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...
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
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...
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...
Six Steps to Better Business Communication
Good communication is vital within every business. Knowing that you’re being heard, and understood, is an immensely important part of this. Too often we communicate on the surface, answering the questions directly put to us instead of seeking out the detail, the...
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
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
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...
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
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
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
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...
You’re never too old to learn, but when you stop learning you’re old
The title of this article might sound a bit harsh, but I am a firm believer in lifelong learning. Keeping your mind active and positively challenged undoubtedly improves wellbeing, longevity and prosperity, which is one of the reasons I decided to embrace business...
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
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
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...
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
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?
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
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
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 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...
4 Generations in the Workplace, 7 Considerations for Business Leaders
Everything about work has changed. Even before the pandemic, businesses have had to move with the times whether they like it or not. As well as running a business whose colleagues are WFH and keeping morale high, businesses have to work with and cater for 4...
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...
Are you paying attention to the Culture of your business? You should be.
Bring a group of CEOs and company owners together and they’ll tell you that their people are their most important asset. Ask them where in any given year their main investments are and you get a list that includes technology, premises and equipment. So where is...Wake up and smell the coffee; using behavioural tools to make change work
Whether the impact is Brexit, a global pandemic or a lack of innovation, to make business change effective, a team needs to be aligned and pulling together in the same direction, leveraging the entrepreneur’s (E) vision for the future, the leader’s (L) plan for...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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