Business Growth Blueprint with Mark Fitzgerald
Welcome to "The Business Growth Blueprint Podcast," your ultimate resource for entrepreneurs and business owners looking to rapidly grow and scale their ventures! Join us as we dive deep into the world of marketing strategies, client acquisition, and retention techniques that empower you to take your business to the next level.
In each episode, we bring you expert insights, actionable tips, and inspiring success stories from industry leaders who have mastered the art of business growth. Whether you're a startup founder or a seasoned business owner, our podcast is designed to equip you with the tools and knowledge needed to attract more clients, enhance your marketing efforts, and build lasting relationships that drive sustainable success.
Tune in to discover innovative approaches to scaling your business, effective marketing campaigns, and proven methods for keeping your customers engaged and satisfied. With a focus on real-world applications and the latest trends, "The Business Growth Blueprint Podcast" is your go-to guide for transforming your business vision into reality.
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Business growth, marketing strategies, client acquisition, client retention, entrepreneurship, scaling businesses, business owners, podcast for entrepreneurs, business success tips.
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Mark Fitzgerald
Business Growth Blueprint with Mark Fitzgerald
Foundations of Business Success
Ever feel like your business is a rollercoaster ride, with exhilarating highs quickly followed by terrifying drops? You're certainly not alone. The entrepreneurial journey is filled with uncertainty, but there's a blueprint for stability that starts with three fundamental foundations.
The success of your business—and ultimately your life—depends on your ability to clearly define what you truly want from your entrepreneurial journey. Without this clarity, you become what I call "a twig on a stream," simply floating wherever the economic current takes you. True entrepreneurial freedom comes from taking control of your direction. But here's where most business owners stumble: your current business model might not be capable of delivering the lifestyle you're seeking. This revelation can be jarring, but recognizing this misalignment early allows you to pivot before investing years in a model with limited potential.
The second critical foundation involves honest assessment of your current position. Like a GPS that needs both a destination and starting point, business growth requires complete clarity on where you stand today. Are you barely staying afloat, or are you positioned for the next level of growth? Many entrepreneurs I coach are surprised when they take this honest inventory—either discovering they're closer to their goals than they realized, or facing the sobering reality that significant changes are needed. The third foundation brings everything together: identifying the specific actions and metrics that will bridge the gap between your current reality and desired outcomes. When you and your team obsess over the one or two numbers that truly matter in your business, remarkable progress follows.
Ready to apply these foundations to your business? Take a moment to reflect on what you truly want, assess where you stand today, and identify the critical metrics that will drive meaningful progress. If you need help implementing this blueprint, visit markfitzgerald.com for free resources or book a consultation to discuss your specific challenges. Remember, what goes around comes around—I'm here to help you succeed.
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www.markfitzgerald.com
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Email me at: mark@markfitzgerald.com
Three things every business owner must know. Welcome to the Business Growth Blueprint podcast. If you're an entrepreneur looking to elevate your business, you're in the right place. In today's fast-paced world, growing your business is more than just numbers. It's about making great marketing decisions to build meaningful connections, increase your revenue and keep your customers not just satisfied but truly happy, so you can live your life on your terms. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Blueprint with me, your host, mark Fitzgerald. It's great to have you joining me here today. So if you are a business owner or you're just getting started building your own business, we've put together this podcast to help support you on your journey.
Speaker 1:Because, let's face it, in life, most businesses it's like riding a roller coaster, isn't it? We're going up and down. We have good days where everything's great and we're stood on the top of the mountain screaming this could not be any better, and then it all comes crashing down like a bolt of lightning. So we need to make sure that we stay consistent and persistent in our approach and we need to also make sure that, as business owners, we remember we're not on our own. There is a whole economic community out there of business owners and, let's face it, particularly here in the UK, like most countries, us entrepreneurs, us small business owners, on the grand scheme of things, are what actually keep the economy going or actually help the country. Now, it doesn't help that we don't get the support that we should get, or I think we should get, and don't get me started on that, that's an episode on its own, but what I want to share with you today are three things that every business owner must know, because in any business, there are three very, very important foundational steps which have to be in place, I'd say, quite early on, and if you've never done this, it might be time now to just take a minute, grab a journal, grab a pen and paper and go through these three things, because you need to make sure that you're moving in the right direction. Of course is one, but you'll never move in the right direction if you don't have the passion and commitment to follow that up. And, of course, the truth is that one or two of these are sometimes all three are missing, and from a huge number of businesses out there as well, and you see people getting lost all of the time, and perhaps, as I said, this could be the same in your business as well.
