When I first started my entrepreneurial journey after a long and successful corporate career, I started building companies on my own. I had a few early successes and was able to sell these companies and used the proceeds from these sales to set up The Business Collective, a venture creation firm and investment holding company. Under the new structure, the objective was to become a sort of Venture Capital and Private Equity crossbreed, focusing on building businesses in several different sectors but with a strong focus on the operational side of things. We had 3 separate methods of building businesses; we found budding entrepreneurs and invested in them, bought distressed businesses and turned them around, and started up businesses ourselves by looking at market needs and commercializing solutions based on demand. As we embarked on this we started to realize a few things.

Realization

Passive investment in a business involved trusting in the capabilities of the entrepreneur. Many of the businesses failed because the people working on them did not have the experience nor the requisite knowledge of strategies and systems that made a business successful

Mentoring and serving on the board of these companies alone proved to be of little use as it served as intermittent guidance upon request at best. We could not impact their operations without becoming heavily involved ourselves.

 We had to hire people to work in the businesses and getting them to perform at the pace we required of them to deliver results was difficult.

I had difficulty transmitting my ideas to the people and getting them to do the right things at the right time.

I realized that I needed to train them and develop a formula that we could replicate quickly to bring maximum impact in the shortest period of time thus reducing the effect of The Quickening (The Quickening is a phrase that we use to describe the process most entrepreneurs go through where they struggle to make the business work)  and shortening the learning curve for the entrepreneur and his team.

High Performing Business Roadmap

So I started documenting my processes and putting together a system that the entrepreneurs could follow. I spent a lot of time learning the aspects of the business where I was not an expert, learning from the best in each respective industry where possible and spending tens of thousands of dollars in doing so. I put everything I learned into practice in our businesses and refined the processes. I would train the entrepreneurs in the different processes, give them access to DIY online trainings and supplement this with weekly calls or monthly meetups to track progress and I found that the results showed significant improvement. The businesses had guidance now on demand, without me having to be there all the time.

Today I use the feedback I receive from our community to improve the system and add in new best practices constantly. We also work with experts from various fields like Digital Marketing, Branding, Innovation and others to make this the most comprehensive entrepreneurial training system and community in the world. We call our proprietary trademarked system The High Performing Business Roadmap.

The High Performing Business Roadmap is a step by step system that we created to help entrepreneurs build their own high performing businesses. It takes the entrepreneur through all the stages of a business’s evolution, from start-up to growth, maturity and decline and consists of a series of strategies that deal with the different issues faced at each stage. We can break down the entire system into the following phases:

a. Work on the Mindset of the entrepreneur or business leader(s) (Step 1)

b. Complete a robust yet quick situational assessment and plan (Step 2)

c. Listen to the market and react accordingly- set up to be able to launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), listen and learn and pivot and iterate till you get it right (Improvement Loop) (Step 3)

d. Once you learn what works then you fortify your Branding, Marketing and Sales activity (Steps 4, 5 and 6)

e. Structure the business optimally, build systems and processes and automate where possible while building a high performing team (Step 7)

f. Listen to the market and grow by building around your ecosystem (Step 8)

g. Now look to innovate and grow or exit at the right time (Step 9)

The first stage in the training involves working on the entrepreneurial mindset because I found that this was the biggest barrier to success. I could teach all the subsequent steps but if they did not have the right mindset I could almost guarantee that they would fail. After some time I started to be able to detect this right off the bat and today a great deal of my due diligence is spent in assessing the mindset of the entrepreneur. Some people have it, some can learn it and others just don’t have it. For those that can learn it or are at least willing to try, I put together a series of frameworks that they need to work on before we embark on building any business. And the frameworks involve gaining Clarity on the what and why and then sharpening the Focus to concentrate on a few very deliberate steps and then moving quickly to Action.

The Action part involves putting together a plan that will put some structure around all your ideas. Now it’s important to note that even if you already have a business that is running and is even successful it would be helpful to go through the frameworks in this section where the focus is on going deep into analyzing your customers’ needs and coming up with a simple go to market strategy. The plan is designed to be imperfect as it’s more important to go to market quickly and let the market tell you how to pivot. There is no point in spending too much time on a comprehensive plan only to realize that the market demands something else. This strategy of imperfection is applicable to every campaign or new product or service or initiative that you launch and the frameworks in this section will help you gain that confidence in your product and there is no better confidence builder than actually earning those first few dollars of income from your offering.

