbers. It’s based on emotions. At start-up things are exciting. With some success this moves on to frantic. From there, investment in further growth leads to getting through your 1st brick wall and...
Getting to Your Customer Base

Getting to Your Customer Base

The most successful companies have an acute understanding of the power of channels to market, a subject that forms the basis of our Distribution framework. Essentially it’s about understanding the many different routes that your business can take its product or...
The Three Things Leaders Should Do

The Three Things Leaders Should Do

Step away from the clichés. Stop trying to absorb the newest leadership fads. You’ll never blend these ideas into a strategy that will, somehow or other, power your business forward. The reality is the best leaders only do three things: • Set the context • Manage the...
4 Ways to Future Map Your Growth

4 Ways to Future Map Your Growth

As an entrepreneur, CEO or business owner, your work is your lifeblood. Yet as your organisation responds to an ever changing landscape, substantial growth can seem harder to realise and a tendency to mitigate scenarios with knee jerk reactions can prevail.     ...
Setting Effective Key Performance Indicators

Setting Effective Key Performance Indicators

How often does a failure to meet Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) trouble you as a business owner/director/manager? Or, phrased more positively, if every colleague consistently met and exceeded their KPIs, what impact would this have on the business? Often, the...
Know Your Position

Know Your Position

Entrepreneurs are increasingly asking what’s the most important thing that a business should focus on as we navigate through the pandemic and look forwards to a growing, but still fragile economy. The first area to assess is your positioning in the market. For...
The Ups and Downs of Business Growth

The Ups and Downs of Business Growth

In the final of this series of articles of how to navigate business black holes in order to grow your business. Now we’re looking at how to avoid being dragged backwards just when you thought you thought you were actually jumping over the black holes! Let’s use...
The Four Cycles Between Black Holes

The Four Cycles Between Black Holes

In the previous article, ‘Business black holes’, we outlined the predictable black holes that any business can fall into if they don’t plan ahead accurately enough. Here we go further and look at the four cycles between black holes which are key to business growth and...
Business Black Holes

Business Black Holes

Growth and stall trends occur regardless of the size of your business, what industry or sector you operate in or your location. All businesses go through predictable stall points. We call these black holes due to the fact that businesses can disappear into them for...
Generate More of the Right Kind of Revenue

Generate More of the Right Kind of Revenue

We all know that turnover is vanity and profit is sanity, meaning you need to focus on generating the right kind of revenue for your business. It’s very tempting to say ‘yes’ to all kinds of clients, particularly when you’re in the first few years of establishing your...
Coaching Works

Coaching Works

Judson Brewer, psychiatrist and thought leader in the “science of self mastery,” gave a TED Talk back in 2016 about the autopilot decision making process. By making you aware of your autopilot decisions (i.e. your unconscious choices) you can correct your...
What Is Your Business Worth?

What Is Your Business Worth?

We all know the answer to this…whatever someone is willing to pay.     It’s true, but not massively helpful when planning the strategic direction of a company and how you, as the owner, may sell it one day for a pleasing sum of money.     The formula generally used to...
Why People Really Leave Jobs

Why People Really Leave Jobs

People leave jobs for a number of reasons; when their job isn’t enjoyable, their strengths are not being used, they are not growing in their careers, or feel that they are not fulfilling a purpose. If you want to keep your people, especially your stars, it’s time to...
There’s Only One Resource

There’s Only One Resource

How many resources do you think you have available to you? Many of us could probably list a couple of things. Those with successful businesses might be able to make a big list. Whichever it is, let’s make the assumption that all our resources are completely relative....
Culture is Everything

Culture is Everything

Culture within business is the working environment created by choices business leaders made in the past, ones made in the present and as odd as it may first seem, those that have yet to be made. By identifying, aligning and integrating the commercial and cultural...
Three Ways to Enhance your Employees’ Work-Life Balance

Three Ways to Enhance your Employees’ Work-Life Balance

Once, we used to talk about Millennials’ view of work-life balance as a new-fangled idea. In 2020 everyone had to readjust and learn to live with the monumental effects of Covid-19. Millennials and even Generation X-ers may have pioneered the concept of work-life...

Happiness is good for business…

It is also a keystone in the Shirlaws methodology, in fact it’s relevant in every one of our frameworks. Understanding where you, your teams and the company are on your business journey creates options for accelerated growth by overcoming issues blocking the way. So,...

10 Strategies for Effective Leadership in Uncertain Times

As the old expression has it, “May you live in interesting times”, and certainly the 21st century has proven to be very interesting so far. From Brexit, to the U.S. presidential administration, to the global pandemic, pretty much all of the news we’re consuming makes...
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