Duncan Tannahills – Top Ten Tips
Duncan is helping businesses deliver on their aspirations and a younger generation of entrepreneur to find their individual pathways to success and growth. He will lead the Startup4ten® webinar programme which will start in the autumn of 2017 and continue into 2018.
1. Have a clear vision & mission statement and share it
- Successful businesses know where they are going and have a good idea on how they are going to get there.
- Having a vision and mission statement is a guiding document to help staff understand the journey and the key goals of the business, so it gets them more engaged.
- And finally, a good vision and mission should be shared with all stakeholders to let them see the ambition of the company which in turn instils confidence in them to support the business as appropriate.
2. Work 'ON' not 'IN' your business
- Most people spend most of their time working ‘in’ the business i.e. delivering the product or service and everything that goes with it.
- By comparison successful people also spend a chunk of time regularly working ‘on’ their business including doing such things as planning, building capacity, seeking out new opportunities, building key relationships and always re-focussing the business and themselves.
- When you work ‘on’ your business performance across the board will improve and typically you will have fewer fires to put out.
3. Know your numbers / KPIs / financials
- Businesses must know and understand their key numbers, what influences them and how to optimise them.
- If the numbers are available then you can ask questions about how to improve them and this in turn will lead to better decision making, which in turn will lead to improved performance and profits.
4. Manage quality at every stage of the process
- Quality is the key differentiator from one business to the next and can either help retain customers or drive them away depending on their quality experience.
- Poor quality and a lack of focus on quality is like having a bucket with a hole in it; to keep the bucket full you have to fill it more often!
5. Manage your time every day
- Time is the most valuable resource you have. Once it is gone it is gone for ever.
- So, as a valuable resource you must know where it goes and what steals it from you so that you can make the changes to use time more effectively every day.
6. Strong positive leadership
- A good leader needs to be able to enrol and inspire his / her team to achieve maximum results.
- As such the role of a leader is to set out and explain the plan and then communicate it to the team so that they are motivated to step up to deliver the plan.
- Leadership is different to management. Managers plan and co-ordinate while leaders communicate and motivate.
7. Motivate your team every day
- A motivated team will always outperform a team which is not motivated even if they are a better or stronger team.
- Motivated people will always go the extra mile to achieve success and only stop when the job is done.
8. Build raving fan customers
- Raving fan customers make selling easier and will do much of it for you through referrals and endorsements.
- With loyal raving fan customers you reduce cost to the business in always having to find more and new customers to meet your targets.
9. Build relationships internally and externally
- People do business with people, so having good relationships simply helps that process.
- Spending time on relationship building will always pay dividends in the long term and provide a pool of trusted people on whose knowledge and skill a proactive business owner can draw and tap into for help and advice.
10. Have an up to date plan at all times and review it every week
- Failing to plan is planning to fail.
- Having a simple (and short) plan helps to ensure that the business is doing the right things at the right time to achieve its goals and is a key tool to guiding the team every day.
- Objectives in plans should follow the S.M.A.R.T. rule i.e. be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time framed.