Business Growth Blueprint with Mark Fitzgerald

Stop Spinning Your Wheels And Build A Business That Works For Your Life

• Mark Fitzgerald • Episode 8

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We map a practical path from honest annual review to a marketing system that funds itself, then anchor it all with the TERMS framework so your business supports your life. The goal is clarity: know your numbers, face setbacks, and plan a year you can actually live.

• marketing reframed as a repeatable, self-funding system
• radical honesty about goals, misses, and patterns
• the risk of avoidance illustrated by a tax-bill story
• numbers-first planning to guide investment and focus
• the TERMS framework for human-centered growth
• designing a 12-month plan with tests and thresholds
• choosing growth over drift through weekly reviews

Check out my website, which is just my name, which is markfitzgerald.com, or reach out to me and let's have a coffee, whether it's a Zoom coffee or whether we meet up


For more help and FREE tools and resources please visit..

www.markfitzgerald.com

or reach out to me on...

Email me at: mark@markfitzgerald.com


SPEAKER_00:

You're in the right place. Growing your business is more than just numbers. Make it great. Increasing 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. So it's all about business. This podcast here is to help you grow your business. Now, whether you're a small business owner, an entrepreneur, a property entrepreneur, it doesn't matter. It's all about understanding how you can grow, systemize, and make the best business possible for what it is that you choose to do. And I like to always at this time of year roll things back and review how things have gone. And I hope that you do the same as well. And we're going to do some episodes on that where we'll go through exactly how best practices, if you like, to plan out the next 12 months. Because if you don't have a plan, how do you know where you're trying to get to? But what I want to do in this episode is I want you to understand a bit more about your marketing. Because a lot of the times now we aim to try and be the property professional of our time. And that's what we have to be always striving to better ourselves, to become more professional in what we're doing and in our business. But what we will also find is it's getting harder and harder to attract clients, customers, leads into our business. It doesn't have to be that way. And a lot of the time, people look at marketing as an expense, but it shouldn't be an expense. What it should be is a systematic system that you put into your business that brings in a constant flow of customers and leads that pays for itself. Now there are 12 key numbers that you need to know about your business to really be able to market successfully and to make sure that you're going to build the life that you desire and get the profit that you want. So, what I want you to think about during this episode is what were your goals that you set last year? Now, if you haven't got a new business, maybe you've got a business that's been going for a while now. How did things work out for you? Did they work out to plan, or are you still just spinning your wheels in the same situation? I work with certain clients now, certain business owners, to really help them master the numbers, help them master their marketing and grow systems in their businesses so that it delivers a life on their terms and the life that they desire. So think about it as well. What disappointments have you had over the last year? And don't just dwell in them, but use them as learnings, use them as parts that can really help you to make sure you don't make the mistakes again. You might be able to put on a front. You know, some of us can do that very successfully for long periods of time, but you know whether your business is growing or shrinking. After all, there is no status quo. So you are either growing or you're shrinking in what you're doing. So what is it for you at the moment? But you really have to be true to yourself with that. You see, it's okay that things don't always go to plan. The trick is not to deny that. Don't spin things up, don't pretend that failures or bad things didn't happen. Look at what's happening in your business in the past and be honest with yourself about that. Have an awareness and an understanding so that you can shape a better future. Otherwise, you'll just go around again, you'll make the same mistakes. I've been there, I've done that. You've got to learn from those things, and you'll have the same regrets. How many times have we got to the end of the day? We've been busy, but we've been busy on the wrong things, and then we think we've wasted our time, we've wasted our day. We need to have structure and we need to have a plan. So if you set yourself some big goals in the past but have come up short, linger in that for a minute. Learn from that, because therein lies the path to your future and wealth, and this is what it's all about. You have to not ignore the bad parts, not just celebrate the wins, but also look at what's gone wrong and how can we change that so it doesn't happen again, so that we can be clear. Because sometimes things happen in our business or in our lives that we cannot control. But the response that we and the way that we react to them, we can control. So when you look back, we're not trying to change the past. That's not the purpose of all of this. We're just trying to learn from the mistakes that we've made and the things that we may have regretted. So you can shed proper light on what's going to happen in the future and how you behave and respond to that next time. I had a friend of mine actually who had a massive tax bill and he managed to ignore it for nearly 18 months until they showed up at his