Making It Happen What exactly is the ‘Making It Happen’ programme? Making It Happen is our flagship, 12-month programme that will… - Increase the value of your business,
- Provide you with the ideas, tools, support and encouragement you need to grow your business,
- Give you greater success, and
- Help you to achieve your business and personal goals.
Based on the highly successful Business Edge programme, Making It Happen is designed to accompany you every step of the way as you take your business from where it is to where you want it to be. As well as using the full 102-step Business Edge process to create breakthrough strategies for your business.... .... it also actually helps you to put those strategies into practice. What's more, it is based on the thinking of some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, gurus and business thinkers. It uses processes that have been used by some of the UK’s most successful companies. And it has been developed by our team in conjunction with an internationally published business author and the Added Value Network of business growth specialists.... so you know it will work! What is included in the ‘Making It Happen’ programme? There are three pillars to the Making It Happen programme – which are all completed over a 12 month period. - Pillar 1 The big picture - Working with you to identify what you want your business to do for you, your team and your customers - and then using an SSTW (“Simple Stuff That Works”) approach to help you achieve that, and much, much more
- Pillar 2 Growth strategies - Working with you to find smart, low cost ways to grow your business profitably
- Pillar 3 Systems solutions - Pulling everything together by working with you to systematise your entire business so that you can take time out whenever you want and still know, with absolute certainty, that it will continue to work brilliantly smoothly, brilliantly efficiently, and brilliantly profitably
We will now look at each pillar in more detail: Pillar 1 Stage 1 - The KickStart day We launch the Making It Happen programme by spending a full day looking at where your business is, where you want it to be, and the issues and challenges we will need to tackle together in order to get from where you are to where you want to be. This KickStart day covers all three pillars of the programme, and is essentially the same as the Business Edge. So if you have already gone through the Business Edge, then you will be off to a flying start! Some of the areas we will look at in detail on the KickStart day include: - Explaining ‘The 7 Stage Plan For Growing Your Business’
- Using our ‘24 hour action plan for getting where you want to go’ tool to help you set and communicate your personal and business goals
- Starting to create a working mission statement for your business
- Identifying and analysing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
- Finding practical ways to rise to the main challenges facing your business – both now, and in the future
- Doing a preliminary benchmarking exercise to compare your business to the best in the United Kingdom – and using the results to help you focus your energy on the most important areas
- Planning for the day that you will eventually want to step back from, or out of, the business – so that the business is worth what you want it to be when you pass it on
- Systemising your business in order to give you control over it, and to give you the freedom and time to do whatever else is important to you
- Getting and keeping more customers
- Brainstorming up to 75 ideas to make your business more successful, and then....
- .... narrowing these down to the 15-25 best strategies, and
- .... creating the first draft of your strategic action plan.
Within a week of the KickStart day we will meet again for a half day follow-up session. The aims of this session are to: - Review everything discussed at the KickStart day – including your personal and business goals - so that we can tailor the rest of the Making It Happen programme to the precise needs of your business.
- Use software tools such as Business Potential to identify a handful of ‘Quick Win’ strategies. These will be things that are easy and cheap (probably even free) to do, but which give you the largest and quickest payback… so that you get an immediate return on your investment in Making It Happen.
- Help you implement your Quick Wins
- Finalising your draft mission statement (“draft” because the mission statement will be discussed with your team in Stage 3 and finalised as part of your competitive strategy in Stage 5)
- Agree your strategic action plan, and
- Agree a timetable for the rest of the year so that, together, we really do make it happen!
