Posted by jpayne on February 8, 2009 under Business Coaching | 
Julia Comments: In this open and frank article, James Frost talks about the importance of seeking a business mentor who can provide a company with the necessary strategic direction
Coast Digital CEO James Frost sold price comparison website CompareandSave for more than £12 million, but he’s the first to admit it’s been a bumpy ride.
When I started my website design business in the 1990s, I quickly learnt that money doesn’t last very long. I got through all of it (about £20,000) in the first few months.
My approach was just to get the work so I could pay the bills and I had this unrealistic view that the bank would be falling over itself to lend me money. They made it quite clear they had been burnt from dotcom businesses before and would not view any application for funding favourably. I ended up having to draw money from my mortgage to get additional capital, which was around £50,000.
The experience taught me the importance of being able to take advice and support from people when it’s available, even though it can sometimes be easy to dismiss. After I got support from a business mentor everything became much more goal-oriented and the business started to find its direction.
‘My approach was to get the work so I could pay the bills’
Another lesson I learned is that you have to fight for things: they’re not just going to be given to you. Before I started out I was promised some contracts from old friends and colleagues from previous companies. However, once it came to the crunch, most of these offers evaporated. If they had followed through with their promises then that would have kept us going for longer in those first few months, but I may never have started the business if I had known they were going to change their minds. So, in a sense I suppose, they did me a favour.
Keep going
I started my current business, Coast Digital, in 2002. It was a 50:50 joint venture, and what caused me a lot of pain and anxiety was that when it came to needing more money, my partner was nowhere to be seen. So I had to make the decision to buy him out.
It made me realise that if you are going to embark on a joint venture, you need to have a clear outline of each other’s expectations first. Friendship and business don’t mix otherwise. By the time I set up Compareandsave.com with another partner in 2005, I learned my lesson. Falling out with a good friend has got to be my biggest regret in the last seven years.
In the early days of Compareandsave.com I was trying to do everything on a shoestring, but my partner pointed out that the company would never achieve its full potential that way. That was hard to accept at first, as we were running the company as a side operation and I didn’t want to lose him from working full-time at Coast Digital.
The problem was that I was consumed by the other business and didn’t want to get too caught up in a side project. It’s possible we may have made greater headway if we’d focused more on the new business, although it worked out well in the end.
The key thing to remember in business is that you have to be prepared to change, but also be open to suggestions from other people.
This article appeared on http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and business coaching to SMEs and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on February 3, 2009 under Business Growth |
What Big Businesses Can Do Differently
10 Strategies for Business Growth
Strategy 3:
Short Sightedness
Let’s understand some basics about human nature in corporate culture.
By their very nature, short-sighted people are unable to see into the future and therefore must practice caution. Their lack of long-term thinking means they have more time to focus on immediate profits.
Short-term thinking about immediate profits is dangerous because it causes people to place less emphasis on the importance of customers and ignore the bigger picture of corporate longevity.
We all have ‘negative experience’ stories about wanting to return a product to a store only to get caught up in a battle of principles. Every shop has at one time or another lost future revenue due to their insistence of hanging onto a few present-day pennies.
This lack of long-term, big picture thinking is utter commercial suicide and it frequently spills over into other areas of business. Short-sightedness with regard to forming strategy, developing high performers, listening to differing opinions and opening channels to market are just a selection of what, I am sure, we have all experienced at some point in our career.
It’s important to remember that not everyone is good at seeing the bigger picture. If you can, start to try and encourage others to. It may be with small steps within your own department or function. When people see change occurring at grass roots level, it can quickly have an effect and open new avenues of thinking and ultimately, action.
Action:
Focus on long-term thinking. Eliminate short-sightedness. Remember the importance of the customer. Encourage others to see the bigger picture.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on February 2, 2009 under Business Coaching |
The behaviour of a company’s leader is crucial to the entire organisation.
The behaviour of leaders set examples that communicate more than anything else. A leader’s greatest tool in leading others is the combination of their personality and behaviour.
While a leader’s greatest contribution is how well they communicate ideas, influence those around them, demonstrate the behaviour they talk about, and inspire others to join together in accomplishing a common goal.
It is a fact that the further up the ladder a leader moves, the greater the risk of loss of constructive feedback.
Giving constructive feedback to anyone is difficult at best for most people. Coaching helps to fill this gap. When done well, coaching accelerates the development of both managers and leaders.
The attraction, retention and development of qualified staff are also key concerns as organisations adapt to an ever changing and challenging world around them.
Executive Coaches work with leaders to develop leadership skills, encouraging them to lead by example and how to best support their teams to engage in ongoing professional and personal skill learning programmes and to be motivated and committed.
Direct Benefits of Coaching:
It is increasingly recognised that individuals and groups perform better with coaching and this performance translates into business results. Some of the specific ways in which coaching is beneficial include:
Coaching for leadership. Impacts companies through increased productivity, improved communication, increased staff commitment and loyalty and decreased levels of stress and tension.
Coaching assists individuals to remain loyal and committed to the company in the face of demanding global business hours, language barriers, differing work ethics and economic fluctuations.
Coaching can help prevent executive derailment, which, as some studies suggest, can be as high as thirty-three per cent for senior executives.
Coaching helps managers develop better interpersonal skills. Some common reasons for interpersonal conflict include executives being too abrasive, too controlling and too isolated.
Coaches work with executives to explore these behaviours, to recognise and regulate their self-defeating beliefs, assumptions and actions.
Coaching helps leaders to think and plan more strategically, to manage risk more effectively, to create and communicate vision and mission.
Coaching aids in developing a culture of trust, commitment and personal responsibility both internally and with the external world of clients and customers.
Coaching enables the executive or manager to leverage his or her personal power more effectively.
Coaching can develop those leadership qualities that have been empirically proven to be associated with success.
These include: cognitive capacity, social capacities, personality style, motivation, knowledge and expertise.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.