Speaker 1:So the three things that a business owner needs in order to make a meaningful progression in their business and, of course, in their life, is to first properly understand what it is that you want from said business. Most of us haven't started any sort of business just for the fun of it Now if you have happy days to you but most of us have a reason, a purpose, an understanding of where we want this business to help us go, what do we want this business to support us with? And one of the most beautiful things about being a business owner is that we get to decide where we take our lives, where our businesses go and what our lifestyle, of course, is. As we grow, and without an understanding of what you want from your life, or you want your life to be like, the business is just going to be taken where the economic current, so to speak, wants to take it. You'll be like a little twig or a flower on a stream and you will just be following where the current wants you to go, and that is not a good place to be. You see, once you've got some clarity on where you want to get to in the terms of earnings that you need from the business, cash that has to come out of the business and the amount of hours and time that you're prepared to put into the business. It's vital vital that you look at your business from a helicopter's perspective. You look down on the business and also make sure that that business can get you there. It can deliver what you're asking it to deliver.
Speaker 1:Now, a lot of the problems I see when coaching business owners and helping support them is that they're trying to grow a business for a certain lifestyle. They're trying to grow a business to feed them in that way and sometimes that business doesn't have the capacity to do it and it can be very, very enlightening to understand that potentially, the business model that you're chasing, that you're doing that maybe you inherited from a parent, maybe you have friends that have the same business model and they have never really taken it to the next level that you're thinking. With the level of thinking that you're using right here right now, and the way your business model is right here right now, it might not be able to deliver you that lifestyle. Things may need to change.
Speaker 1:Now it's not all doom and gloom. It's not complete and utter loss, because you can pivot. You can change the way that you do things, or you might have that realization that you're in the wrong business. Maybe this isn't the business that's going to get you there, and that's okay, because the sooner that you can recognize something like that, the better it is for everybody. The more you can then focus and start to channel all of your energy, all of your output, into something that will be able to deliver the results that you want, into something that will be able to deliver the results that you want, the better it is for you. So the first foundation block is because now you have a good understanding of what you want to get out of the business.
Speaker 1:It's very important now to get an understanding of where we are right now with regards to your plan, if you have one. A lot of people don't have a plan. They don't know where they're trying to get to. They're just winging it. You need to understand where you are right now. Are you very close to actually being able to have a business that churns out profit and cash each and every month to give you that lifestyle, or are you miles away from it? But you've got to be honest to yourself. Don't hide your head in the sand. If your business currently isn't making money and is a liability to you, you need to get that oxygen mask and put it on first. You need to make sure that you plug those holes if you've got a leaky bucket, because if we do bury our head in the sand and we just expect everything to turn out okay, trust me, in most cases it won't, and we need to make sure that A the fun part is finding out what we want.
Speaker 1:The second foundation is understanding where we are right now, and that can be a revelation to a lot of the people that I work with, and it can be a revelation to you if you just sit down and have a good think about this, because to get anywhere, we have to know where we are starting from. The only reason a sat-nav works is because it knows where you are right now in relation to where you want to get to. I mean, the directions that you take to get to Southampton are different depending on where you are in the country, from where you're starting from. So we've got to understand where we want to get to and then, of course, we need to understand where we are now. Then we have an opportunity to be able to take the right actions in the right manners and get the results that we need from it. Ok, the third important step is what has to happen in your business to get you to wherever it is you want to be.
