Yes You Can Have a Successful Business and a Fantastic Life

By Jann Meehan

Yes You Can Have a Successful Business and a Fantastic Life

Do you have the business of your dreams, but your dreams haven’t quite turned out as you’d hoped?

Did you get into business so you could be master of your own destiny, have flexibility with your time, plenty of disposable income and the freedom to get out and enjoy it? But now you find yourself running from one thing to the next, busy and stressed and not sure what to do to change it?

Jann Meehan, Success Coach, has been there with her own business and life and come out the other side. An experienced chartered accountant, business owner and coach whose focus is on working with her clients to create the life they dreamed of, her down-to-Earth practicality and up-in-the-clouds optimism make the perfect blend to help YOU create a successful business and a fantastic life!

Full of wisdom, humour and compassion, this book will guide you through the steps you need to take to turn the life and business you have into the life and business you’ve always wanted.

Read it! You’ll be pleased you did!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jann Meehan
• Release date: Dec 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310564659

Jann Meehan

Jann Meehan is a business coach, business owner, speaker and author, living in Christchurch, New Zealand.She is married with three grownup sons and five grandchildren.Her mission is to make the world a better place for other business owners. She wants to bring heart and soul into business, helping to create soulpreneurs in the business world. She is a strong believer that we can have a successful business and a fantastic life.

Book preview

Yes You Can Have a Successful Business and a Fantastic Life

Do you have the business of your dreams, but your dreams haven’t quite turned out as you’d hoped?

Did you get into business so you could be master of your own destiny, have flexibility with your time, plenty of disposable income and the freedom to get out and enjoy it? But now you find yourself running from one thing to the next, busy and stressed and not sure what to do to change it?

Jann Meehan, Success Coach, has been there with her own business and life and come out the other side. An experienced chartered accountant, business owner and coach whose focus is on working with her clients to create the life they dreamed of, her down-to-Earth practicality and up-in-the-clouds optimism make the perfect blend to help YOU create a successful business and a fantastic life!

Full of wisdom, humour and compassion, this book will guide you through the steps you need to take to turn the life and business you have into the life and business you’ve always wanted.

Read it! You’ll be pleased you did!

Yes you can

Have a successful business

and a fantastic life

Jann Meehan

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Jann Meehan

Also visit www.jannmeehan.co.nz

This eBook is liscensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter one How hard can it be? Getting into business

Chapter two Who are you? Getting your mindset working for you

Chapter three Where you are going? Getting the big picture sorted

Chapter four How are you going to get there? It’s about planning and goal-setting

Chapter five What will get you there? Learning to work on the business

Chapter six Who will get you there? Getting a great team together

Chapter seven Who are you serving? It’s all about the customer

Chapter eight What about the money? Understanding the numbers

Chapter nine Know that you’re not alone

Introduction

The work I do is incredibly exciting. I just love it – working with business owners to help them find out what’s stopping them achieving what they want. I help my clients get an awesome business, one that is profitable but also fills them with passion and gives them time to enjoy life as well.

Up until three years ago I was an accountant. I had been an accountant for twenty-five years and I got to the stage where I wanted to work with people more than numbers. I wanted to do something more meaningful, something that would make a difference in people’s lives.

I had become really interested, really caught up in personal development. It just fascinated me. I read a lot and went on lots of personal development courses. I realised that this was the sort of work I really wanted to do, and I knew that it was so essential to the success of a business. So I did a diploma in life coaching and along with my accountancy qualifications and experience in running a small business, became a business coach with a difference: a business coach who doesn’t just look at the profits, leads and conversions, but extends that to the bigger picture of what is important to the business owner and how that can fit into their life plan and values.

The motivation for that came from my ownership with my husband, of a retail bakery for the last twenty-six years.

I’ve been his accountant and business partner for nearly all of that time. I know first-hand how hard it can be, what a struggle it was for us.

That’s really what motivated me to want to work with business owners and help them achieve the success they deserve. I wanted to help them avoid the mistakes we had made, so that they had businesses that worked for them, rather than the other way around!

I hope our experience, and what we’ve learnt in our business, can help you, too.

Chapter one

How hard can it be?

Getting into business

This book is for struggling business owners, who want profit with purpose along with a balanced life.

Starting a business is wonderfully exciting. You have this great idea and you think, Wow, yes I’m going to be my own boss, I’m going to make millions, I’m going to be able to have time off during the week, I will have time for sailing, for golf, I’ll have far more time for the kids, life will be sweet!

For most business owners, that is far from reality.

I think how it was for us is how it is for most people: we started off with a great idea, we identified a gap in the market, and thought, Yes, it’s fabulous, we’re away.

And we just launched in boots and all, we didn’t stop and think about it, we didn’t plan it or research it very much; we just thought it was a great idea and off we went.

We really weren’t prepared for how hard it was going to be. We had absolutely no idea of the challenges we would face.

Our story

The great idea was that my husband identified a gap in the market: no one was making children’s birthday cakes.

At the time it was the late ‘80s, women were going back to work in droves and they were very time poor. They couldn’t make cakes like mother used to make.

So we thought there was a gap in the market: we could make children’s birthday cakes. We thought it would go really well because heaps of mums would want to buy these children’s birthday cakes – which they did.

How it came about was, we were lying in bed on a Saturday morning brainstorming ideas for a friend of mine who was going back to work.

