Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi guys. Stephen Edwards from Grow Profit First Accountant. So honestly I am so excited to be going through this content with you. So up to this point we only do business plans with at the time I'm recording this on a one to one basis for our platinum clients that are typically paying a thousand pounds a month or more and quite simply more people should be doing business plans. So I'm so glad you're here, I'm so glad you're watching this because my, my passion is helping business owners build a better business to literally have a better life. That is why I do what I do. That's why we become Profit First Accountants. It's why I love entrepreneurship and you're in the right place if you want to grow your business. And yeah, super excited to be going through the business plan with you. So this is the pre work. I want you to be doing this and I want you to not overthink this part of the course. You're going to have the resource to down this, to download this at the bottom of the course page in the resources section.
[00:01:03] And I want you to literally not overthink it. You know, just see what comes to your front of mind, what's kicking in with your intuition, listen to your gut instinct because we're going to lock it in later on. The reason why we have two steps to this is we don't want you to, you know, get stuck on that first step. We want you to get some things off your brain because when you sleep on it, you reread it later on you're probably going to have a slightly different take for some of these questions. So let me just walk you through this.
[00:01:33] So I'm not going to go through the exercise of actually answering the questions now. I'm just going to ask the questions and maybe give you some clarity and some extra information if it feels the right thing to do. You're going to take a bit longer because you're going to complete these questions. It's probably going to take you maybe the best part of an hour if you're doing it properly. I personally would recommend booking an hour to concentrate on, on this initial kind of planning pre work section. So there's a link here. If it's not working on the document, I'll add the resource below. But if you, if you've heard of Simon Sinek, he's, you know, a very inspirational person who's well known for this particular TED Talk. And at the time it was, it was unheard of and unheard of to discuss things in this way and most people say what they do and how they do it, but they didn't talk about why they do it. So when we're talking about why we do something, it's basically why should your customers care? I just shared with you what my mission is to help business, business owners to build a better business, to have a better life. What is your why it's not just simply to have more customers, to make more profit, to have more money. Why is a little bit deeper of that? So if you watch that video, I believe it's about 10 minutes long, that would give you a little bit more context and you know, Simon will explain it far better than I do. But it really helps you find the right customers, the right tribe, build the right community. So why does your business exist? So after watching that video, answer this question and this is for the perspective of your customers and the example a lot of people used to use was Apple. Apple wasn't just about buying the computer, buying the product. It was about being aligned with, thinking differently. That was the moment their whole marketing and their whole ethos, whether you're a fan of Apple or not, completely changed because people that kind of saw themselves as an outlier, as different as not following the crowd because Microsoft was the crowd. They aligned to the messaging of Apple and it was to be innovative. It should make things beautifully simple.
[00:03:45] That's Apple. You can take some other examples, you can research businesses and you know, I'll probably do some training on Chat GPT in the future if you've not already watched that and you can use chat GPT or do some googling to learn what the, the mission, the vision, the purpose is all kind of connected to this. Of certain well known brands are, you know, if you to search for Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, Disney, Netflix, whatever it is, they will all have some, they would have all done this exercise essentially. So why does your visit your business exist in the eyes of your customers? You might actually need to ask some of your customers and, and think beyond the obvious. Obviously we're accountants. Our business exists to file their accounts, file their tax returns. But it gets a bit deeper than that. I just told you why we exist because we generally want to make people have a better business. And why do we want them to have a better business? To have a better life for themselves and their family. So just take some time. You might want to pause the video and just think about that for, for your own business and fill it in on the form on the PDF.
[00:04:57] How is your business different to your competitors? And I don't want you to be aspirational from the perspective of what you'd like to do in the future. I want you to talk about what you are doing now. What makes you different already there's a reason why people are choosing you. One of the things we do is we're deep into the entrepreneurial mindset. We love working with people that want to grow their business. If you're watching this, you're, you're probably a very entrepreneurial. You're probably into self development, podcasts, reading books, learning and profit first is one of the ways that we enables us helps us have a foundation to make a bigger impact with people doing these courses. Doing this business plan course is not what normal accountants do. That's my business. Have a think about your business. What makes you different? Pause the video if you want and come back to the next question.