Speaker 1:Okay, do you need to keep doing the same things? Maybe just scaling it up? Do you need to get rid of some things? Do you need to change some things? It might be how many sales you need to get at a given date or by a given date, by a deadline, obviously, to give you that cash flow that you need to allow you to make a purchase, such as a new piece of machinery. Maybe an investment opportunity is out there. It might be a new location for your expanding business, or maybe a holiday that you booked. Maybe you booked and committed to something, which is always a good thing to do. Give yourself some deadlines and commit to things. It makes things happen, but making sure that you're out there and getting on with it. It might be getting a defined number of discovery calls in your business. Maybe you have to get a certain amount of leads in there each week. Then you can get the results that you want.
Speaker 1:Obviously, understanding and knowing the numbers is imperative for that, by you and your whole team obsessing over about the one or sometimes two numbers in your business, then things can really start to happen. If you have those targets there, you set your sat nav, you set your locations of where you want to get to where you are now and you set your numbers. What are the numbers that we need to hit? Numbers can be so powerful and then you can put everybody in your organization or maybe it's just you onto those numbers. These are our targets, these are our goals and this is what is likely to happen when we hit those. You know, sometimes this might just sound too simplistic if you've ever experienced it, but I promise you the truth is absolutely there in these three very simple foundations and fundamentals, and it's alive and breathing because the business that you're making will help and will grow with this. You will start to make big progress this year and, of course, those that do understand the one or sometimes two numbers that will get them to where they want to be in sales, in leads, in all of those sorts of different things they will be the ones that know they are progressing week on week, month on month and year on year, and I'd love that for you.
Speaker 1:So take a few moments, maybe if you're driving or whatever, just pause. Whatever you're listening to, whatever you're doing maybe you're stuck in traffic or something, or somewhere where you can concentrate and ask yourself what is it I truly want out of life, where do I want to live, how much do I need and everything. But where am I going with all of this? And then, of course, where am I now? Let's be the cold half truth of it. Where am I now? Are we sat? Really good, we're in a great place. Or are we sat somewhere where we're struggling slightly, okay.
Speaker 1:And then, once you've done that, what are maybe one, two or three things that you know need to happen to get you the results that you want, to bridge the gap of where you are now to where you want to be? It isn't any more complicated than that, and sometimes we overcomplicate things. I know I'm bad for that but if you do need any help with this, then you've got to just reach out, that's all. So check out markfitzgeraldcom. We have some tools and resources on there, but realistically, you've got to help yourself with this, and that starts by just sitting down and thinking about these three things. If you haven't done that for a long time, maybe your business is okay, maybe it's plateauing then just start thinking about it and doing it now.
Speaker 1:I help my coaching clients with this very, very early on to see where they are right here, right now, and then look at where we're going to get to, because it makes it so much easier as a coach to be able to help them put their plan together, to know exactly what their targets are, to know the numbers that they're trying to get achieve, to get them the results that they want. Because, as we say with the sat nav, if you don't know where you're going, there's no point in putting a destination in. It is there. You just turn up anywhere. And we don't want that for you. I don't want that for you and personally, I don't think you want that for yourself. So get yourselves out there.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you for joining me here. It's been great to have you. I hope this episode's helped you. If it has, then great. If you feel that it would help or benefit anybody else, then do feel free to share and subscribe. Please give it a like, give it a review Always appreciative of reviews and things and, yeah, if you need any help, check out markfitchgerald my name dot com.
Speaker 1:We have some free tools and resources there, and I'd be more than happy to jump on a Zoom call, have a little chat with you, talk about your business and see if I can point in the right direction. That's what it's all about. I'm a massive believer in life, in what goes around comes around, so by me helping people, I then in turn get that help coming back in different manners myself. So thank you for joining me. I look forward to you joining me very soon. Take care and bye for now. I hope you've enjoyed this episode today, and if you are enjoying these and you need more help and assistance, then why not head over to my website, markfitchgeraldcom? I have a lot of free tools and resources there that you've learned about and heard about in these podcast episodes, and I would also love, if you need further help, to book some time together and have a Zoom coffee and a chat to see if we can help you grow and scale your business. I look forward to seeing you soon. You take care and bye for now.