Stage 2 – Managing your time It’s the same in every business we talk to… there’s never enough time to do everything. And because of that many owners and managers fall into the trap of spending most of their time doing the urgent things – like taking phone calls and dealing with the person who has just walked through the door - at the expense of the really important but not urgent things. And it is precisely because the action plan you have just created is important but not urgent, that the very next thing we do is to show you how to free up the time to make it happen. Every single person in your organisation can, if they want, come to the workshop. There you will all learn: - How to tell the difference between the urgent and the important demands on your time – and how to make sure the urgent tasks never get in the way of the really important ones
- How to delegate effectively in a way that motivates and empowers your people
- How to understand and benefit from the crucial distinction between working ‘in’ your business and working ‘on’ your business
- How to use other proven and practical time management techniques to free up valuable hours
- How to use your time to lead and drive your business forward towards greater success (after all, as Sir John Harvey Jones said... “Leaders should only do what only they can do”... and that means to lead)
At the end of the workshop we will work with you to create an action plan that will give you all the extra time you want and need. You will also take away one of the leading books on delegating effectively. Stage 3 – Motivating your team In order to get the best out of the Making It Happen programme, and indeed your business, you need a highly motivated team. So that is precisely what we look at next in the Making It Happen programme. During this stage you will learn the ‘Five Paths to Sustained Success’. We will look at how innovative and successful organisations bring the best out of their people to achieve significantly enhanced business performance. You will be given practical ideas and tools to get the most from your team. We will also run a Team Forum to discover what their key frustrations are and how the business can provide higher levels of customer service. We will help you to run a Let’s Get Going event to explain to your entire team what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how they can help. At the end of this stage your entire team will be committed to Making It Happen. Stage 4 – Identifying and meeting customer needs Now you have your team fully behind you, and you have created the time for the really important things, we can really start to get things moving by turning our attention towards your customers. In this stage we talk with your customers to find out: - What frustrates them about dealing with you and the others in your industry
- What they like and don't like about your business
- What is it that they really want but aren't getting
- What promises they really want you to make
- What standards they want you to live up to
- What you do well
- How you could do better
- How else you could help them
Stage 5 – Devising your competitive strategy Now that we know what your goals are, and what your team and customers need, we can start working out what your overall competitive strategy needs to be in order to give all of your stakeholders exactly what they want. During this stage we will work together to: - Fine tune and finalise your mission statement
- Identify the ‘Key Success Drivers’ for your business - ie the things that you need to do superbly well if you are to achieve everything you want to achieve
- Start measuring those success drivers
- Start creating a OnePage™ plan for your business – a unique document we have developed in conjunction with other members of the Added Value Network, to give you a single piece of paper that shows your target and actual performance for every single success driver in your business, and contains your action plan for doing even better in the future.
- Create a powerful set of Unique Selling Propositions that position your products and services as giving your customers exactly what they want
Stage 6 – Unleashing the full power of your team In this stage we will start by helping you to communicate your vision and strategy to your team. And then, having made sure that your people are motivated, and understand and buy into your competitive strategy, we will help you to tap into the knowledge, energy, enthusiasm and insights of every single person in your team to find extraordinary new ways to delight customers. One of the tools we will use to do this is the Wow! How? process. This proprietary process involves your team in answering two key questions: Question 1 - What can we do to make every point of contact with our customers so memorable that they never even think of going anywhere else? (the ‘Wow!’ part) Question 2 - And having dazzled and delighted them in that way.... how can we use their enthusiasm for what we do to help grow our top line profitably (this is the ‘How?’ part of the process – and often involves creating cross-selling systems and referral systems) Stage 7 – Measuring and managing the results Throughout the programme we will help you to produce timely and accurate monthly management accounts and reports – complete with graphs. But in Stage 7 we will go much further by helping you to finalise your OnePage plan – which, as its name suggests, is a unique way of showing on a single A4 sheet of paper, absolutely everything that matters in your business. Between them these reports will give you all the information you need to see exactly: - How well you are doing – both in absolute terms, and compared to your targets
- What is working, and what isn’t
- Where you should be concentrating your efforts
- And what else you need to do