[00:05:53] So I appreciate there's some overlap here. Don't worry about that. Sometimes we're just getting it out of our heads in a slightly different way. It sticks in a different way. You know, why does your business exist is a bit longer. What do you do is is a bit more simple. If someone was land on your website, there's an expression called you confuse, you lose. If I don't know what you do from your website in the first two sentences, then you're losing. You're losing the impact of engaging your prospects on your website. So quite simply in a sentence, what do you do? And pause the video. So next section is all about your vision. So describe what your business will look like in five years time. And just to help give you something to facilitate that, think of the size of the business in terms of maybe the revenue, perhaps the location. Are you in a new office, a new shop? Are you working from home?
[00:06:53] Is your product mix or your services changed? Are you doing the same things? Have you moved into new markets? Just get clear on what your business looks like in five years time. This is, you could spend an hour thinking about this and it's one of the most exciting things you can do. I'm, you know, I'm quite big into meditation. But you could visualize if you look at sportsmen, they know what the outcome needs to be. They visualize scoring that goal, they visualize having the knockout, they visualize winning that Formula one race. So this helps you visualize what you're going to achieve. It makes it a lot more likely if you're clearer where you head in again, don't get too stuck in the in in the detail because it might change. And if You've never done this before. This might be quite hard for you and that's why I don't want you to overthink it. I just want you to just spend a little bit of time and focus to answer that question.
[00:07:45] Okay, so with your five year vision in mind, what does your business need to deliver to you personally in the next 12 months? And it's probably going to be a separate video, your personal vision, because this is more about your business plan and we could, we could do, you know, a course that goes on for several hours in terms of your personal vision, in many ways we should start on your personal vision. But it's so personal to you in, in, you know, at least at a minimum. I would suggest you do some thinking time, just to think about what does your life look like in the future? Three years time, five years time, just start thinking about that. What sort of holidays do you go on? How many days a week do you work? How many hours do you work?
[00:08:29] What sort of activities do you do in your business? How many times do you exercise? Do you still live in the same house? Just think about your personal life and then, and if you spent a few thoughts on that, bring it down to the next 12 months. What do you want the next. Because we're really building a business plan for the next 12 months. The future is important, but we want to bring it down to the ground. What does your life look like? What does your business need to give you in the next 12 months for you to kind of be satisfied? Bear in mind where you need to head in five years. So if you're a 250k business and you want to be a 5 million business, you're probably going to want to be pushing towards a million in the next 12 months. If you're 100k business and you want to be 150k business, that might be slightly more natural instead of 50% increase. But just start thinking about what does your personal life look like in the next 12 months? How many hours do you work? Are you doing the same role in the business? What do you want to draw out per month and per annum? And don't get too stuck up on tax and profit. Just think about what you need to live on in the next 12 months.
[00:09:34] Values. What values attributes do the people in your business need to possess? Again, a lot of these areas we can go really deep on but we can't do it all today. That's why your business plan, there's so much to it and people don't know where to Start. But your. Your core values, if you've never written it down before, you know, it's not a corporate thing to have core values. Big businesses do have core values, but if you've never written it down before, it doesn't mean you haven't got core values. I bet you've got things that you value personally. Terms of what? What should an employee bring to your business? What sort of traits should they have? How do they show up on a daily, weekly basis? You know, it might be little things like they're polite to the customers. They always go above and beyond with their service. It might be that, you know, they're always on time. It might be they go. They always do that extra. And go above and beyond.
