Are your a business owner serious about improving the results you're currently getting from you business ? Then this FREE workshop is definitely for you...

Henry Ford once said "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got." So if you are a business owner who's frustrated with your current business performance and would like more sales, profits, cash flow, and more success, then you will need to do something different. That difference is what this workshop is all about!

WHO SHOULD ATTEND…

The workshop has been developed for business owners with established businesses that employ a team of people and are open to new ideas and tactics for building their business. If you are looking for ideas to help you focus, or just motivation and strategies to move your business forward, you will find this information in-valuable.

WHAT DO WE COVER?

In a content packed 4 hours, just some of what you will learn:

 The one big barrier stopping you from growing your business.

 The 4 Stages to Sustainable Business Growth. Miss any of these and your profits will be leaking away.

 Creating marketing that works.

 The 5 elements to growing your profits.

 The Art of Systems and why they are the key to you working less hours.

 The 7 Keys to Building to Building a Winning Team.

 How you can achieve double digit growth year in year out.

We guarantee you will leave this workshop with at least 5 ideas any one of which can transform your business…

WHO ARE MPC?

MPC are a team of dedicated business coaches working with mainly local business owners who really want to grow their businesses and see the value of investing in themselves to achieve their goals more quickly and easier than they could do on their own. In 2016 more than 80% of our clients enjoyed double digit growth.

SO HOW MUCH IS THIS GOING TO COST ME?

This is a FREE workshop. Why is it FREE because statistics show that business failures are on the increase and we really want to help reverse that trend so this is an open workshop for businesses of all shapes and sizes with a whole host of different challenges. For a small number of attendees there will be the opportunity to learn more about business coaching and just what it can do for you and your business. Before we commit to these meetings we want to make sure that you are the type of people we enjoy working with. Strangely enough the people we enjoy working with also tend to get the best results. Secondly, we want to be certain that you are committed to growing your business, developing your people and becoming the leader you know you can be.

WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO SECURE MY FREE PLACE(S)

You have three options:

Secure the places yourself at https://mpcfourstages.eventbrite.com select a date that suits you & book your place/s

Phone our office on 0151 348 1202 and one of our team will take care of it for you

Or drop us email at susan@mpcforprofit.com and once again we will take care of it for you.

Come and join us we know you will love it and it will be great to meet you.

 How to get the most from your team meetings…..set the rules!

When I ask business owners the reasons why team meetings are at best infrequent events in their business typical answers I get are ‘Don’t have time,’ ‘To time consuming,’ ‘They’re just not productive,’ or even the golden nugget ‘Death by meeting.’

In the corporate world it is known for managers to have a meetings about meetings so they have pre-meetings and the management becomes locked into the meeting merry go round.

So it’s easy to see why meetings can get a ‘bad press’ yet if you look at really successful teams and businesses, meetings are an integral part of why they are successful in the first place. Which poses the question ‘What are they doing in their meetings that makes them such a success?’

I believe that most owners/managers deep down understand the value of having meetings the challenge is that most turn into at best a chat that has little or no value. Because of the lack of value team members will offer excuses why they can’t attend leading to meetings being cancelled which leads to the belief that they are waste of valuable time.

The best meetings however will align the focus of a team, build trust, drive commitment which will lead to peer to peer accountability and a much bigger focus on the business results.

So how can you hold effective meetings?

Two things that need to be in place to hold effective meetings are:

• A clear understanding of the purpose of the meeting. What is it you want people to do after the meeting?
• Clearly defined rules. There is a presumption that people should know the rules after all its common-sense problem there is common-sense isn’t that common. In the absence of rules people will make up their own.

My focus in this blog is on ways of establishing rules that will lead to more successful and productive meetings.

A simple discussion about agreeing the ground rules is all that’s needed to get the subject out in the open. Here are few areas that will to be considered:

• What are the starting and finishing times of the meeting?
• Who needs to attend the meeting? Who doesn’t need to attend?  
• Who is accountable for recording the minutes and outcomes of the meeting?
• What are the rules regarding laptops, tablets, mobile phones etc?
• What are the toilet break rules?
• What are the rules around interruptions during the meeting?

