Enlisting Your Army To Generate More Revenue In Less Time

 Introduction

   The difference between “having a business” and “being a business” is significant.

   When you are “being a business” almost everything is de- pendent on your time, your energy and your abilities. That’s a very limiting modus operandum.

   Any solopreneur who wants to enjoy more money and more free time and who does not engage support staff is either ignorant or stupid.




   Hopefully it’s the former because the latter is invariably impossible to fix. Once a person understands how relatively easy it is to engage a team member and have that person in-credibly happy and productive in their work, then ignorance is replaced with enthusiasm and their team grows both in terms of numbers and goal-aligned productivity.

   This applies equally to those entrepreneurs who have an existing support team but who are sick and tired of paying their team but taking little home themselves.

    Engaging smart, happy and productive team members is not complicated and nor is it especially difficult, unless you are ignorant of how to do so. In that respect it’s like opening a combination safe. If you know the combination, it’s rela- tively easy. If you don’t know the combination it’s frustrating and all but impossible.

    The purpose of this article is to lay out a step by step method for engaging top quality support and to have those people executing much of your marketing for you.

     And as you would expect from the founder of the 80-20 Center, I’ve applied the 80-20 Principle to the process and therefore stripped out any “nice-to-have” fluff.

     Please note that my approach makes the process less than perfect,. However the trade-off is that isable to be put into place by virtually anyone. That’s in contrast to the myr- iad of perfect systems out there that are so complicated that solopreneurs and simple-minded entrepreneurs such as me have to reach for the headache pills within just a few min-utes.

     It’s worth noting at this point that what successful en- trepreneurs do better than anything else is to  get results through other people.

     The military equivalent is the General who has soldiers to fire the bullets. The General sits in Command+Control and directs his forces.

      Please note that the term “Team Member” may re- fer to an employee, contractor, supplier or advisor. The legal nature of their role will be determined by your preferred engagement style and the nature of the work. For example, I prefer to work mostly with offshore con- tractors. The only exception is where I must physically have someone on the ground here in Australia. Work- ing with offshore contractors gives me massive flexi- bility in respect to increasing/reducing workloads. And using my system below I gethigh levels of productivi- ty and great results. This, together with a reduction in costs of between 60 and 90% is to my mind a “no brain- er” reason to go offshore where feasible. At the very least every new solopreneur or business owner should immediately hire a contractor for at least 10 hours per week.

     Another analogy is that of the classical music Compos- er (Entrepreneur) who writes a symphony (Plan) and has an orchestra (Team Members) play it while a Conductor (Man- ager) guides them.

    The commercial equivalent of the Head of each section (e.g. Head Violinist) are Supervisors and Middle Managers.

    A solopreneur is Composer, Conductor and Violinist all at once. No wonder they are so time poor and so stressed!

Simple Steps For Getting Results Through

Other People Step 1: Set Your Core Goals

Step 2: Set Your Sub Goals

Step 3: Identify Goal Drivers

Step 4: Where Relevant Create A System For Each Goal Driver

Step 5: Hire a Smart Person

Step 6: Show Them The Goal, the Goal Drivers and the relevant System

Step 7: Meet weekly to Review, Coach and Plan

Step 8: Reward them

Step 1: Set a Goal

    Goal Categories include “Financial” e.g. EBIT and/or Gross Profit and/or other financially focussed objectives. Other Goal Categories will be Revenue and Customer Satisfaction related.

    All goals need to be expressed as a number so that is crys- tal clear whether or not it’s been achieved. Each goal also needs to have a time frame.

    The old SMART aconym is a worthwhile one to apply here:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Reasons (motivational enough to persist)
• Timebound
  

Examples of Goals
include:



    This is simply a matter of figuring out if there you can break the bigger Goal down into smaller Goals. Sub Goals can also be specific Projects such as establishing an office offshore. By way of example:

   Step 3: Identify Goal Drivers

   Goals are conceived in thought and achieved in action. Therefore, every time you set a Goal it’s imperative that you also figure out what it will take to achieve that Goal.

   I refer to such items as “Goal Drivers” and there are two types: Activities and KSIs (Key Strategic Indicators which are similar to Key Performance Indicators).

   KSIs are a Result to be achieved, expressed as number.

   Both Actions and KSIs are effectively mini-goals or steps towards achieving the Sub Goal and therefore helping to achieve the Core Goal.

   Note that Goal Drivers always involve some guess work. This is especially true at the start, until you’ve tracked the results and can prove that when you achieve the KSIs and Actions that the Sub Goal is also achieved.

    Even after that, there’s still no certainty that, the next time you achieve the same KSIs and Actions, you’ll get the same result. Therefore it’s always a matter of being slightly para- noid and measuring and reviewing your results, if not daily then at least weekly.

   Let’s drill down to see what Step 3 looks like: