Business Health – let’s get it sorted!

There’s a lot of heat on mindset currently and I’d like to discuss how important it is and what it means for a business. Mindset in a business sense, actually relates to everything in both life and business and it leads me to ask a couple of questions:

• Who is responsible for your business plan in your structure?
  Answer:  you are. But you may be tapped out already, working long hours, feeling out of control because of cash flow problems, maybe poor team performance or maybe your competitors have just just gone and dropped their prices.
• Again, who’s responsible for this? 
  Sorry, but it’s the same answer. It’s easy to get a little out of control and start focusing on what’s right in front of you and lose sight of the future. What I want to show you is how to get around that.

O A R B E D

Here’s an activity you can use on your business, but also on your life. It’s called OARBED and it works really well for improving employee motivation communication, engagement  and the results of your company. Also works for children and teens! 

Visualise 6 letters and place them vertically down a page, O A R B E D. Draw a line across the page after R.

• OAR – these are the terms used that are above the line these are basically the terms used by lets say, a victor. 
• BED – these are terms used below the line, quite often used by victims.

So, what is OAR? It’s taking Ownership, it’s Accountability, its Responsibility. The 3 key traits for business owners to make sure their plans actually happen. Conversely, BED below the line is Blame, Excuse and Deny.  Let’s think about that unfortunate event some of us have been through as parents when a daughter or a son comes home late at night. And the first thing they do is say  ‘It was Bob who made me drink’. Blame. Or ‘I didn’t realise that when I was having vodka that it was actually alcohol’. Excuse. Or flat out ‘I didn’t have alcohol’. Deny. What would ownership or responsibility look like? “Yup I’m sorry dad I did have a bit too much to drink I will make sure in the future that doesn’t happen and I will contact you if I disagree in the future’. Hopefully this gives you a bit of an idea about mindset or OARBED and how we can actually apply this to business. 

The Ceiling of Complexity 

A business may have been going well for weeks, months or years and all of a sudden the growth seems to stop and you seem to have reached a ceiling for some reason and even though you try really hard, you keep bouncing against the ceiling. The performance has just leveled off so instead of 50% growth to year-on-year you’re getting 2%.  What’s going on often in business is we overdo things, we try and make things more complex, and as we do that, we make our business harder and harder to operate, becoming a real struggle. 

What if we could do something to break through that ceiling complexity? The opposite of complexity. Simplicity. Simplify your system, simplify your marketing messages. Will this simplification make it easier? Short answer is yes, and you’ll see it a lot today with businesses trying to make things more and more simple. It doesn’t mean they’re going backwards, they’re just making it easier for people to execute their plans. 

Free up Capacity 

Here’s a quote from John Labeck, born in1834 and died in 1913, Labeck won a nobel prize for literature and he wrote a book in 1887 and this quote from him really resonated with me. “In truth people make time for what they choose to do, it is not really the time but the will that is lacking”. Are you spending time on just the things you want to do? It’s easy to ignore things you don’t want to do in the hope they will go away or get better and we all have to do things in our day that may not be as pleasurable as others. Also think about what time of day you are most productive, morning, afternoon? Find that time and do the things you don’t want to do, 10 minutes later it’s done!