Bearing in mind that one of the purposes of holding effective meetings is to build trust amongst the team lets look at a typical scenario:

A meeting is booked to start at 10:00 that means that everybody should be in their seats ready to go at 10:00. It does not mean top your coffees up because we are about to start or if need to loo now’s the time to pay a visit or if you have any calls to make now is the time. Two things need to be considered here is how much respect is being paid to those who are organised, arrive on time, bring all the relevant information and are seated ready to go at the assigned time? If this continues to happen what will it do to trust? Also If someone who is vital to the meeting arrives late by ten minutes and there are six other attendees you have just lost one man hour.

What to do next

With your team discuss the rules and the reasons for the rules. Get buy in from the team (not consensus). Ask what will happen if rules are not met. Have the rules drawn up and published to everybody. Revisit them regularly. Make sure that you have 100% participation in sticking to the rules that includes the owner!

Are You Dealing With Under Performing Team Members? Read on...

One of the biggest challenges most business owners face at one time or another is dealing with a team member that isn’t pulling their weight or someone that is performing well below their potential. This can be very frustrating not to mention costly and extremely time-consuming.

As a Business Coach, a question I frequently get asked is “Is it time to move this person on or should I persevere and address the performance issue?” to be honest I prefer to start with the latter because in most cases when you dig a little deeper it isn’t the team members fault. Let me explain…

In a lot of businesses when someone joins the team their induction to the job goes something like; “Here is your desk, this is your computer (providing someone has remembered to order it) any questions just ask Rodney in the next office.” Is it any wonder that problems follow?

Before attempting to employ anybody some questions that need to be asked are; How well defined is the role? How clear are you on what you expect the person to do?” What Key Performance Indicators do you expect the person to meet? What responsibilities will the person have? How clear are the standards you expect the person to perform at? This is not an exhaustive list yet having clarity on these points will increase your chances of successfully integrating somebody into your company. Without them there may be a gap in expectations between you and the team member.

Once you are clear on the role the next step is to get agreement. What you are looking for here is clarity and buy in. “Here are my expectations” to which you want them to reply “Yes I fully understand those expectations.”

Next we need to have in place a system for providing accountability which simply means, how are you going to keep score. This will normally take the form of some kind of KPI or Key Performance Indicators that are activity based, for instance number of business owners spoken too per day or number of sales meetings booked per day.

Business can be quite predictable and once you understand the numbers in your business it is relatively easy to predict the outcome of a team member’s activity or indeed lack of activity. To keep people informed how they are doing you will need some kind of feedback system, be that a daily or weekly one-one, a scoreboard to which people can refer on a regular basis or a group catch up. A key thought here is to catch people doing things right and feedback how awesome that is as opposed to the more usual approach of catching people doing things wrong. The upside of this approach is that they are more likely to repeat the same behaviour.

Occasionally you may need to provide feedback to correct behaviour, helping the person get back on track and have them take responsibility for achieving their agreed upon goals.

You will often find that by introducing the 4 steps above, team member performance will start to improve massively. An added bonus with the process is that the people who are unable to meet your standards will normally leave of their own accord because they realise they are not up to the job.

To recap, apply these four steps to your hiring process and watch your results improve:

• Clearly define the role, responsibilities and expectations.
• Gain agreement to the clarity and buy in from the new team member
• Have a system for accountability to whatever you have agreed.
• Provide regular feedback and if needed correction.

Introducing the above system was one of the biggest wins I made in my early business career, and it led to vastly improved staff retention which of course led to much higher profits.

One final point with this system in place life was a lot less stressful.

If you'd like to discover 'How to build a team culture that, Inspires, Motivates and Thrives in Your Business Join us on Friday 16th June for a morning full of learning and practical ways to grow Your Team, YOUCAN'T GROW A GREAT BUSINESS WITHOUT A GREAT TEAM - GET YOUR TICKET/S HERE