The Key Secret Of Business Success | A Business Mentor
It took me a monstrous 28 years to realise that I needed a business mentor, or I would probably never achieve any business success at all. I’d been entrepreneurial since a child, but I was growing up in a family with no money and no business people in it, much less successful business people. My early business ventures were, although I didn’t know it, pretty much doomed to failure!
From flat finding to waistcoat production, from renting my paperback books at the age of 8 to being a freelance fashion designer suppling designer shops like Hunter in Brighton, or Duffer Of St George in London at the age of 26.
From helping my husband start his own dance music compilations record label, Esoteric Records, to working with many start up entrepreneurs as their PA, I always knew I wanted to build a successful, profitable business, for me, but in spite of reading many many books and attending many government sponsored courses, success STILL eluded me.
Things improved a bit at the age of 38 when I saw the light, took responsibility for my own success and results and started my wealth creation journey and my quest for financial freedom.
I have told the story many times of how I met my first wealth creation mentor, Gill Fielding, and if you haven’t read it you can enjoy that story here >>> . However, Gill had loads of experience of creating wealth through property investing, and investing in the stockmarket, and we all know that she is an utterly brilliant speaker, but having come from the corporate world herself, she didn’t know how to start and grow a small, startup business from scratch, on a shoestring. We started The Wealth Company together, and after 6 months amicably agreed to go our seperate ways, Gill wanting to reach more people to “light the spark of financial possibility” as she called it, and me wanting to work more one-to-one. Gill bought me out and in the process, giving me the first inkling that a business idea, put into action, might have an asset value and be actually be worth something. None of my other start up business ever had been.
When I bought my run-down hotel The Acacia, no money down, gutted it and started to market it online, I quizzed my accountant Mark Nicolson from Spofforths in Worthing and my bank manager Mike Murray from Nat West, about what made the businesses they saw every day successful, and what seperated those that succeeded from those that failed, and I got some very interesting answers.
One of the most important of those, for your information, was cashflow management. Mike said that he had seen many profitable businesses fail, through bad cashflow management. At that time I had both the hotel business The Acacia, and the wealth coaching business The Money Gym, so I taught myself how to manage not just one, but two cashflows, through a simple spreadsheet, on a weekly basis and I love knowing the impact of what I spend today, on my cashflow in 18 months time.
But one of the main problems was that neither Mark nor Mike knew what I didn’t know. And the big problem with that is, that without a business mentor watching over you all the time, you can easily make a VERY BIG BUSINESS MISTAKE, a costly business mistake, even a fatal business mistake, without even realising you are making it.
So subconciously, I knew I needed a business mentor and I was searching for one, even while I was coaching many Money Gym clients to success, in property, internet marketing, the stockmarket and………yes…….you guessed it, BUSINESS.
I was a master of the Start Up, and how to build a mailing list, market yourself online and get sales, but didn’t know how to grow a business past the point of just paying your salary, into mega success. Apart from Steve helping out on the techie and design side, which did improve things a lot, I was also doing everything else in my business, so hardly ever had any time for thinking about the strategy for growth, or as we call it round here, working ON my business, rather than always working IN my business.
Even I had had some time, I still didn’t know WHAT to do, to grow the business. I sold the hotel, following some personal upheavals, but due to an ill-timed council planning decision, i went from nearly making £350,000 in 3 years, to making nothing much to speak of. However, The Money Gym was still going strong.
One of our first Money Gym clients, and now my business partner, Judith Morgan has shared the story of how she found us online, what happened in her year in Money Gym Gold and how much of a return on investment she got (and is still getting) from 2003 till the present day, just six years on. You can read that story here >>>
I have also told the story of how, in 2005, I had been looking for a business mentor, or a business advisor, or ANYONE who knew how to grow a business from startup and ticking over, when I had the famous brainwave and decided to make Judith Morgan our business partner in The Money Gym. You can read that here >>>
Judith’s arrival made a huge difference to The Money Gym and not least because she took on the day to day managing of the money, making sure we were cashflow positive and always current with the VAT and Tax Office. Just that lack of worry about money made it possible for me to be more creative and focus on the marketing.
Steve looked after operations, design and customer support, so now we were growing a team. My original idea had been that Judith did all the coaching (I had done it myself for over 3 years!) and she had a better idea, and invited some of our more successful clients, all trained coaches themselves, to become Money Gym coaches.
Judith had grown several businesses from scratch, and had been accountant and finance director to many more, so she brought solid financial sense to the business, but she brought something more. A new energy, and a creativity, a love for people and an ability to think much bigger than I ever did. Steve had always worked for someone else, and all those years, I had been embedded in survival mode, while Judith was firmly ensconced in abundance mode and that is an amazing quality to work with.
I have also been priviledged to experience both of Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System and the live version of the Guided Profit System (GPS). I’ve watched Rich grow his business from nothing, to a multi-million turnover in less than three years. Rich, of course, not only interned at a huge consulting firm in the strategic planning department, but has enormous amounts of experience in growing businesses to a multi-million turnover. More importantly, he has some awesome business mentors of his own, including marketing guru Jay Abraham, and Agora Publishing’s Michael Masterson (that’s his pen name).
Through Rich Schefren, I’ve been introduced to some amazing business concepts and tools, and his GPS programme in particular has given me some awesome ways to solve problems and bust through obstacles. The Michael Masterson books “Ready Fire Aim” and “Zero To A Million” have shot straight into my Top 10 Business Books of all time.
Working through his programmes have proved to me that there is much more to building a successful business than just starting one with a great idea. It’s an ongoing process, which is both rewarding and challenging at the same time.
Deeply fulfilling and utterly terrifying, if you are doing it on your own. Nobody to talk to, nobody to ask, nobody to run ideas past. Ideas that may be the best thing to happen to your business, or the worst business mistake ever!
I still have regular dreams about Steve and I being back at The Acacia, just before it sold, and in those dreams I have the strong feeling that I could make it work, this time, because I know so much more about business and what makes business success now!
How frustrated I feel when I wake up……….about as frustrated as I feel when Money Gym google group members express some erroneous assumption about their businesses and marketing, or say they are going to do something that I feel might be a mistake, or that could be done easier, or more effectively.
Frustrated because, no matter how much Judith and I would like to, we can only help and mentor the business people who sign up for one of our coaching programmes. We are also a business after all, and modelling good business building practices is part of our remit.
By growing The Money Gym we inspire and by doing it in a way that serves our personal needs, we learn skills, tools, techniques that we can pass onto our clients.
We are now searching for, and interviewing, potential strategic partners to work with on the parts of the Money Gym business that we are not able to do, or suited to do.
We are talking to people about starting to run a rolling series of product launches, for us, for our main Money Gym coaching programmes. We are looking for an Adwords / Conversion expert to work with, as while I’m pretty good at Adwords, wealth creation is a very competitive and expensive niche, and we are not achieving the kind of traffic or front end sales I want and the business needs, to keep on growing. We are looking for an affiliate manager to guide and help our hundreds of affiliates to be able to make more money from recommending us.
This year, realising from our own experience and from talking to our Money Gym Gold clients, that there was a huge gap in the market for businesses of all sizes, looking for a business mentor we created our top level coaching / mentoring programme, The Money Gym Boardroom.
At the moment, you can go to Business Link, or your Enterprise Centre, but it’s very hit and miss whether you get assigned a business mentor who has actually had some business success themselves.
We know that you need to work with experienced business people, who are walking their talk, and constantly searching for excellence, more profits and win/win situations. And we are not JUST talking about us, but your fellow Boardroom members. Carefully picked, for intelligence, action taking abilities, and aspirations, everyone in that Boardroom will contribute till the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
God! Here’s a cry from my heart!
How I wish I had had something like The Boardroom years ago – instead of the years and years I have spent learning, slowly and painfully, how to do business successfully, I would have been so much more successful, so much sooners.
But hey, ho! Here we are now.
The only question is, are you going to join us?
We hope so.
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