Breeding Gazelles

Fast Growth Strategies For Your Business

Dan Bradbury

• Publisher: Chiddingstone Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780995453241
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

More revenue, more profit, more time.

Three things every business owner wants. The challenge is you haven't developed the systems to allow the company to function and scale without you. You struggle to find and hire the right people who can effectively take things off your plate. Growth consumes cash so the end of month pay run is always a little too tight for comfort. It wasn't meant to be this way. Breeding Gazelles; Fast Growth Strategies For Your Busines s has the answers. How do you rapidly grow your company without it all being dependant on you? DanBradbury shows you how to: - Hire 'A' players for a fraction of the price
- Double your sales... in an afternoon!?
- Solve your biggest business problem in halfthe time
- Implement 5 keys for increasing your cashflow
- Maximiseyour business valuation prior to an exit
- Increase your sales by 32x in less than 2 years The level of thinking that got your business to where it is today will not get you where you want to go.
Breeding Gazelles contains interviews with some of the most successful buisness owners in the U.K. on how to avoid the pitfalls of rapid growth whilst maximising the upside.

CHAPTER 1

YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE DOING

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover
who’s been swimming naked.”

— WARREN BUFFETT

“We did a lot of things right, we got up to £40 or £50 million a year in revenue. But we made the mistake of thinking we knew what we were doing.”

Richard Reed, Co-founder of Innocent Smoothies, a juice company he sold to Coca-Cola for over £100 million in cash, spoke at one of my recent events.

“We just got lucky, he says. “For ten years of the business, we had no major problems. Then the recession hit, and we were within hours of going out of business because of a few stupid mistakes.”

According to Bill Gates, ”Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” Richard admits the company got lazy due to past success and made some critical mistakes - like only having one supplier who manufactured his smoothies, so when that supplier went bust, it nearly ruined the whole business. Or when they signed a bank loan with very stiff penalties if growth didn’t occur at a certain rate. When they didn’t reach that rate of growth due to the financial crisis, the bank very nearly called in the loan. That would have ended the business.

“The game never ends; there are always going to be big problems,” Richard stresses. “Your job as a business owner or entrepreneur is to make sure that you’re not making the same mistakes and having the same problems over and over again. Make them bigger, higher quality problems.”

If you’ve picked up this book, you must be ready to stop lying. You must be ready to admit that you have no clue what you’re doing. I know you think you do, but you’re not telling yourself the truth. You’ve just gotten lucky.

You’re a smart person, you’ve worked hard, you’ve got some traction, and you’re able to sell some stuff, but in reality, you are a slave to your business.

You are lying to yourself and everyone around you. Your business is on life support.

Likely you have set goals for yourself and your business in the past. Goal setting is not where it’s at.

Goals are the effect, not the cause.

The goal setting, the visualisation, is the exciting bit. It’s important to define your end point initially, but most people spend so much time focused on the end outcome, they forget they have got to actually MOVE!

Pretty much everybody on the planet wants to be fitter, sexier, richer, but wanting it does not make it happen.

Most people have the goal, but in reality, very few are prepared to do what it takes to make it happen. They are lying to themselves, saying they ‘want it’. They don’t.

I believe, if we spend the majority of our time focused on the daily disciplines, the critical drivers that, if consistently done, will produce the effects that we want, we would all make much more progress towards our goals.

Most business owners live in a fantasyland. Whenever they talk about the future, there are always big plans, goals and ideals. Big dreams that are “almost there” or “just around the corner.” But as soon as you ask about the previous twelve months, there’s an immediate change of heart, a justification as to why they didn’t hit their goals.

An excuse.

They are looking for a big win, the thing that will finally make this business work, overcome all past losses, a sudden breakthrough to a new level of profits and opportunity… and it’s complete and utter bollocks. It just doesn’t happen that way.

Not in the real world. And when it appears to, what you are actually observing is the “compound effect.”

What is the compound effect? Einstein described it as the eighth wonder of the world.

Keith J. Cunningham would describe it as “ordinary things, consistently done, producing extraordinary results.” One of the best books I’ve read on this subject is The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. In it, Darren explains how, if you are constantly making incremental improvements, at first it feels like nothing is happening, but if you persist, then you gain huge momentum.

If you take one penny and double it every day for thirty-one days (so it’s two pennies on day two, four pennies on day three, etc.), how much money would you have on the last day?

Over £10.7 million!

However, on day sixteen, you’re over halfway there and yet all you’d have is £327.68—do the math and see for yourself. And that’s why most business owners give up. They feel like they are putting in all this effort and not getting rewarded. Or worse, they get impatient and take a stupid risk that sets them back years, just before they were about to get the ‘overnight success’ they’d been looking for.

Massive leverage can and does happen, but the little wins need to be gained first.

There’s no specific requirement that you must slave for a certain period of time in business before you prosper, but you must keep consistently making incremental progress. Most people don’t have the discipline to do this, and that’s why they join the ranks of the majority of the population, who are just one month’s paycheck away from oblivion.

Just a tiny two percent improvement in your income each month would see your pay increase by more than ten times in less than ten years. So dream big, by all means. Just make sure that, every single month, you’re using the strategies, tactics, and case studies detailed in this book in order to get compounded results.

You’re Stalled

You’ve hit a plateau. It’s gotten harder to scale. The thinking that got you to your current level not what will get you to the next one. In fact, the thought process that got you where you are now is the very thing that will inhibit and prevent you from reaching that next level.

Different stages of business size and scale require different skillsets. The first stage is about taking massive action to get traction, throwing ideas up against the wall and seeing what sticks.

Your business was an infant, so it needed nurturing and hand-holding. It needed everything you were doing for it. But now, as you look to go from mid-six figures to seven figures, you have to have leverage, and leverage only comes in two forms: people and systems. In order to have a business that is self-sufficient, what Dan Sullivan, Founder of Strategic Coach, would call a self-managing company, that can live, breathe, exist and make money by itself, you need to have systems, processes, and people driving that business.

Unless you know how to set up the systems, and unless you know how to choose the right people, get those people on the bus, then manage and lead them, it’s going to be your Achilles heel. It will be the weak link that snaps the chain.

You cannot get the scale that you want with the skills that brought you to this level. To go from mid-six to seven figures, and definitely to go from seven figures to eight figures, you need a different skillset. You need the skills contained in this book. Otherwise, you will be permanently stuck, working your ass off, taking less money home than your team members in some months while carrying all the stress, all the hassle, and all the risk. You’re not getting return on investment.

You’ve managed to do the hard work, managed to get enough momentum to keep the business alive. And actually, it’s not such a big shift to a radically transformative level of profitability, a hugely more profitable business. There are just a few little shifts, but you need to know what those shifts are. You need the information in this book

Most business owners are deluding themselves. Modest success makes you falsely believe you know what you are doing, but the reality is you don’t have a clue. My biggest challenge is dealing with business owners who think, firstly, that they know what the problem is, and secondly, that they know the answers. They are mistaken. Like you, they know the answers that got them to this stage. Like you, they don’t know the answers that will get them to the next level.

My biggest problem is dealing with business owners who think, firstly, that they know what the problem is, and secondly, that they know the answers.

Worse yet, at this point, you are lying to yourself and to everyone around you. Your past success means you get protective and try to defend your business systems. You don’t want to lose the income streams coming to you, and you don’t want to take on risk when you are finally starting to make a little bit of money.

Actually, you need to get real. In order to fix the problem, you need to first acknowledge that one exists. And the fact is, you don’t have your act together.

In many respects, you just got lucky.