[00:10:29] Yeah, whatever it means for you, I'll share our core values again. There's actually a workshop that we do personally in our business and we've done it with other people to help you create your own core values. Our core values in our business. And we've got an acronym to remember it. It's K A N. So it's a can do attitude. I say the K stands for Kaizen, which is continuous improvement, which means you're always growing. Hence the rebrand, hence the grow Profit first accountant. Our team members need to be growing. They need to be growing personally, they need to be growing professionally. They need to have that growth mindset. They want to do more because we want to work with businesses that grow are growing. If our team members not grow in, we've got no chance. So Kaizen is continuous, constant growth, you know, 1% improvements constantly. The A is above the line thinking. So that's having a can do attitude. If you're above the line, it's called or, so the acronym is. Or bad oar. Above the line is you take ownership, accountability, responsibility. That's the traits we want to see in people. That's above the line thinking, I'll share the resource at the bottom of this for you. So you can see what above the line thinking is all about. All beds is the acronym. The model below the line is B, E D bed Blame, excuses and denial. We don't any team members who blame other people make excuses and they're constantly in denial. So that's I second core value. Our final call value, which is the N is no eels. Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. You might have watched Winnie the Pooh in the past. So Winnie the Pooh's fairly happy. Go. Lucky Tiggers bouncing all over the place. Eeyore is this doomy gloomy it's a never rainy day type attitude. We do not want any eels. We don't want fake positivity but we don't want people to drag everyone's energy down because it's like a virus. So that's our core values. I don't expect you to have yours articulated like that because I've been working on my core values the last seven years and it's evolved as I said, you know, we've done workshops on core values just. But think about what comes to mind. Don't over think it. KPI's.
[00:12:35] So what are the driving factors behind your business?
[00:12:39] These must be the key be key to success and measurable.
[00:12:43] So example for consultancy business is how many chargeable hours, how many clients they got, how much the average client pays them. If you're a builder it might be you need so many projects a year at an average fee. If you sell products it might be you need to sell so many units per month.
[00:13:00] If you're a solicitor again it might be billable hours it but you can, you can go at different levels of this. You can create what we call a scorecard. So there's some indicators are kind of a result of everything. So for example your revenue on a monthly basis is a result of how much customers you've got, how much work you've done and how much customers you've got. How much work you've done is a result of how many leads you bring into your business. So all these things are connected but just have a think about what are the key drivers in your business like the numbers you could track. If I bring this many leads in, if I sign up this many customers, if I do this amount of billable hours, whatever it means for you, just have a think about that again. Chat GPT is brilliant to have your thinking just ask it can you this is my business, this is what I do. Can you help me? Give me some examples of some KPIs and some driving factors behind my business that I can measure if you're stuck and I will do a separate video if you've not seen it already for how to use Chat GPT if you get stuck again. Okay, next question. Ideal customer. Describe your ideal customer.
[00:14:10] So you could go deep, you could do market research. What I would say is think of your. If you think of the Pareto principle so you know that you've probably got your top 20%, your customers that give you 80% of your income or closer to that than 50, 50 or 80 or your top 20%, your worst 20% customers probably give you 80% of your challenges. So we can use that 20% to really dive deep into our idea. Ideal customer. So think about the top 20% of your customers and then write down, make some notes, you know, the sort of write some things about them and figure out what they've got all in common and use that as a way to brainstorm what your ideal customer looks like. Again, this is version 1.0. We are going to lock it in later on and it's going to evolve over time. I look at mine on an annual basis.
[00:15:01] Okay, opportunities. What are the three biggest opportunities in your business? Externally and internally? So let me give you some examples. Externally could be for a lot of people, they're leveraging AI. So AI is an opportunity in their business and they can help them do marketing copy, it can help them maybe do blogs, it can help them do emails. So that's, you know, something you can use externally and internally. Something a little bit more internally focused might be nurturing, training some of your team members. If we bring this person up to this level of skill, this is the impact they can have on our business. So for example, we've got Millie, who's a new training accounting technician in our business. She's only been joining us for the last month so. In 12 months, her knowledge will have gone through the roof and in 24 months it gone through the roof. So just think of the opportunities you've got internally and externally. Other opportunities might be you're not maximizing your Facebook advertising or you're doing no advertising, you're doing no marketing. Or it might be you could go to this business network group, whatever that means for you. Just think about the three biggest opportunities in your business.
