What Are The Six Steps to Business Success? The ActionCOACH 6 Steps is a straightforward framework to build a successful, profitable enterprise that works without you.
Of course, building a business requires dedication, knowledge, and a willingness to follow this methodology and most business owners either never learn the system, or they apply the knowledge chaotically. But, if you follow the steps, you can make more money and build a business that works without you.
So, what are the six steps that bring business success?
- Building Business Mastery
- Marketing for Profitability
- Building Systems
- Training Teams
- The Synergy Level
- Freedom
Let’s take a look at how each of these steps brings you closer to your profitable business.
Business Mastery
Business mastery is the base of any successful business. It helps you get the core of the business right and builds a solid foundation for growth. Mastery consists of four elements:
- Destination – knowing the goals of your business. Without guidance, you’ll jump from one thing to another, and so will your staff. If people in your team go in different directions, you won’t achieve your business goals.
- Delivery – how well you deliver your product or service. Consistency and persistency are vital so that your customers receive top-quality products or services all the time, every time.
- Money – knowing where your money is. When you’re looking to build a successful business, you absolutely need to know what’s happening with your money.
- Time – doing the right things to grow your business. You need to stop wasting time on things that don’t make you money. If you’re doing it to save money, beware … it might cost you a fortune in the long run.
Marketing
Marketing helps you understand how to make money in your business. It adds profitability to your company and is about promoting your business to attract new customers and building long-lasting relationships with existing clients, so that they continue to buy from you. In marketing, you need to focus on five elements:
- Leads
- Conversions
- Transactions
- Average sales
- Margins
Marketing helps you build your cash flow. If you optimise how leads become customers and the process of generating repeat business, you’ll make a profit. In order to get there though, you’ll need to know your numbers: how many people get in touch with your brand (leads), how many of them end up buying from you (conversions), how many times they purchase (transactions), how much these clients mean in terms of revenue (average sales), and how much it costs you to get new clients (margins).
When you know these numbers, you’ll see that in addition to spending money to attract prospects, you’ll need to make sure customers come back and buy again. You’ll make money by spending less and your profitability will increase.
Systems
As Brad Sugars says, system stands for “Save Yourself Time Energy and Money.”
At this level in your journey to business success, you build leverage into your business to reach the point where you do the work once and get paid forever.
The re-organisation of your business means building workflows and protocols that make the business run smoothly whilst you work on growing the company. Systems make it possible for you to deliver consistency. It’s a complex process of nine steps – and no shortcuts.
The nine steps include:
- Vision
- Mission
- Culture
- Goals
- Organisation charts
- Positional contracts
- Key Performance Indicators
- How-To Manuals
- Milestones
Team
High-performance team building means implementing a structured set of rules. Team leadership and management are essential when you’re looking to build a company that will eventually work without you. To get there, you should focus on building a culture and a set of rules that enable your people to work at their best.
At this level, it’s about building involvement and inclusion within your team; you need to motivate your people so that your team is ready to go all-in for profitability.
Synergy
When you reach the synergy level, you already have a business that works (so, congratulations!). At this point, you should replicate the model and put it in place in multiple locations to make the 30X returns.
Think of Ray Kroc and the way he turned McDonald’s from a small fast-food restaurant into a global business. He found the right model and put a restaurant on every street corner, in over 100 countries. If you have a sound structure, you can replicate your success anywhere in the world and grow your business.
You need to work on these four elements to replicate success:
- Leverage – you need a product or service that you create once and sell millions of times. Think of how Microsoft has developed the software that is now used by billions of people.
- Scalability – build a business model that you can grow and scale. If it gets more challenging to manage the business when it grows, you’ll never be able to create a model that makes you money without you being in charge.
- Marketability – go for a product or service that sells itself. This way, all you have to do is convince people to buy from you.
- Opportunity – build a business in a market where you have a chance to succeed. If you go into a market with multiple competitors and limited demand, you can make things happen. It will be more challenging than if you operated in a market with high demand and low competition levels.
Freedom
At this level, you have an excellent business that works without you, and you can sell it if you want.
But what if you don’t want to sell your business? You’re not compelled to. If it’s growing without you being in charge, you might not sell it – ever. However, the choice is there.
What’s Next?
First, you need to know the level you’ve reached with your business. If you’re still consolidating business mastery, you need to work on the four elements in order to go from chaos to a solid foundation.
If you struggle with marketing, take a closer look at your numbers because its only when you know these numbers that you’re able to make the right business decisions.
If you’re at the stage in your business when you have to consolidate teams, document your processes and analyse the customer-oriented tasks that you need to do every day. Make a checklist of what needs to be done to deliver a reliable and consistent service for your customers, and make sure that your team follows best practice. Plan a meeting once a week to improve communication with your team – make sure you identify the team members who perform the best and thank them for their hard work. People need to know when they’re doing something right.
But above all, build a business growth strategy and work on your business, not just in your business. It’s fundamental to keep learning so that you can continue to grow.
If you would like to find out more, sign up for a free coaching session where I can help you move your business up through the six levels to business success.
