Michael Carter - Stop, Change, Grow

Stop, Change, Grow

Stop, Change, Grow

How To Drive Your Small Business to the Next Level

Michael Carter and Karl Shaikh

Stop, Change, Grow: How To Drive Your Small Business to the Next Level

Copyright Business Expert Press, LLC, 2020.

Cover design credit: Charlene Kronstedt

Interior design by Exeter Premedia Services Private Ltd., Chennai, India

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations, not to exceed 400 words, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published in 2020 by

Business Expert Press, LLC

222 East 46th Street, New York, NY 10017

www.businessexpertpress.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-95253-820-9 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-95253-821-6 (e-book)

Business Expert Press Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management Collection

Collection ISSN: 1946-5653 (print)
Collection ISSN: 1946-5661 (electronic)

First edition: 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

Abstract

Is your business stuck for growth or are you simply out of ideas?

This book is the inspiration youre looking for. In three major sections it shows you how to: STOP doing many of the things that were once right but are no longer appropriate, freeing up resources, allowing you to CHANGE what you are doing for better results today and then to GROW the business for a future that will excite you.

The authors came together in 2003 when they co-founded Virtual Directors Limited a London based consultancy aimed at supporting small and medium sized businesses. They brought together 33 consultants from mixed disciplines, with talent ranging from rocket science, engineering and construction through to retail, corporate finance, HR and economics. Having also both worked on five continents, the authors have a wealth of experiences to relate in this book.

As you turn the pages, you will find real life examples together with easily implemented ideas and suggestions to provide an immediate impact on your thinking and your business.

Keywords

business; growth; controls; management; delegation; profit; improvement; start-up; stagnation; ideas

Contents

Youve bought the book, you wanted answers for your business. Whilst numbers do vary considerably by industry and country, your turnover is possibly in the $1/2 million to $10 million range and the business is somewhere with 5 to 30 names on the payroll.

Your business has historically grown by leaps and bounds, but of late it is seemingly running fast, just to keep still. We see a kind of glass ceiling, where the other side is visible but tantalizingly unreachable. We call these Plateau Businesses. Its like driving a car with a punctured tire; you want to go faster, but unless you stop and change the tire, your speed and distance will be limited. Likewise, if youre on a road with lots of potholes, you need to stop and fill the potholes or consider driving along a totally different road.

Even if you see yourself running a lifestyle business, happy to remain under the glass ceiling, the Stop and Change sections of this book will make your life easier, freeing up more time and mind space for a better lifestyle. For you, there is the opportunity to skip the Grow section, although we suspect you might change your mind once youve seen the opportunities therein to use the freed-up resources to create a better business, and thereby a different lifestyle.

This book gives you answers. Maybe not the answers you thought you wanted, maybe only partial answers, and maybe answers you are not yet ready to admit as valid. This book is purposefully written in a conversational style, jam-packed with seemingly simple yet powerful questions and examples of applying this thinking in many real business situations. Its these questions, examples, and parables that are designed to prompt reflection, to help provide you a fresh perspective, and to help you wonder what if I tried? Its up to you and your own curiosity to wonder what if?

For Plateau Businesses, weve found that asking the right questions with a sprinkling of curiosity can do wonders to unleash your success. You already know its not about pushing harder. Some lines of questioning will feel irrelevant for your businessbecause were not there in person to cut those out for youwhilst others will resonate and trigger you to take steps to move your business to the next level. For these steps that come to your mind, weve provided a handy Action This Today notepad at the end of the book for you to keep track of actions you want to take.

Oh, and by the way, congratulations, as 95 percent of all companies started have either folded before reaching the stage you are already at or still trying to catch you up.

Finally for here if we have anything wrong or misquoted please tell us and well correct it for the next edition.

Happily driving along one day, your car dips into a pothole. The subsequent clanking tells you theres a problem and you limp into the nearest tire center. Mechanics put the car on a hoist and you retire to the cold, drafty, poor excuse for a reception area. Fortified by a ghastly machine-made cup of something, you start reading a magazine article on the problems of disposing of used tires. They cant be burned and they shouldnt become landfill. Only so many are needed to be protection around motor race circuits or to be chained together to create artificial reefs in the sea. Minced up, they make a safe landing for childrens play areas, but it doesnt use that many to do all play areas length and breadth of the country. Sure, some are remolded into new tires, but you can only do the remolding a few times before the whole tire is past reuse. So there are lots of unloved used tires accumulating in vast stacks around the planet.

Then, your Eureka moment arrives. You decide minced tires with a suitable binder/setting agent would be an excellent pothole filler, flexible yet strong, and not subject to deterioration in the cold. The only problem you have at the research stage is finding someone who will supply the small quantity of minced tire you want for your experimentationmultiple truckloads no problem, a couple of sacksfulumm problematic. A nearby, pot-holed, quiet piece of road provides a good proving ground for the Rube Goldberg output from your garden shed. You eventually find the right recipe and want to start selling.

Everyone thinks its a great idea, but nobody wants to take it on, unproven. Finally, you persuade your local town council to let you mend their holes for free as a reference for others and, hey presto, snowball effect, after the next winter you have a fleet of trucks with your name on and a bigger gang of workers, earning you substantial sums nationwide.

A big construction company comes sniffing around. Their acquisitions director says theyd like to make you a wealthy man and take the business off your hands, if only, of course, post purchase, youll stay on and run it for them. You think you can do better on your own.

But then revenues start to fall. You have filled in the largest potholes and theyre not recurring, so work is dropping. You decide to hire a guru who, after much procrastination and no little expense, says license the technology internationally, and there followed a sudden fillip in income, as royaltiesmainly from Scandinaviacome rolling in. The next guru you hire says diversify, so you take your best workers and set them on trialing whether the same product would provide good insulation if formed as house bricks.