[00:16:11] What vulnerabilities do you need to manage in your business? This is really important. A lot of people chasing the shiny new thing, they're not thinking about the obstacles, the challenges, the weaknesses. This is a really big professional business owner discipline to be thinking here. What are the vulnerabilities you need to manage in your business? What are the weaknesses? What could go wrong? And one exercise you could do to, if you've got a few, is you could rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, how significant that will be. 10 being really significant. It's going to have such a big impact or we could call it impact and scale 1 to 10 how likely it's going to be and that would give you a percentage and you can see what are the main vulnerabilities and risks in your business and that might Link into how can you answer what keeps you up at night? For a lot of business owners, that might be cash flow. They might be struggling with paying the bills, paying the wages. They might be worried about where the next customer is coming from.
[00:17:06] What challenges do you have meeting the needs and the wishes of your family? So it might be your family, you need a bigger house, you need more space. It might be you need to move to a new house with an extra bedroom. It might be you haven't been on a family holiday for so long, whatever that means for you. It might be that you've got to pay school fees. It might be that you want to pay for school trips for your children. It might be you want to save for a wedding, whatever that means for you and your personal life. But you personally, what. What challenges do you have that you know, in an ideal world, your business would help you solve on a personal basis?
[00:17:46] It, you know, it might. I'm just giving you examples. It might be you'd love to hire a personal trainer to get in the best shape you've ever been in your life. It's going to cost you 100 quid a week. You don't have that spare money at the moment, but you'd absolutely love to invest in a personal trainer because you know if you're in the best shape in your life, your mindset's going to be different, you're going to be happier and it's going to have a positive impact on your business, but ultimately just going to be happier. That's just an example I'm giving you there.
[00:18:11] We've talked about vulnerabilities here, so. Yeah. Any other vulnerabilities that come to mind? I think there's a little bit of overlap there. Really critical challenges. So you've been thinking about vulnerabilities already. If you had to rank them, I've just gave you a tool to do that. Scale of 1 to 10, how significant it would be if the impact it would have on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely it is. What do you think of the most critical challenges? If you want. If you were to list 5, if you can only think of 1, 2 or 3, that's fine, but there's 5 on the list. If you can think of 10, split the the list and then write more. That's completely up to you. It might be lack of cash flow, it might be getting better quality customers, it might be introducing a new service, it might be having take advantage of Facebook advertising, it might be training your team members, it might be Retaining your team members because they're leaving. It might be finding the right team members, it might be getting your price inserted, whatever that means for you. Goals keeping. We're nearly there, guys, but you would have been if you follow me through. It's probably took you a lot longer than the video. We're nearly 20 minutes. Keeping in mind the opportunities, the vulnerabilities and the critical challenges, what are your goals for the next 12 months? So don't let the challenges and opportunities hold you back too much. But you, you don't want to be oblivious to those, you know. So we can't just ignore the economic climate. We cannot just ignore that. We'll be. I'm a big believer and have a positive mindset, and mindset's one of the most important things you can, you can do to protect and, and cultivate if you're a business owner. However, we cannot be naive and completely ignore external circumstances to take into account your challenges and vulnerabilities, however, be being realistic. What's a nice goal if you were to list, you know, maybe four of them or whatever you can think of in the next 12 months in your business and, you know, start with the top one, top three. What are the goals you think you would love to be working towards that you feel might be a little bit challenging, but they're also realistic in the next 12 months. So this is going to give us all of the foundation, it's going to give us all of the raw material to be able to help you create your own business plan. If you've got any questions, please feel free to drop me a message. Thanks, guys. Cheers.