door and caused him a lot of pain and problems. Now, luckily for my friend, he had somebody who would invest some money to help bail him out of that poor situation that he put himself in. And over the next few years, he repaid that investor. The investor walked away and he was back in troll of his business. So in the end it worked out well. But the problem with that is it would be a happy story if he hadn't done it again. You see, what he did then was start to ignore notices, start to ignore paying his taxes on time. And this was a recurring theme for him. And this is because he doesn't manage his business in the right manner and he doesn't know his numbers. When he gets cash in the business, he likes to spend it, likes to be flash. So when he didn't have to be accountable to somebody else, he all of a sudden falls off the rails again, and that's no way to be. You see, everybody in their lives and in their businesses has reoccurring themes. Some of them are as drastic an example as the one I've just told you about then. Your ability to be honest about them equips you with success going forward. If you don't go back and pull out all the previous plans and look at what actually came to pass, you're denying yourself greater awareness, and that will compromise your ability to plan effectively. So make sure you have got together your life plan, you know your numbers, and we'll go through the numbers in the next episode. And of course, you know the path that you need to be taking to reach the goals and the numbers that you set yourself. Why is it you started this business is always a great question. There's a reason for most of us why we've started anything and put ourselves through this. It could be a lot easier to just go and have a day job where you can actually switch off at the end of the day. But as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we don't want to go down that path. We like the fact that we think we have freedom by having our own business. But a lot of the time when I speak to business owners, they're trapped. They're actually trapped in a business that is worse than being trapped in a day job. And a lot of the times the stress of trying to get ourselves out of that really, really is detriment to our health. So whilst we think we're doing the right things, we're not always doing those. So we like to go through what we call terms. Each year I go through my terms and how I want to live my life, and I go through terms with my clients as well. Because it's ever evolving, things always change, they don't always stay the same. But terms stands for time. So, how do you want to spend your time and what can you spend your time on? Do you actually have any free time, or is it always taken up working? So you go through that and you put down on the list how you are spending your time now and how you want to plan out your perfect day, your perfect week, your perfect life. The next one is E, which is effort and energy. How much effort and energy can you put into your business? Okay, then we go to R, which is resources. Do you have the resources that you need to grow the business? To be into a position that means it can deliver the life that you desire. Then we have M, which is money. So do you have the financial needs to be able to take your business to that next level, or do you need to find a different way of doing things? And S is classed as sanity, but I like to say sleep. Why? Because if I sleep like a baby, I know my businesses are rocking and rolling and going in the right direction. When I can't sleep, it's normally because I've got a problem that I need to get sorted. But also it's sanity. We do not want to struggle, we do not want to put our health in jeopardy over a business. So it's all about living life on your terms. Make sure that you are planning out the next 12 months, if nothing else, because otherwise you will spin your wheels and you will be just doing another year, surviving another year. In life, they say we live till 75. Well, I've got a plan of trying to live till I'm 100. But most people live 75 years one year at a time, never changing it, just doing the same things, expecting the economy to change, expecting the government to help them, expecting something to happen when actually it's all down to you. It's all down to you making it happen. Myself, I want to live 75 different years. I want to try new things. Yes, some things will work, some things won't work, some things will cost me money, some things will make me money, but it's all about making sure that you double down on the things that you can achieve on and that will make you money, and of course, cut out the things that won't. And you won't do or be able to do that if you don't test things, if you don't try things, and you don't expand your knowledge. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. We'll go through the numbers in the next episode, uh, and we'll go through your 12 key numbers that you need to have a handle on to really see whether your business can deliver a life on your terms. And this is all a sequence that goes together. Also, if you need any help and support with your business, whether you're looking at growing it, whether you're looking at expanding it, then we do have opportunities to work with you and to help you and support you on that. So check out my website, which is just my name, which is markfitzgerald.com, or reach out to me and let's have a coffee, whether it's a Zoom coffee or whether we meet up. I'm always looking to meet new people to see if I can help them, point them in the right direction, and connect with them. I look forward to you joining me in the next episode. You 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, monthsher.com. I have a lot of free tools and resources then that you live in the episode. We can help you.