Breakpoints. Ashby Mike

wasn't what I was going to talk about, but I preferred his idea to mine. I went into the seminar room, grabbed a piece of paper and a pen, and while people were drifting into the room I scribbled down the four things that business owners have to do.

I like to wing it because I find the pressure makes me more creative. Figure A (overleaf) shows the framework I sketched out for myself that day, and which I am using (with some modifications) as the structure for this book.

Figure A : the Business Breakpoints

      There are thousands of books about how to grow small businesses. I've got a couple of hundred on my shelves or in the cloud. I have read no more than five of them from cover to cover. The odds are that I wouldn't finish reading this book either.

      So my objective here is simple: I want to beat the odds and have 80 per cent of the people who buy this book read at least 80 per cent of it. Achieving my objective requires me to keep the book short, relevant and readable. So this is not an academic book; it's written from real life for real life. It does have a framework, but there aren't many acronyms and data tables. (By the way the ending is really good, but it only makes sense in the context of the rest of the book.)

      The framework for this book

      ‘Breakpoints' refer to those moments of departure from the past, after which life is different. It comes from the software world (something I didn't realise until someone asked me why I was using the term). A breakpoint is used to interrupt a running program immediately before the execution of an instruction.

      In this book I'm using it as an analogy: when we recognise and implement these particular departure points, we take our business to the next level. Whatever else happens after this, we won't be going back to where we've been. Each of the breakpoints we describe has a before and after: once you've gone past it, your business will be operating at a higher level of performance – even though some of the breakpoints do not relate directly to the business.

The fundamental framework is very much about you. I've worked a lot with The Icehouse, a world-class business-growth centre. Their approach is that the owner, the business and the role of the owner are all equally important, as shown in figure B.

Figure B : The Icehouse's Three Circles

      It's a good way to think about the owner-managed business, especially the idea of ‘you in your business' as being separate from both the business and you as a person.

However, I draw a slightly different picture that reflects both what I've learned and how I operate, shown in figure C.

Figure C : the Breakthrough Model

      I prefer this for several reasons. The first is that I can draw it using SmartArt, which is much quicker. The second is that I believe that the business only changes if the owner changes. I suppose you could argue that the business changes you – the whole experience of being in business shapes your outlook and behaviours. But if you want to grow the business, you've first got to grow yourself. As one of our clients said at his graduation from our program, ‘the business has doubled since I started the program but the thing that has changed the most is me'. He explained that his joinery business only grew because he changed his role and changed the way he thought about how he added (and subtracted) value in the business. To my mind, the focus on the owner has to be first among equals.

      The third reason flows from the second. I'm not an engineer but I'm pretty sure that if you can get the big wheel going, the little wheels will turn even faster. In other words, getting yourself moving at a higher speed will make your business move even faster. And I have seen this often enough in my business and with my members to be convinced that it's true.

      A bit about me

      So where do I get the evidence for the propositions in this book? Since 2003 my development programs have helped small-business owners. These programs have had various names over the years, and right now they come under the Breakthrough brand (in homage to Keith McFarland, who wrote The Breakthrough Company: How everyday companies become extraordinary performers, which I still consider to be the best book for owners of small to medium businesses – it's one of the five I've finished and the only one I've re-read).

      A word about our programs: we have people from all industries but we don't do startups and we don't do rehab. The members are 75 per cent male, and probably most are in the 35 to 45 age range. They attend workshops with anywhere between 8 and 70 other members of the program, where they learn some of the material in this book. They also meet every two weeks in Breakthrough Action Groups of six or seven of their peers where they go through what they said they'd do, what they've done and what they're going to do. Finally, they have a 1:1 meeting with one of our advisers, monthly or quarterly depending on the program. They pay a monthly membership fee to be part of the program. For more information go to www.thebreakthrough.co.

      From 2003 to 2008 it was a well-leveraged business because people joined the program, I ran a quarterly workshop and spent the rest of the time getting members. I worked with (or at least got to know at a relatively superficial level) maybe 400 businesses. I learned a lot about running my own business, and, perhaps more importantly, about running myself.

      The market was changing, so in 2008 I introduced 1:1 advice (it's not really coaching in the normal sense of the word) as part of the model. It was through getting deep into the issues and challenges of business owners that I saw the patterns and solutions that underpin this book.

      That has been a theme in my life – teach first, then learn. Between 1997 and 2001 I was a partner at Ernst & Young Consulting, leading a strategy and transformation team. I could tell you and sell you the latest concepts in organisational strategy, management practices, business transformation – you name it, I'd be half a page ahead. And then I got a job as Chief Operating Officer at a large health insurance company with 450 staff members and even more problems. This is where my education began.

      As it happens, I love to learn and I like to share what I know, so it works out okay in the whole ‘do what you love and the profits will follow' cliché way. I have a PhD simply because I wanted to learn all I could about a particular area, and then I wanted to share it; it was not because my mother always wanted a doctor in the family.

      What I've learned from working directly with about 150 clients over the last few years – and indirectly with another 300 – is the stuff of this book.

      But probably the person I've learned the most from is the owner of The Breakthrough. The experience of running my own business, albeit a very small one with just a few staff, means that I relate to the business owners I work with. In my mind their issues and problems are not just theoretical; they look like the issue or problem in my business that I was thinking about when I was driving to the office, or are similar to problems I used to face in one of my other roles. I probably solve their problems better than I solve my own, but the solution starts with empathy and understanding the problems. My experience as a business owner has given me plenty of that.

MY PERSPECTIVE IS THAT OF A player-coach – AND AMONG THE PLAYERS I'M advising IS MYSELF

      Talking about you

      ‘Repetition without progress.' With this phrase Steven Pressfield, author of Turning Pro, captured my attention with a mental slap. You know what today holds for you and your business because it's going to be substantially the same as yesterday, the day before that and last week. Tomorrow is unlikely to be any different. People who write about habit often mention that 80 per cent of what we do is habitual.

      Sometimes, in moments of reflection, it can feel like the time has flown by one day at a time, and that each today resembles nothing so much as yesterday. Our businesses don't change until someone or