Owner-Reliant Businesses

Building Out Your Business’s Core to Reduce Its Reliance on You the Owner and to Become More Scalable!

Characteristics of a Typical Middle Stage Level Two Business:

• Business revolves around the owner.
• Owner must show up each day or the business suffers from the absence.
• Owner hits a revenue plateau; can’t work any harder or put in any more hours.
• Outside world – especially customers – identify the business with only the owner.

The Self-Employment Trap™

Why is it that most business owners never make it past Middle Stage Level Two? Because the owners are entrenched in the traditional way of building a business for control and active cash flow based primarily on their personal production.

Not only do they quickly max out on personal production, but what’s worse is that every day, more and more of the know-how to run the business gets buried deeper in one person’s head—instead of being captured in processes, procedures, and systems.

Sadly, these typical Middle Stage Level Two business owners stay stuck at the tactical level of doing the job the business requires instead of creating the time and space to step back and build the business itself.

Middle Stage Level Two requires building your core systems, business controls, and team. The challenge is doing that while balancing the business’s need for you to continue to lead its daily operation. This is a delicate balance between what your business needs today and what it will need tomorrow.

Thankfully, you don’t have to figure all this out yourself.

The Level Three Road Map shows that, at Middle Stage Level Two, you have to build out the baseline systems for the following 4 areas:

1. Your “Master System”—the system of all your systems. This Master System involves how you organize, store, access, and update most of your business systems.
2. Your “Core Systems.”This includes 4 key systems:
   1. Your system to generate leads (Lead generation);
   2. Your system to convert leads into sales (Lead conversion);
   3. Your system to fulfill on customer orders and deliver on client promises (Fulfillment of your core product or service);
   4. Your system to collect on payments you’re owed (Accounts receivable).
3. Your big-picture strategic plan. This includes your business priorities, plan of action, and branding and market positioning.
4. Your initial team. These are the early team members you’ll lean on as you grow your business. You’ve still got to hire cautiously due to both cash flow concerns and your business’s immaturity, but now is the time to begin hiring high order talent—slowly and deliberately. You’ll also start systematizing the “Team” area of your business by developing written job descriptions, a draft organizational chart, and a formal hiring process.

In essence, this means developing your core systems and controls, hiring and aligning your initial team, and clarifying your strategic plan to get you to Level Three.

Brian Fuchs doubled his sales and profits in the first 12 months of the business coaching program!

Middle Stage Level Two Case Study: Brian S., Marketing

When we first began working with Brian as a Business Coaching client 2 years ago, he was the quintessential “one-man-shop”. He made the sales, he processed the orders, he collected on his receivables, and he handled all the other administrative details in the business. The business was successful—but only because he was there each day running it. In fact, it was his CPA Tom (another client) who referred him to work with us.

The first focus for Brian in the program was to get him out of the day-to-day operations of the business so that he could focus on growing his sales. This meant building out some of his core systems and controls, plus hiring on his first full time member (Diane). This was a scary move for Brian, but one that paid off handsomely as it freed up his time to focus much more heavily on sales and marketing.

Here is how Brian describes the results, “In the last 6 months in the program I’ve stepped out of over 90% of our operations now and we’ve doubled our company profits!”

Suggested Next Steps for Owner Reliant (Middle Stage Level Two) Businesses:

1. Get and read, Build a Business, Not a Job Click here to get a FREE copy of this bestseller book written by David Finkel and Stephanie Harkness
2. Watch the concentrated training video above on this page on how to escape the Self-Employment Trap™ and build a business, not a job! (That is if you haven’t already taken the 3 minutes to do so yet!)
3. Signup for our next 90-minute S.C.A.L.E. Formula webinar – 5 Simple Steps to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back. Click here to learn more.
4. Participate in our Business Coaching Program. Follow this link to learn more (including how you can qualify for a complimentary 45-minute one-to-one coaching session.)

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