Breakpoints. Ashby Mike

businesses at the very peak of their sector – you get the idea.

      And despite the diversity, we always find that every one of them is making at least one of the common mistakes.

      The art of coaching is to remove the obstacles to great performance, providing detached advice that allows a performer to correct their technique. Our clients know much more about their businesses than we ever will; but we know more about a wider range of businesses than they ever will.

WHEN WE'RE sitting WITH A BUSINESS OWNER, THERE'S ONLY ONE expert ON THEIR BUSINESS IN THE ROOM

      Up next

      In this part we're going to cover the symptoms of businesses that are stuck in a rut. Over the years we've identified seven mistakes or conditions that sit behind the symptoms:

      • thinking small

      • under-marketing

      • settling for less

      • working too hard

      • complexicating

      • spending too much Time In, not enough Time On

      • knowing but not doing.

      CHAPTER 1

      THINKING SMALL AND UNDER-MARKETING

      Most business owners, at some point in their entrepreneurial lives, get stuck. This has two dimensions: swamped and stalled. Let's look at each.

      When we are swamped we feel overwhelmed. There are too many demands on our time from too many sources. We have all these great ideas but we never seem to get the time to close them out. We end the day with the distinct sense that we have made no progress towards our vision, let alone a sense of a day well spent. We're drowning.

      The good news is that we put ourselves there, and we can get ourselves out. In this chapter, I'm going to talk about some of the causes of feeling swamped, and in later chapters you'll learn how to drag yourself out of the swamp.

      The other part of getting stuck is feeling stalled. This is when we reach a plateau in our business, we've achieved a good deal, but we have no idea what's next. Actually, that's not quite right: we know there is another level, but we can't see it from where we stand.

      Sitting below both of these sticking points is one or more of the mistakes I'm about to describe. And if we can understand the mistake, we can begin to understand possible solutions.

      Thinking small

      There are many owners whose aspiration is determined by what they believe they are capable of right now. It's not that they don't want more; it's just that they haven't really thought of what they really want in the future. Underlying that lack of thought is a mental framework. It's a way of thinking about yourself that is self-limiting.

      If you define yourself as a small business, you'll stay one. Think about successful people you know. They might be modest and humble but you know that they don't think of themselves as incapable of achievement. They always seem to be playing a bigger game, with higher stakes and a bigger stage – and they seem confident in their right to be there.

      Let me give you some examples. At one of our Breakthrough workshops, Tim Rillstone talked about the journey he has been on with Cossiga, a food cabinet manufacturer and exporter.

      Tim said that Cossiga's first growth was completely market-led, which sounds great, except it's really code for ‘random'. The original owners could not control the beast, and it went into liquidation after a few years. Tim and his mentor, who were familiar with that market, could see the opportunity that was on offer at Cossiga if they could get it right. They bought the assets off the original owner and set about growth in a controlled, deliberate fashion. From the outset they focused on the brand, creating some brand values that they hold as the Cossiga way of doing things. As Tim said, working on your brand allows you to punch above your weight. Since then they have enjoyed excellent growth at both top and bottom line, because they've adopted bigger-business thinking in how they organise themselves.

PUNCHING ABOVE YOUR weight ALLOWS YOU TO LOOK bigger THAN YOU ARE. THAT'S LEVERAGE

      Thinking about brand like this is bigger-business thinking. Steve Bonnici has built Urgent Couriers into a highly successful business in the fast delivery niche. In his presentation to The Breakthrough group a couple of years ago, he mentioned brand a lot, and I asked him, ‘How long have you been so focused on your brand?' He smiled and said, ‘Since day one'.

      Clive Lewis, founder of Kiwi Blue (a highly successful bottled water brand) talked to The Breakthrough group about lessons he has learned, and the one that stuck in my mind was this: don't be afraid to knock on bigger doors. That's what he did with Coca-Cola and in the end he sold the business to them.

      Keep your thinking ahead of the curve

      Your thinking has to be ahead of the company's growth. There's a quote that we use in our foundation days for people starting on our programs. Thomas Watson Sr, founder of IBM, wrote about IBM's success. He said that he started with a vision of how IBM would look when it was built, and then he thought about how it would act when it looked like that. Then he realised that they had to act that way from the very beginning.

      At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and at the start of the following day, set out to make up the difference.

      Days at IBM were committed not to doing business, but to business development.

      In other words, be today what you would become tomorrow. This concept of business development that Watson talks about is a fundamental theme of this book that I will return to repeatedly.

      What does it look like when you don't do that? I've been involved with companies that have grown faster than their thinking. There was one in particular that was really interesting (and painful) to watch. When it finally achieved the growth target it was after, the wheels started to fall off. The board became dysfunctional and political, management lost focus on their core competency, customers and senior managers started drifting away. The company is still there but it's stalled. And it will stay that way until they get their thinking right.

      Thinking too big

      At the other extreme I have worked with a few people whose thinking exceeded their business. We've all met them: people with big ideas that are worse than pipe dreams, dreamers who fail because their ideas can't possibly succeed, people who are simply more confident than competent (listen to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic's Harvard Business Review podcast on the dangers of confidence – delicious but disturbing). But dangerous as those people are to themselves (and others unfortunately), they are a small number compared to those who take the risk of doing nothing too grand.

      No-one has said it better than Marianne Williamson who notes in A Return to Love:

      Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.

      Be less afraid of thinking too big than of thinking too small. You're much more likely to undershoot your potential than overshoot it. You can afford to think bigger without much risk of your thinking exceeding your business.

      Identify yourself

      ‘Identity' is a powerful explanation of attitude and behaviour. You are who you think you are.

      There is an interesting piece of research involving returning lost wallets. The single biggest group of wallet returners reported that they did so because they just don't think of themselves as the kind of people who keep stuff that isn't theirs.

      As I've got older I've got fitter and leaner. Part of what has happened is that I consciously make food choices based on the identity I've developed over the last few years – ‘I don't eat that kind of thing', ‘I prefer salads'. I don't even have to think about some of those choices anymore because my identity doesn't even