Bold Brave Business: Raw and Real Strategies to Amplify Your Profit, Scale and Growth

By George Zenon

Do you have a good business and want to make it great?

Most business owners aren’t as successful as they should be. You reach a point where you get stuck under a glass ceiling; growth stalls and your model can’t scale any further. It’s a struggle to attract new or larger customers, and you find yourself working harder and harder for less and less return. Due to skill gaps as well as difficulty in recruiting and retaining top team members, burn out becomes inevitable.

It doesn’t have to be this way!

For over a decade, award-winning Business Strategist & Coach George Zenon has presented to thousands of business owners and entrepreneurs and has directly helped more than 300 businesses in 34 industries, smash through their glass ceiling, maximise the performance of all areas of their business and create more profit, scale and success.

Looking at existing ideas in a new way can often give you the breakthrough needed to move from mediocrity to greatness. Being bold enough to act and brave enough to follow through, can be the difference between having a booming business and one that is stuck under a glass ceiling, not performing as well as it should.

Learn these proven strategies that have been tried and tested in over 300 businesses:

• The Niche Maker - Attract high quality, targeted leads
• The Engagement Triangle - Turn cold prospects into convinced buyers
• The 6 Key Growth Drivers - Structure your business for scale and growth
• The Team Development Cycle - Build and maintain an ‘A- Grade’ team
• The Time Value Amplifier - Boost your personal productivity
• And much more...

This book is perfect for any business owner or entrepreneur with the drive, determination and willingness to turn their good, stalled or stuck business, into a BOOMING business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Zenon
• Release date: Jan 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781539913429

George Zenon

George Zenon is an award winning Business Strategist, Entrepreneur, Presenter and Best Selling Author. Over the last fifteen years, he has directly helped more than 300 businesses in 34 industries improve all areas of performance and presented to thousands more. He has owned multiple businesses of his own, led one of the highest performing teams in the business coaching industry worldwide and helped launch a number of highly successful social ventures. With a passion for learning, education and all things business, a staple of George’s success has been a focus on strong leadership as well as the utilisation of proven frameworks that are simple to understand and easy to implement.

Book preview

Introduction

Be bold, be brave, be true.

This is a piece of advice that was given to me many years ago by one of my first mentors. I chose to title this book around it, because over the years I’ve come to realise that this single piece of advice forms the essence and the basis for success in all areas of life, especially business.

The daily life of being a business owner or entrepreneur inherently requires you to take risks, face constant and growing challenges and make tough decisions without always knowing the consequences. It perpetually puts you into circumstances and scenarios that compel and demand you to step well outside your comfort zone, while confronting your deepest, darkest fears and doubts.

Therefore, being bold is an absolute requirement, being brave is a baseline necessity and being true to yourself as well as to others is a critical requisite for anyone who wants to not only succeed, but thrive and flourish in this environment.

In this book, you are going to find practical strategies for structuring your business for success, enabling you to scale and maintain control. You will find out how to gain back your time, focus only on what will make an impact and you will discover how to build a marketing machine that consistently builds and grows your business.

I wrote this book because I want to help develop better business leaders. I want to give growth-minded business owners and entrepreneurs the tools and resources to help them build a booming business, enabling them to have the lifestyle, freedom and wealth they desire.

I believe that the better a business leader is, the better the opportunities they will create for themselves and for others. Better business leaders provide better products and services, they provide better employment opportunities and they encourage and enable innovation. These, in turn, drive the greater economy forward, benefitting everyone.

The content, frameworks and concepts found in this book are exactly the same as those I’ve been using with business owners, entrepreneurs and managers for the past 10 years. Everything that you will find in these pages is real, raw and has been used countless times to drive significant results.

My aim with this book is not to necessarily share with you a broad range of new and never-heard-of-before information. In fact, in this day and age, information is easily accessible. It is abundant and you can find it almost anywhere. With that in mind, I believe that there is not really a whole lot of new information or content. There is only, in my view, new context. A new or different way of looking at or applying the content. When familiar content is framed with a new context, that is where significant breakthroughs happen.

Therefore, my hope and wish for this book is to provide you with some new and useful content and plenty of new context, for some concepts you may have seen or heard before.

I have tried to keep things as simple as possible. My mantra when it comes to information is this: If it’s not simple enough to easily draw on a whiteboard or a piece of paper, then it’s not simple enough to easily implement.

Therefore, I have deliberately kept the frameworks, information and stories simple, so that you can take them and implement them as quickly and effectively as possible.

The stories in this book are all real. They are based on real people with real businesses I have worked with over the past decade. For privacy reasons, the names of clients and businesses have either been changed or deliberately left out. However, these stories will demonstrate how anyone who implements the concepts and frameworks I will teach you, can achieve amazing results.

