Fantastic morning with Neale Lewis – including video highlights of a great event on ‘Scaling up your business for financial success’.

What an amazing Friday morning we had at Pride Park Stadium with Neale Lewis. His presentation on how to scale up your business for financial success went brilliantly! We were able to capture some great snippets on video of Neale too and you can watch these HERE! Over 50 businessmen and women across Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire came and enjoyed a powerful workshop.

Some key takeaways:  –  PEOPLE  –  STRATEGY  –  EXECUTION  –  CASH

PEOPLE  –  Get your recruitment strategy right:  –

• Put a proper consistent process in place. Of your existing staff – work out who are your ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ performers? Be brave and honest enough to let someone go if they are not right as its your ‘c’ players who will frustrate and ultimately cause your ‘a’ players to leave!
• The phrase ‘slow to hire, quick to fire’ is really important! Don’t hang onto the wrong people for any longer than you have to.
• Be thorough!! Have rigor in checking the past performance of your ‘potential’ staff and have the processes in place to make this happen – every time!
• Have regular performance or ‘talent’ reviews
• Have a strategy how to hand onto your ‘a’ players?

STRATEGY  –  Be different to your competitors:  –

• Have a strategy to monitor what they are doing. What can you learn from them? Do’s and don’ts!
• Understand the core values that make your business different and stand out from the crowd
• What trends are happening in your market space?
• How can you take advantage of these?

EXECUTION  –  Make your plans happen:  –

• Have a 5 year plan – have a clear goal of what you want to achieve for your business and YOU personally!
• Put in place processes to monitor your progress against your plans
• Have 90 day plans and make sure all your team have their own plans to achieve their targets
• What are the ‘rocks’ in your business? What are the priorities that HAVE to happen in your business in the next 90 days?
• Surround yourself with people better than you – seek a professional Coach / Mentor / NED to steer you and keep you focussed

CASH  –  Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity:  –

• Always remember that cash is king in business
• Know what your cash to conversion cycle is – how much money does it take through overheads to achieve profit?
• The power of 1% – if you could generate just 1% extra performance, 1% extra sales volumes – how much extra profit could that mean? Small steps = big changes in your financial bottom line.
• Recognise the importance of truly understanding the numbers and true meaning of your balance sheet and what it is telling you – week in week out, month in month out!

FINALLY:  –

• Visualise your company’s performance – have a visual representation for your aims and where you are to date in achieving them – for you and your team!
• Set yourself, your team and your business a ‘hairy, audacious goal’. Dare to dream.
• Have processes in place to track performance at all levels, all the way, ALL THE TIME!
• Consistency is everything. Once you have processes in place they have to happen consistently to make an impact!

Thanks again to everyone who came, our team at Astute and of course the staff at Pride Park who made everyone very welcome and provided a much needed breakfast! A special thank you goes to Craig Barker of Koobr for his video testimonial about his thoughts on the morning! You can watch that HERE.