The key to a successful launch is to not spend too much time and effort in the preparation but to get your product on the market quickly and learn from what your customers tell you about this product. You then take this feedback and go back to your plan and tweak it and relaunch and repeat the process till you get it right and are confident that you have a winning formula. We call this iterative process the ‘Improvement Cycle’ and the goal is to get to 20:20 vision with regards to your offering.

You’ve now proven that you have a product that is in demand and that you are capable of selling. You know what works and why. So now we focus on building some momentum with this proven product or service. This is the Attract — Engage — Convert (AEC) part of the process. We have a detailed 2-day workshop that focusses entirely on these 3 elements but more on that later.

The first part of this AEC process involves building a differentiated brand for your business, product or service. Notice that we keep this to after you know what your customer wants because focusing on this before you launch the product and test the market and gain that all valuable feedback is like putting the cart before the horse. I have seen many business owners spend exorbitant amounts of money on their branding only to realize that it does not resonate with the market. You will notice that as we move along with this program we will be stress testing and experimentating at almost every stage: this is the key to building a successful business. There are no hard and fast rules. Everything is relative and the only way to be sure is to experiment. By the end of this process, you will become an expert at experimentation in a business setting and in doing so will exponentially increase your chances of business success.

So back to the Branding then. The key to Branding is in differentiating yourself from the competition. In today’s world of info overload via the internet and social media, you are exposed to a lot of noise. To get heard over this noise you must stand out and in this section, we will cover the 7 stages of product awareness with your customer and how to climb this product awareness ladder through your branding efforts to become a rockstar in your industry.

Once you have all your branding elements in place, you can start putting together your marketing campaigns and building out your funnels. In this section, we go in great detail about funnels and content marketing as we believe that producing engaging and relevant content is the key to good marketing. You already understand what your customers want so now let’s tell them what they want to hear. With this, the objective is to open up a flood of new leads and to engage all your old leads more effectively to push them to the next stage, Sales.

Once you have a flood of leads to follow up on, you need to close these leads and convert them into sales. The key here is building rapport with your prospect and we will go into strategies and systems to help you convert successfully.

The 3rd stage is what we call the Scaling stage. You have now earned the right to grow. You should already have one or two products or services selling well in your markets and you now focus on Growth.

Preparing for growth requires structuring your business in a way that facilitates growth. We find that the best way is to structure your business for a sale. There is after all no better validation of the success of a business than its ability to attract a buyer. We will go through what a buyer will look for in a business in this section. We then talk about how you should build your team and strategic partnerships that help with growth and then finally we systemize the business and automate everything you can so that you don’t have to start from scratch every time you start a sales or marketing process. Repeatability with the same level of quality in the delivery is critical to growth and this can only be achieved by setting up systems, processes and automation in your business.

With the right systems and processes and automation in place along with the right team and structure, you are all set to really scale. In this next section, we look at building an ecosystem around your core products through a process of innovation and different models for scaling your business. This will move you to having multiple revenue channels at the same time.

Finally, the key to a high performing business is to stay relevant. Things change quickly in business and you must remain close to your customers and advancements in the market to be able to evolve as required. At this stage, some businesses could find themselves in trouble and we go through a process of dealing with distressed businesses. We also look at how you can innovate to bring in game-changing new products and services to your business. We finish off with a section on wealth management where we cover what you should do when you are already successful.

One thing to note is that while we have presented this a sequential process, everything is interlinked as building a business is not a sequential event. You will often have to deal with many diff elements at the same time but we have presented this program in this manner as we believe that it is the best way to cover all the relevant topics and it has proven to be very effective with our own businesses.

As you can see this is a very detailed and intensive process. We are in the process of rolling out an online DIY training which will take you through this process of building a business step by step. We also have a number of advanced programs for those of you who want to go into particular elements of this program in more detail. We are also aware that as a business owner you have to be spending time on your business (we are after all business owners ourselves, so we know what it’s like). You can’t afford to take a week or a month off to go attend a full-time course. That is why this program is designed to be easy to follow and if you dedicate 30 mins a day to implementing one step at a time in your business (depending on where you are you will focus on different aspects) you will see that you have all the tools you need here in one system and will actually save time and see results quickly by following this program. We have a number of features that will make this easy for you including the community element and our micro learning reinforcement markers and learning circles that I will introduce a bit later.

Like what you are reading? Send us an email at enquiry@thebusinesscollective.sg and tell us what your biggest problem is in your business today.

Stay tuned for our next post…..