Though a book is a tool for learning, my hope is that you take it one step further. What I mean by this is that I don’t want you to go into reading this book with the mindset of "How much will I learn? but instead, be asking yourself the question, How much will I implement"?

Implementation is the key.

Some of the information will be new, and some you may have seen before—in fact, some of it you may well be doing already. When that happens, I want you to challenge yourself and ask, "How well am I implementing that? and What can I take from the concept that I’ve just learned that will make a positive difference"?

A combination of small, positive differences will add up to make a significant impact.

How to Use This Book

I want to say something up front.

You may find that this is not necessarily a book that you read from cover to cover.

It’s designed to be more of a handbook that you can open up to any chapter that may be relevant for you and gain some real and raw insights, ideas, motivations, tactics and strategies.

Each chapter covers a concept or framework that I’ve used either for myself, or for one of the hundreds of businesses I’ve worked with. It is by no means meant to be a comprehensive guide, with everything you could possibly need to know about growing your business.

Rather, the premise of this book is to help you build a booming business by sharing with you some of the most effective, actionable and proven strategies that will give you serious momentum and be applicable for any business, in any industry.

It will read just like this introduction—as if I’m having a conversation with you. As a reader, I feel you should be able to easily consume whatever information you may need at the time and then be able to act immediately—rather than get bogged down with too much information or too many new ideas.

One new and effective idea implemented 100 percent is far and away more beneficial than 10 new ideas implemented at 10 percent each. The premise here is that you don’t need to complete the book before you can start implementing changes and receiving real, tangible results in your business.

So, for whatever reason you may be reading this, whether it’s to gain knowledge, get motivation, make a breakthrough, or just looking for confirmation that you’re already on the right path … I sincerely hope that you find what you’re looking for and I hope that these pages inspire you to take action towards achieving your goals.

CHAPTER 1

The Six Key Business Growth Drivers—How to Structure Your Business for Success

Having worked with hundreds of businesses over the past 10 years, one of the most common questions that I get asked is,

What do I need to do to scale and grow my business?

I wish that was a straightforward question to answer. The reality is that every business is different, and all business owners are facing challenges that are unique to them and their current situation.

Having said that, if I were to try and answer that question as simply as I could, there would be one word that sums up most challenges I see. This single factor affects most businesses, it stalls growth and keeps businesses from being as successful as they could be: structure or lack thereof.

The common trait with most businesses I see when I first start working with them is that the business grew to wherever it is today organically, rather than by deliberate planning and execution. Therefore, there never was a whole lot of rhyme or reason to how the business is structured, nor was the structure proactively set up to best facilitate growth. Rather, it just kind of happened over time as the business reactively dealt with customer or market needs.

To put it simply: your business needs to be deliberately structured for success.

A good structure is fundamental because if you’re working without one, you’ll get stuck under a glass ceiling and won’t be able to break through. You will constantly be too busy to really focus the time and resources on growth. With the glass ceiling in place, the business won’t grow as fast or as big as you may want it to and it definitely won’t be providing the money or returns it could—given all the time and effort you’ve put into it.

When you work with a distinct, defined and concise structure, then you create a clear path forward. The activities that you need to do and the strategic direction you need to head become logical and progressive, so that the business can grow as fast and scale as big as you want. When done properly, the business can provide exactly the level of wealth and lifestyle that you’re after.

Let’s pretend, for example, that you’re building your dream house. You wouldn’t just buy a block of land, start building the foundation, throw some bricks on top and blindly hope it turns out to be the house of your dreams.

That would just be crazy. Instead, you would sit down and work out exactly what your dream house would look like. How many bedrooms do you want? How many bathrooms? How many spaces in the garage and how does the layout fit together to create functionality?

You’re going to need to know what the floor plan looks like and what materials are needed. You would also be likely to engage an architect or draftsman to design it and make sure it is structurally sound. They would then formalize your plan, which would then be passed on to a certified builder and/or project manager, so that then, and only then, construction can begin.

Business is much the same. It’s as if most businesses that have grown and been built reactively, started as a humble hut and random elements kept being added to it over time. The problem is, the hut isn’t going to become your beautiful new dream home. Instead, it’s likely to grow into some kind of a shanty town. It will become a patchy, poorly fitting together shanty town with no matching pieces, a shaky foundation and quickly approaching a point where nothing more can be added on to it—definitely not to council code!

When architects design the structure of your house, they make sure that the design they come up with is going to look great and also be functional. There’s no point having a pretty house that’s a huge pain and is inconvenient to live in because of a bad layout. Therefore, when designing your house, a good architect is going to make sure that it’s first and foremost functional as well as aesthetically pleasing.

Once again, business is the same. There is no point projecting an image of success if the business doesn’t