We were thinking of ideas for what she could do and suddenly this idea came to Martin and he said, She could even make children’s birthday cakes. No one’s doing that.

She rejected that idea and then Martin said, Oh, wow, we could do that and I said:

"Hang on a minute Martin, you’ve never made a child’s birthday cake" and he said those immortal words:

"How hard can it be?"

And of course it was incredibly hard, it was the most difficult thing I think we’ve ever done in our lives.

Those early years were extremely difficult. One of the things that made it incredibly hard was that it was a successful business. People did indeed want to buy those cakes, and we grew at a very rapid pace. One of the main issues was that we didn’t take the time to plan at the outset, then we got caught up in the busyness of it all, and there was no time for anything else.

We didn’t plan the whole vision of it, where we were headed, what we wanted to do, how we would get there – we just sort of did it on the wing, to be honest.

I was working long hours as a full-time corporate accountant, so I didn’t have the time available to use my professional expertise to help Martin. So it was just a huge struggle.

We struggled to keep up, we struggled to get good staff, we struggled to motivate any good staff we did get. And we probably blamed each other – I was resentful because I was the breadwinner waiting for the business to make enough money to support us.

We made a lot of mistakes. It was very, very challenging.

And now those mistakes help me with the work I do with other business owners.

I’ve made all those mistakes and I’ve learnt from them and I can help others avoid making those mistakes.

That’s really why I do what I do – because it’s so awful to be stuck in that and not know how to get out of it. You feel like you’re on a treadmill and there’s no escaping.

When I work with business owners, I help them get off the treadmill, and help them find a way to overcome the things that are holding them back.

Look at yourself first

Before you even begin to look at the business, it’s a great idea to look at yourself. A clear understanding, total self-awareness of what makes you tick, what things are stopping you, why they are stopping you, is one of the main contributing factors to a successful business.

Top professional athletes do this. They know that peak performance isn’t just about being fit and training the body, they know they also have to train their minds. Being a business owner requires resilience and an ability to cope with constant challenges. Having a positive attitude and the right mindset is an essential component of peak success in managing a business.

It’s important to know who you are, what you want, to have a strong idea of your values. If you’re working with a partner, it’s important to communicate that with each other.

That was one of the things that we didn’t do, sit down and really talk about those things. I was in a very busy, full time corporate role then which didn’t leave much time for that. We should have made that time though, that would have made a lot of difference.

Vision

It’s so important to have a clear vision at the start, to know your values, and have that vision tied in with your values.

If you’re in a business that conflicts with your values, it’s never going to be a success; you’re never going to be happy, you’re never going to be fulfilled, it’s horrible. Also, having that clear vision, the big picture of where you are headed really helps you keep going when it all gets tough.

Quite often the first thing a business coach does is look at the business, and what’s going wrong in the business, but my approach is to look at you and what is stopping you. Once you can get over the things that are stopping you, then you can start to do something with the business.

My focus at the start is to work with you, the business owner and find your higher purpose, the big why of the business. I help you discover the vision and the values of what you want long term for your life, your families’ lives and your business. That’s when you can overcome the blocks and create the life and business you have always wanted.

It’s very exciting when that happens.

What’s happening in your life, day to day?

Sometimes there’s a disconnect between the business and what’s happening in your life day-to-day. That’s why it’s important to have a clear overall vision for your life that aligns with your values. So often, business owners throw everything at the business and lose everything else in the process. Lots of marriages and children have been sacrificed for business success and it’s so unnecessary.

Understanding that is all part of getting clear about what is important in your life. This book will guide you along the path so that you can get clear about it.

The power of mindset

"Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve."

Napoleon Hill.

It’s taken me a long time to develop the positive mindset required for a successful business. You get people who are glass half full people. I was definitely a glass half empty person. I tended to always look on the negative side of things and didn’t really find out until much later on in life that in fact it’s all to do with your mindset, that what you think is what you get.

Henry Ford said, Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right.

It’s all totally to do with your mindset and you can develop that. Lots of clients will say to me I don’t really think that way. I find it really hard to be positive.

It just takes practice. It’s something that builds up and builds up. The more you practice, the easier it becomes.

Now I tend to see the positive in absolutely everything. It’s rare for me to feel negative about things now, it’s just taken years of practice.

Personal development

The shift came for me after I did a personal development course, with Landmark education, and learnt to take responsibility for my own life.

I realised that there was no one I could blame for how my life turned out, whether we had a great business or not. Whether I had a great family, whether I had a great husband – anything – I had to take responsibility for that.

Once I fully accepted that it changed my whole outlook. I stopped being resentful about the business and I started helping out a lot more.

Martin did Landmark as well and his attitude changed, too, and we both came to the realisation at the same time that for this business to succeed, we had to have different attitudes: to the business, to the customers, to the staff and most importantly, to ourselves and each other.

We had always blamed others for things going wrong, but once we took that responsibility for ourselves, it miraculously started turning around.

It sounds like that’s a tough thing, it really sounds like that’s a hard thing to do, but it actually makes everything easier.

And that was the turning point in the business because we became better employers, which meant we had better staff; everything started working so much better for us. We started working together as a team. We supported each other more, we learnt to appreciate and acknowledge each other more.

Taking responsibility for your own actions and the way things turn out for you is totally the way to go. It’s not a hard thing to do and it isn’t done in a sort of dutiful way: I must be responsible for this – it’s done in a light way and it just feels great.

Once you can get staff working well and working as a team towards a common goal and vision