The 7 secrets to Generating Revenue in Your Business

Having spent numerous years coaching, training and mentoring businesses of all shapes and sizes several things have become very clear to me. Business is limited by the thinking of its owner or leadership team and that with the right tools and techniques businesses can push well beyond their expectations. However, I don’t need to tell that to a bunch of coaches do I? You already know this.

What you may not know is how to go about working with businesses and clients to resolve these issues.

In my book ‘Turning on your P.R.O.F.I.T.S Tap’ the 7 secrets to Generating Revenue in Your Business, I cover the process I undertake to achieve the shifts necessary to create such changes in mind-set by setting out a way of thinking about business strategically. I then back it up with practical tools businesses and/or coaches can use to create the success and profits desired.

In this article it my intention to give you the structure I use to get business owners and/or leadership teams to think differently. You can of course apply this to your business as well as that of your clients.

If I ask any business owner and/or leadership team to name all the things they need to do to generate revenue in their businesses the list can be exhaustive and endless. Believe it or not there are over 180 things a business owner needs to do to successfully generate revenue and profit. Is it any wonder business owners can feel trapped in their businesses?

The next question to them is if they have any staff? If the answer is yes, do they have a job description? If they say yes, I turn to the list they produced (180 things) and say ‘There’s your job description – did you really sign up for that or to do what you loved?

You see, most business owners, including me, started our business because we love what we do and then we have to do all this other stuff. It can be quite overwhelming.

To get you out of that trap and thinking strategically you need a way of thinking about your business a mind-set.

The tools I use with businesses give them that mind-set. You see I can take all 180 things and distil them into 7 main headings I call ‘Contexts’ so they can make sense of their business fast and make the right strategic decisions. I’m going to share those steps with you now.

But first, ask yourself this: are you a coach providing coaching services or are you a business owner who has a coaching business? There is a big difference in mind-set straight away.

Now for the seven mind-sets:

1. Purpose and Vision: ‘Companies with unusually clear vision outperform their competitors by a factor of ten’ according to Harvard Business School. Does your business have a clear purpose? Do you know why you exist and can you communicate that purpose with passion. If you can, great. Next what does your 3-year vision looks like and can you present it in a visual format. I use concentric circles, a bit like an archery target, with year one in the middle, year 2 the next circle out and year 3 the outer circle, and I get clients to populate it from the outside in. It creates clarity as they connect revenue to activity, staff numbers, customers etc.
2. Are you Relevant? Strange question I know, but ask yourself or your clients all the same. We have seen the demise of Woolworths, BHS in the UK and we live in a disruptive market. If you drive for a living, you’ll be redundant within years. Are you robust enough to deal with change as a business? You are getting this knowledge free courtesy of this article. How long before all knowledge is free and accessible, putting the education industry at risk?
3. Can you ‘Outclass the Crowd’ you are a coach like me. If I go networking I can guarantee there will be other coaches in the room. How do you differentiate yourself? You have to be clear on:

What you do?

Who you do it to?

What you charge?

The Service you provide?

The supermarket chains all know this. They sell essentially the same stuff, but people buy from them for different reasons. People will buy you or your client for different reasons. Understanding why you or your client is different is paramount. What is your or their X factor?

1. Finding Clients. Even if you ‘Out Class the Crowd’ you could still be the best kept secret. When I work with clients I help them find their ‘supermarkets’

You see Kellogg’s Cornflakes don’t sell to you and me. They build a relationship with a supermarket and they display and sell their goods. Who are your and/or your clients’ supermarkets? Mine are accountants, lawyers, and recruitment agencies etc. All I do is build a relationship with them and they refer me all over town. Now there is a way of building these relationships, which is simple, but too detailed for this article. Do you and your clients have relationships like this? I’ve taught this to a number of coaches one of whom receives ￡100K worth of referrals from one accountant each year.

1. Inspired Sales Meetings: If you have done all the early stages well you will need a sales process to follow for your meetings. Do you and/or your client has a documented sales process? If not, make sure you design one. I have a six-step process that focuses on the clients’ agenda not mine. Most sales processes are focused on sales, mine is focused on relationship as I want the client for life so I can be transformational not transactional to them
2. Time Management: Critical to any success in business is the ability to manage your personal time and business capacity. The more successful you become, the less time potentially you will have. Tools to manage your time and make you effective and efficient are therefore imperative. A month has 31 days at best and if you strip out the weekends, 22 days at best. How you use your time therefore is critical, considering that you have to run your business and serve your clients. Mu capacity is 12 client days a month. What is yours or your clients?
3. Serve Your Clients: No matter what business you are in, you will be measured on standards set by the companies like Apple and Amazon. You must, therefore, give exceptional service. You must give exceptional service for other reasons too. You want your client to refer you and you want your client to come back and buy more.

In conclusion, does your business or your clients business look like this? By doing a simple scoring you can work out where you need to put your focus:

Tick – yes it does

Neutral – sometimes

Cross – Never

As an example of how this works:

It’s a bit like turning on a tap at the top of the diagram. If there is a blockage you won’t generate as much as you deserve. If you don’t have a clear vision, the ability to outclass the crowd or build supermarkets then you’ll have loads of time on your hands. Conversely, you may have time and capacity issues if you’ve done the above well.

This simple tool will help you work with clients around their strategy for generating profit. There are a number of tools and in depth explanations in the book I mentioned, but even without the book you could run this model over your business and that of your clients and create tons of coaching opportunities.

I hope you have enjoyed this article and it brings you every success.