The trade business growth juggle.

(“What are you talking about Jon?”)

Well, I’m Jon, as you know, from Small Fish Business Coaching. I help people grow their trades businesses and I use a very specific framework to do it. I talked about building a marketing machine that brings all the work in. And a sales machine that wins those jobs, that converts those leads into jobs. An Operations machine that does the work. Back-office machine that holds it all together and makes sure you get paid. And I talked about managing the people – yourself as the leader and your team, your trades people and your office staff to make sure everybody works well together. It’s happy, there’s a great culture and everyone’s pushing in the same direction. And that’s all very beautiful.

Once you’ve got a business with those machines kind of humming along,

• You’ve got a beautiful thing.
• You’ve done something you can be immensely proud of.
• You’re probably making good money.
• You’re probably in control, not stressed and not working so hard.
• But the journey from today to there is not that simple. It’s not a linear progression. You can’t just go, “Let’s build a marketing machine,” and there it is.

You start doing some more marketing and you get a bit busy and then, you have to go and work on your operations machine and grow people, hire people, or make it more systematic or take yourself out of it. So, you have to go and work over there. Or maybe you go and work on your sales machine. Or maybe you look at your back-office and you realize it’s not as profitable as you thought so you have to go and work on your sales, and your margins, and your budgeting.

Everything you do has another effect and sends you over to somewhere else and that’s what I mean by the juggle; by the marketing, by the sales, by the operations, manage myself a bit but hire somebody new, work on hiring, work on managing the people – it’s the juggle.

You can’t do all at once. It’s not simple and linear. It’s not straightforward. It’s a juggle.

You’ve got to decide your priorities, and they change on a daily basis, almost. They change certainly, reasonably, regularly, and they change according, of course, to what you do and to how your customers and new people react and to the things that go on, the disasters that happened, because of course they do.

If you’re going to grow your business – if you’re going to go from small and informal, to larger and systematic and structured, you’re going to have to do the juggle. It’s quite fun and rewarding. It’s quite difficult and of course, that’s what I help people to do. We paint the framework and decide what the framework is going to look like and what those marketing machines and sales machines are going to look like, and then we direct our effort accordingly. And I help people set the priorities and decide how the priorities need to change as that environment changes.

Is that what you want? Do you want some help? I’d love to give you help. I’m a business coach that’s my job, that’s how I grow my business.

So, if you want me to help you, book a chat.

We’ll have a chat about whether I can help you and whether indeed that you will be the right business for me or whether we’re suited, like each other, etc and we’ll go from there.

See you later.