Food for thought from an advisor
Back to work after a short Christmas break, which gave me time to catch up on all my tape recordings of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Once you can get over the liberal use of the ‘F’ word, this is essential viewing for anyone wanting to improve their business - the simple principles Gordon literally rants on about translate well into almost any type of business.
I work as a Business Advisor for Business Link Yorkshire and my job is to help businesses grow and prosper. I spend most of my time out on the road visiting businesses and although my choice of language is not quite as fruity as Gordon’s, I see the same kind of challenges and problems. Business Link itself is a private Ltd business (not a lot of people know that!) and we make our living by competing for, winning and delivering European & UK Government funded contracts to provide support to small and medium sized business in York and North Yorkshire, in other words we have to be good at what we do to survive, just like any other business.
Anyway, back to Gordon. One of the ace things about doing this job is when you come across a business with growth potential, that is they’ve got a business opportunity so good they could make megabucks if they can get it right. I came across a business like this just before Christmas, and I’m now tete-a-tete with the Managing Director and a Marketing Consultant I have brought in defining that great opportunity, and working out how we are going to maximise this. I have no doubt that if we can help the MD get this right he’ll double or even triple the turnover on his business in the next 12-24 months, and then he’ll have a different kind of problem: - how to find the money to fund his expansion. Luckily I have colleagues at Business Link who specialise in this kind of thing, so before long they’ll be chatting to my client too.
Keeping the cash rolling in (cash flow management) is key to growing your business. 70% of businesses that go under are trading profitably, they simply just run out of cash. Maybe a customer pays them late, or they have spent too much too quickly then when the bills come in they can’t pay them in time. Like Gordon, we see many businesses that are ’stuck’ for some reason or other, and often a conversation with an advisor (we are impartial and very lovely human beings!) can help the business owner to start seeing that light at the end of the tunnel.
Now that I’ve set the scene, I hope to provide some stimulating food for thought in my future blogs for anyone wishing to make their business reach its full potential in 2007!
January 11th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Have you ever been called in to advise a business, and it’s in such a mess you don’t know where to start?
January 16th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
I do agree with your comment that in any business you have to be good at what you do to survive - but the big shock to me when I first set up my business was that whilst I’d gone into it because I felt I was good at something, I ended up spending most of my time working on other things that I wasn’t so good at - such as solving staffing problems and doing Health & safety risk assessments!! I don’t suppose there’s any way round that - you just have to get up to speed on so many things so quickly - and that’s the challenge.
I think Gordon Ramsay speaks such basic common sense - but I do have some sympathy for the people he encounters in those restaurants, because sometimes you’re working so hard and so close to the coalface that its really difficult to take that objective step back and see the bleeding obvious!!