You are hanging on by the skin of your teeth, and problems are popping up. Fires flare up at different times, and your whole attention goes to them. Your business enslaves you, your phone never leaves your side, and you’re always on, 24-7, 365. It makes your spouse crazy that you’re not available because the business is on life support. It’s not about to die, but it’s sick, and it all feels so unfair. You’re trying to train somebody with a nagging knee injury to be an elite athlete. It doesn’t make sense. You cannot have peak performance when, fundamentally, you have injuries and flaws.

Those flaws in your business will prevent you from ever being an elite athlete, ever increasing from a half million to ten million pounds. You need to address those issues. But first, you need to acknowledge you don’t know it all. Then, rather than seeing some great idea on the internet and assuming that Facebook advertising will magically save the day, you need to learn how to look for the problems plaguing your business.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

In today’s business world, you can’t stay still. You need to continually improve, even just to stay still, and if you don’t stay ahead of the radically moving marketplace, your business will be over.

Capitalism is the ultimate definition of survival of the fittest, and if you’re not on the cutting edge of technology, if you’re not well-versed in new skillsets, new business models, the latest economic trends, you’re screwed. The business will be done and you will fail. It’s important to remember that the accelerated pace of change is both the biggest threat and the biggest opportunity.

If you can stay ahead of the curve, not just react but correctly anticipate the right move, you, as Wayne Gretzky said, “can skate to where the puck is going”, and you can reap rewards beyond your wildest imagination. It’s not about getting lucky. It’s not about coming up with an idea to rival Uber. It’s about identifying how you think about your business, how you approach your business, and how you make sure you stay ahead of the curve every single day, making the incremental changes necessary for maximum impact on your profitability.

It’s never been a better time to be a small business owner. The trend, as we’ve come out of the last great recession, is increasingly pro small business. It’s increasingly technology-led, which means more and more generic jobs being lost and more and more people being self-employed. This new technology means people can create new ideas, products, and services quickly, leading to great opportunity, as well as more competition than ever. There has never been a lower barrier to entry but, unless you have a competitive advantage, it will become harder and harder to make money.

The return on investment you seek can only be gained by having a competitive advantage, and that competitive advantage comes from having the skills and tools to outthink and outsmart the competition. One in a thousand people might get lucky. The only way to consistently give yourself a competitive advantage is to have the right system, the right process, which allows you to correctly analyse what’s going on and make the best possible investments of your time and money.

This book will help you do three things:

1.Clarify a much bigger vision for your business. Your business is capable of so much more than you currently think. I will show you how to tap into that vision.

2.Correctly analyse the business to get the low hanging fruit. Knowing which screws to turn and which dials to move can have an exponential increase on your profitability. You’ll learn to identify the easiest change you can make to create the biggest impact and maximise the return on investment.

3.Leverage people so that your company is less dependent on you. Once it can exist as self-managing, meaning the right people and systems are in place, you can make the profit you deserve and have the time to enjoy it.

Most business owners can’t see the wood for the trees. They’re too wrapped up in all of the drama in their business. This book will help you identify the low hanging fruit. From reading this book, you will immediately identify something you can put in place that, within the next thirty days, will result in a notable difference in your bottom line profits and cash in your bank account.

Are You One Of the Top Two Percent?

The speed of change is also accelerating, however. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: What Is A Gazelle?
• Chapter One: You Have No Idea What You Are Doing
• Chapter Two: Set For Life?
• Chapter Three: Critical Elements To Success
• Part I - Principles
• Overview Of The Four Principles
• Chapter Four: Critical Thinking
• Chapter Five: Power Of Mastermind
• Chapter Six: Deal Flow
• Chapter Seven: The Multiplier Effect
• Part II - Strategy
• Chapter Eight:Roi
• Chapter Nine: Financial Analysis
• Chapter Ten: Business Value Maximisation
• Chapter Eleven: Double Your Sales In An Afternoon
• Chapter Twelve: Your Strategic Plan
• Part III - Execution
• Chapter Thirteen: Culture
• Chapter Fourteen: Metrics
• Chapter Fifteen: One Thing
• Conclusion: You Have Everything You Need
• About The Author