The Top 7 Things I Learned After Recording 500 Grow A Small Business Podcasts.

In late 2019, we launched our podcast which helps growing a small business with ease, so the owner can live the lifestyle they signed up for.

It has been a huge honour and so much fun talking with other owners - hearing their wins, pain, mistakes and the changes to lives they could bring to their customers and team.

Here are the top 7 things I learned from almost 4.5 years of recording, now three episodes a week.

This truism was only reinforced when more than half the guests answered “people” to one of the final questions I ask - “What is the hardest thing in growing a small business?”

Most of us learned the hard way how to recruit, lead and manage the A-Team you need to bring financial success:

People are only the hardest thing in growing your small business, if you let them be.

Recruiting, leading and managing people, after all, is your job.

Invest in becoming an effective leader, a world-class manager, and an amazing recruiter.

These corners of the business will never let up, as people are your greatest asset - so continually learn how to be better at each of those roles.

The guests whose growth impressed me the most, mainly because it was often coupled with ideal ‘work / life balance / integration’ (some were hardly working in their business these days), was that they had solid (and clear) strategic plans, and a good cadence of strategic planning.

I recommend quarterly plans, and having the team aligned to that 90 day sprint, by tailoring their One Page Job Descriptions with the current quarter plan, which falls from the annual plan.

But, just throwing out wildly ambitious growth plans that are untethered from reality, sets the team up to fail, and brings about a dark cloud of demotivation after missing the goals quarter-after-quarter.

One of my favourite Bill Gates quotes, is:

We made this mistake in one of my businesses a few years ago.

A business partner said we should sell X many widgets in 10 years, but when I crystallised this into a financial model - which considered the time and cash constraints - we quickly realised X was a terrible number to strive for.

Refining our 10 year financial model allowed us to put more realistic stakes in the ground for those 10 years, which was then cut down to the next annual plan, and each quarterly strategic plan.

Make sure your team starts with a solid 10 year financial model when doing strategic planning, then fill out the other key documents (business plan, marketing plan and quarterly strategic plan).

A handful of guests said they sought out the best training material for the management team to become world-class in this vital role when chasing fast growth, with less stress.

Only one of our guests mentioned the number one resource I have found to help you develop into a world-class manager, Manager Tools.

But that was the exception, rather than the rule, and I must say, I was a little shocked when she raised it - the other 499 had not.

While the Manager Tools website is clunky and doesn’t look modern, underneath it is a wealth of key advice on how to manage people well, and all backed with decades of experience and a lot of data.

Manager Tools is a good foundation, but not all their content is relevant to the small businesses with 5 to 30 team members we guide.

So, we added a lot more advice from our own experience and other resources we recommend, in our 16 week ‘Business Transformation Program’.

One of the three courses in the Program, the ‘Kick-Ass Manager’ online course, is free for your managers to do (including future ones), once you have led the way, completed it and moved toward becoming a world-class manager yourself.

I wrote about where I first heard of this rule last week, in one of our small business blogs in Australia.

None of our podcast guests had heard about the rule, but ALL agreed when I said:

This concept only developed in my mind in the last 100 episodes, when I picked up on a theme with most of the guests who grew more than 10% each year.

That the two main growth levers in a small business are people and marketing, what I call the ‘growth seesaw’.

A fast-growing small business perpetually walks up and down the growth seesaw - market to land more sales, then after a while the team is maxed, and you need to walk to the other end and recruit more A-Players.

I wrote more about this a few weeks ago, in this blog post.

Since starting my first two businesses in late 1999, I have kept up my ferocious appetite for continual learning - PD, or Professional Development as I call it.

Currently, I consume 10 hours a week of audiobooks and podcasts, at 1.5 speed and I learn at least one thing from every book or cast.

Some people say that’s a lot, to which I retort “yes, and it’s my job” - but then I tell them I do all of that in ‘dead time’, when I am cleaning the house, driving around town, in the gym or shooting hoops in the sun.

Here are the 10 best books I discovered from our guests in the first 500 episodes:

Here are the three casts I am grateful to have learnt about from guests, I listen to these each week:

Recording the casts helps me become a better business owner, and manager - it is a tremendous source of not only inspiration, but also finding the best material in the business realm.

If you don’t invest in quarterly and annual strategic planning (especially by starting with the numbers), and train yourself and other managers to be Kick-Ass, join our ‘Business Transformation Program’ waitlist. We only open the Program to a group of 8 business owners 3 times a year (March, June and September).

Cheers,

Troy | Founder | Grow A Small Business