And, of course, we will help you to interpret the numbers, share them with your team, and use them to drive your business onwards and upwards. The next steps By the end of the 12 month Making It Happen programme you will have seen dramatic improvements in the performance of your business. But, of course, our support doesn’t end there. We can continue to help you in any way you want... ... from regularly telephoning you to make sure you are still on track, to reviewing your monthly OnePage plan, and from coming to your board meetings, to working on specific business improvement projects with you. The choice is yours. As always, our mission is to do whatever it takes to help you get from where you are now to where you want to be. Pillar 2 This part of the programme is designed to help you grow the sales, profits and value of your business in whatever way and at whatever rate you want. Here is how it works: KickStart and ‘quick wins’ – During the KickStart day we work with you to identify fast and low cost ways to grow your business. A strategy for growth – We work with you to create a Success Driver Map that will show you, on a single piece of paper, exactly where the room for improvement is in your business, exactly how much more your business can grow, and exactly what you must do to make it happen Winning more customers - We spend up to a day together developing new, smart and highly cost-effective ways to get more customers for your business. Getting customers to spend more - We spend up to a day with you and your newly enthused team creating powerful systems that get customers spending more every time they buy from you Getting customers to stay longer and buy more often - We spend up to a day with you and your team creating powerful systems to make sure that your customers buy from you more often and stay as customers for longer Communicating for success – We spend half a day with you explaining recent research findings that reveal how to make everything you write more effective and profitable Creating growth tools - During these months we work with you, using the skills covered in the “Communicating for success” session (month 7) to create the scripts, letters, sales presentations, proposals, menus of services, objection handling scripts, written guarantees and any other documents you need to implement your growth plans Growing your sales profitably - We spend up to a further day with you and your team revisiting earlier ideas and coming up with new ways to grow your business. As always the focus will be on simple, practical and (previously) under-used strategies that you can implement easily, quickly and cheaply. Pillar 3 This part of the programme is designed to help you create, document, and train everybody to use all the systems your business needs to run brilliantly smoothly, efficiently and profitably.... even when you choose not to be there. It works like this: KickStart and ‘quick wins’ – During the KickStart day we explain what systems are and why they are vital to you and your business. Documenting the business processes – We work together to create a flowchart or mindmap of the systems in your business Financial systems - We work together to improve and document your accounting systems so that they give you all the accurate information you need, when you need it. People systems – We work with you to create all the systems you need to recruit, train, manage and keep a great team. Customer systems - We work together to turn you and your team’s best Wow! How? ideas into a unique set of customer service systems that stand you head and shoulders above your competitors Operating systems and efficiency improvements - We work with you to improve your key operating systems so that everything your business does gets done cheaper, faster and more accurately with less waste. And we help you to document these improved operating systems. Administration systems – We work with you to create all the practical systems you need to make day to day tasks work perfectly. Marketing systems - We take all the very best ideas we developed together in our Growth Strategies sessions, and turn them into systems that are used every single time. Systems that allow you to grow your business quickly, easily and profitably. Systems that work. Leadership systems – We help you to develop leadership and management systems to drive your business ever further forward. Installing your new systems software – Finally, we pull all your systems together and install them onto every single computer in your business so that every single member of your team knows exactly what to do, in every single situation, every single time. And, of course, we train your team in how to use the powerful systems software we install so that everybody can and does use it. And finally.... Everything else you need to know Making It Happen is designed to coach, support and encourage you. It will give you the tools you need to make your business much, much more successful. It will show you and your people how to use those tools. It will monitor and evaluate your performance. It will help you review the results. And it will help you to make sure that the entire change programme keeps on track. In other words, we will do everything we can to help you ‘make it happen’. Your job, of course, is to actually use the tools to take action. Only you can do that. Example - We will show you how to systematise your business, we will guide you through the process, provide you with template systems for generic processes, monitor your performance, review the results and provide you with a software front-end to put the resulting systems on the PC of everybody in your organisation. But your team will actually have to write some of the systems – with our guidance, of course. Making It Happen is a flexible process. We have attempted to describe how the 12 months might unfold. But since every business is different, there is no one-size-fits–all blueprint for every business. Making It Happen is fully and unconditionally guaranteed. You can stop the process in any month in which you do not feel it is adding value to your business. And you have the right to request a refund of the fee for the current month. So, if it doesn’t add value to your business, you do not pay! So what have you got to lose? Why not contact Simon Chaplin on 0845 466 7000 to discuss how we can transform your business into something so much more exciting and enjoyable.
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