by Paul Steel | Jan 18, 2023 | Articles, Overwhelmed, Productivity
Busy vs Productive
Do you need to do more, or to focus on less?
Every month, I meet with many business owners. After a while, obvious patterns begin to emerge. It has become obvious that owners fall into 2 primary categories—BUSY and PRODUCTIVE.
Most of the owners that I meet live in a constant state of being overwhelmed. They never seem to have enough time and feel like they are always “Busy”. When you ask them how they are doing, they will often choose to tell you how busy they are. It’s almost like a badge of honour – as if it is a good thing. Perhaps they actually think it is, but their results prove otherwise.
Busy Owners constantly struggle to prioritize and constantly re-prioritize their schedules and activities. By adding new priorities and tasks, they move to a constant state of over-commitment. It is not uncommon for these owners to drop balls, become forgetful, miss appointments, lose trust, and damage their personal and company reputations. They fall short on most of their goals due to lack of focus. Many Busy Owners haven’t taken a real vacation in years and when they do, they are unable to peel away from their emails, texts, and voicemails. They are truly busy, but mostly ineffective and unproductive.
An interesting thing about Busy Owners is that their busy-ness usually leads to more busy-ness. For them, being busy is like pumping more wood into a fire. The fire may temporarily get larger and feel like progress, but the end result is simply a larger pile of ash.
Conversely, the most successful owners focus intensely upon productivity. Productive Owners rarely seem to be busy. Although all businesses have occasional issues that may require additional attention from the owner, this Productive Owner is typically relaxed, thoughtful, curious, and balanced. They appear to have a great deal of control over their words, thoughts, calendars, and decisions. They keep appointments and are proactive instead of reactive. Rather than adding more goals, strategies, and activities, which tend to disperse focus, these successful owners invest an appropriate portion of their business and personal planning deciding what NOT to do (the most challenging, but important part of planning). Productive Owners can always find time to focus ON (versus in) their businesses and their lives.
The Busy Owner “never has the time” to do this. There is just too much “important stuff” to get done.
The most successful entrepreneurs understand that there is no more powerful force than focused energy. So instead of investing exorbitant time creating and trying to execute their To-Do list, Productive Owners devote extra effort to creating and managing their “Don’t Do, Delegate” lists. Doing so helps them to invest their limited, valuable time, energy, and resources in the most effective way possible and to focus only on those activities at or above their pay grade. Instead of striving to be busy, these owners strive to be productive.
Productive Owners outperform Busy Owners in every imaginable category including growth, profit, valuation, vacation, sleep, happiness and more.
So if you are a Busy Owner who wants to become a Productive Owner, here are a few steps to get you started..:
- CHOOSE to not be busy. This is about your mind set.
- Write your “to do” list, and then move the busy activities to the bottom of the list.
- Form the new habit. CHOOSE Productivity as your priority for 90 days. By then, Productivity will become a habit and busy-ness will taste like poison.
- For every BUSY task that you do take on – think why? Think about how to avoid doing this yourself next time.
- LOCATE an Accountability Coach or Productivity Coach to keep you on track. A short period of accountability coaching will help form the new habits.
- Test your BUSINESS MODEL – how do you get to afford to pay others to do the busy work for you…
by Paul Steel | Jan 18, 2023 | Articles, Mind Set, Sales
Are you struggling with generating sales?
As a leader in your business some of the following might sound familiar:
- Sales volumes are inconsistent from month to month
- Writing lots of quotes / proposals, but still not getting the sales
- Having to re-write quotes / proposals several times is driving you crazy
- Too many prospects saying “not interested”, or “call me back in 6 months”
- Just not getting enough leads for generating sales
All of the above are symptoms that your Sales Process is not working properly.
Let’s start right there. Sales is a process. Surely you want a series of repeatable steps, where if you follow the steps, you improve your odds for generating sales sales.
In your business, surely you know the difference between a successful sale and a non-sale? So what happened in the successful sale, and how do we capitalise on that? Are you sabotaging your own sales? Had the experience where you thought to yourself “I should not have said that”, or “I should not have done that”?
How do you form good habits around the things that work in sales, and remove the behaviours / steps that cause you to fail in sales?
MIND SET
The road to success in sales in filled with obstacles, pitfalls, potholes, and landmines. Navigating through this is going to take an open mind. You are going to need to be open to learning and trying new ideas, and you are going to need to be resilient.
None of this is going to be easy for most entrepreneurs. It’s your business and your process. Accepting the need for change is the first hurdle. Consider engaging someone to work with you on understanding and challenging your current sales reality.
HERE ARE 10 FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO POOR SALES.
- Beliefs
What you believe about sales and selling is going to drive your behaviours and your success. The same applies to your sales team. Past success will shape your thinking: “This is the only thing that works”. You develop blinkers to any other strategy. Past failures contribute in a similar way: “I’ve tried that, it doesn’t work”. Have you considered that the failure might actually have been due to poor execution, lack of experience, or how many other factors?
- Not enough effort
Sales is hard work, and it’s a numbers game. The effort that you put in has to be in line with the results that you expect. If you do not have enough prospects being fed into your sales pipeline, you are just not going to achieve and sustain the sales.
You simply have to track and know your numbers. Know where the conversion is dropping and focus on that.
- Do not know your ideal client
The belief that anybody and everybody is your client [customer] is going to dilute the effectiveness of any of your marketing strategies. You cannot be all things to everyone. Your marketing message needs to be focused and it needs to talk to and resonate with your ideal client.
- No USP defined – point of differentiation
Far too many entrepreneurs rely too heavily on price, quality, and service as their differentiators. The challenge is that quality is often hard to measure or prove, and service is very subjective. Everyone can claim better quality and service, until they are proven right, or wrong. Invest more time in understanding and creating a strong Unique Selling Proposition.
- No defined steps in process
Sales is a process. You need to actively move a prospect from awareness to being a customer, and ultimately to being a raving fan. There are actions that can be taken at each step on this customer journey that will improve the likelihood of them taking the next step.
- Writing too many proposals and quotes
Writing proposals or quotes is both time consuming and costly. How often does it happen that after any pitch the first thing that your prospective customer says, is “send me a quote”. Not surprisingly, very few of these quotes ever turn into a job, and far too often the quote is re-written several times, and still goes nowhere. Ask more questions, write fewer quotes.
- Prospects not qualified
This is the link between not knowing your ideal customer and writing too many quotes. The prospect that you are talking to does not really have the need, inclination, or budget to buy your product or service. You are wasting time and money talking to un-qualified prospects.
- Order takers and not order makers
Sales staff are most often happy to take orders from willing customers, but are not prepared to, or not equipped to make orders. Taking orders is easy. Making orders requires understanding the customer, and their needs, and then crafting a solution that will make the customer take the next step.
- Passing over the failures
Failure is the point where we can learn the most, and yet we tend to brush it off, and just move on to the next customer. What we need to do is to go through the painful process of dissecting what happened in each step when we failed. If we can understand why we failed, we can find the opportunities for improvement. This is about unlocking the potential.
- Telling is not selling
The stereotype is that a good sales person likes talking. Given any opportunity to talk about the product or service, and you just cannot shut them up. It’s that feeling of being ‘railroaded’ or ‘smooth talked’ into making the purchase. The reality is that the best sales people are in fact good at asking questions, and listening, not telling.
Looking for better sales results, then think carefully about mapping out your existing process, looking for the gaps and opportunities. Not something that you have tackled before, then look for someone to assist you. A fresh set of eyes can be a very good thing to help you with generating sales.
by Paul Steel | Dec 4, 2022 | Testimonials
When we first engaged with Paul 4 years ago, we were a small manufacturing operation managed by 2 individuals. We reached out to Paul because we were facing a few challenges:
- We had growth opportunities that we were struggling to seize.
- Our roles, levels of involvement, and individual strengths were not clear to us.
- We had not set any clear goals.
- Our manufacturing management structure was weak.
- We had a few big challenges that we were avoiding tackling.
In other words, we needed structure and framework.
From the get-go, our experience with Paul was a very positive experience – it was probably the best investment we have made in our business. Before I continue, I would like to highlight that it would not have been a success without a 200% commitment from our side, i.e., reading the material, making time for the action proposed, and having thorough discussions.
The first few meetings were so enlightening: it was about setting the purpose behind the whole exercise, and helping us verbalise and outline our challenges.
After identifying our needs, we spent time resolving each obstacle created by our own mindsets.
Something that was a personal realisation is the way Paul helped to turn a project into reality. My personality makes me put a ‘mental’ boundary between a project and its implementation. This results in me being excited about prospects and future growth, but not realising that this prospect would never materialize because of my inner fear for failure. This was a risk for the whole business as I would “feel” like I was succeeding but I was not growing.
That inner fear was, in my case, that step between selling the project and implementing it. I did not put enough effort into the planning, writing, contracting, and financing aspects to get the project done. Typically procrastinating around the financial part, the project effectiveness would eventually fade away, meanwhile, I felt positive because a lot of work was going out. However, after some time, I would realise that I had not grown, and I was still working IN the business and not ON it!
Paul also helped us with re-organising some of our shareholder relations, and putting rationality behind our thinking, instead of emotions. He really taught us how to have a rational and proactive approach to business.
So, I can surely say that our experience with Paul has been of great benefit to the business. I would recommend him to any entrepreneur who is struggling to grow and make their business work for them.
Diego – MD Bakali Foods
by Paul Steel | Dec 4, 2022 | Testimonials
I met Paul at a networking evening in June 2019, and soon after, Paul became my business coach.
Paul has made an exceptional contribution to both my business and personal growth, through guidance, mentorship, leadership, and being a solid sounding board for myself as Managing Director of Ultra Chem.
Paul assisted me in understanding management reports to planning 12-month cashflow forecasts, where previously, this was not one of my strong points.
Despite going through Covid challenges during the past two years, Paul made a significant impact on Ultra Chem, by ensuring sustainability during this tough time and forward planning to reduce risks and pitfalls.
Through his commitment to Ultra Chem, we have grown from R30mil annual turnover to this year’s approx. R90mil, and he assisted us with moving to bigger premises, all part of the forward growth planning. Our business today is solid, with a reputation for excellence in service, quality, and value for money.
I am forever grateful for the mentorship I received through learning from Paul’s advice and the experience he taught me over the past 3 years. I am most certainly a better leader today because of him and can now boast that I am most definitely “An Entrepreneur!”
Thank you, Paul!
Danie Greeff– MD Ultra chem
by Paul Steel | Dec 4, 2022 | Testimonials
Working with Paul from 40 Megahertz has been a transformation from being a corporate manager to being an entrepreneur. My weekly sessions with Paul have helped me to keep focused and motivated, leaving each session knowing that “I can do it”.
I have benefitted hugely from Paul’s great insight into business, and he has a knack for getting inside my head and helping me to overcome my personal barriers.
Paul’s experience as a coach and as a consultant show through his depth of knowledge and his willingness to share. He has never been afraid to challenge my non-delivery and hold me accountable.
Outside of our sessions, Paul has always been available for that 5 min call to help me clear my head and get back on track.
Highly recommended!
Peter – Founder De Kroetterie
