 So, you have a big Vision that gives you goosebumps and it’s plastered on your wall in huge letters. You’ve started to plan with your team about how together you’ll make that Vision a reality. And you’re all buzzing about the future and cracking on. Great stuff! I can feel the energy from here.
Now, all that’s missing is an effective Personal Management System. Not the sexiest title I’ve come across but even the most inspiring vision, and the smartest of plans will be wasted if you don't have the means to keep yourself on track. A Personal Management System Your daily routine is the cornerstone of your personal management system, and should be crammed full of habits that will maximise your productivity, and move you closer to your Vision. 1. Get into the habit of planning your day the evening before (and your week on a Sunday evening). At the end of the day, you’re usually very clear about what still needs to done, what the priorities are, what tomorrow’s frog* will be. Advanced planning like this makes sure that you hit the ground running. 2. Chunk your work into 90 minute segments. This is a good timeframe for focus, and FOCUS is the key word - don’t multi-task - if you’re going to work on a sales letter, work on it for the full 90 minutes, or until it’s done, if you can do it within the 90. 3. Peak Practice - Work out which part of the day you’re at your peak - for me it’s first thing in the morning - and use that 90 minutes to ‘eat your frog’ - *do the thing that you don't necessarily want to do, but that’s weighing you down mentally, because you know you really need to get it done. Just get focused and eat the damn frog! It’s a really good success habit to get into. 4. Set yourself mini deadlines - always good for those of us who like a bit of last minute pressure - make them ‘drop-dead’-lines too! Absolute must delivers! Breaks are always a good deadline. Holidays are also excellent. Ever noticed how much more you get done in the days leading up to a holiday, or the minutes leading up to any deadline. 5. Switch Off. Both breaks and holidays are essential for your long-term productivity too - refreshing and re-energising your mind and body. The most successful businessmen and women really get this, and have made breaks long and short, a habit they will always keep. 6. Daily Exercise. Other daily routines and success habits that are good for your mind and body, include taking at least 30 minutes exercise a day - even if it’s just a walk down the road and back - and drinking plenty of water - two litres is the recommended amount isn’t it? I’m no scientist, but I can testify to the power of a lunchtime walk for clearing your head and setting you up for a productive afternoon. For budding entrepreneurs, there are three other personal management essentials:
A Personal Management System takes discipline and time to develop, but when you learn to manage yourself, the business will be a piece of cake! Do one thing: look back over today/yesterday. Did your work take you towards your Vision? Did you have frog for breakfast? If not, look to adopt these good habits and improve your routines. For more information on how MPL can help you, contact us here: hello@mariannepage.co.uk
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 ‘9950! I just need to go up and down stairs a few times; I’m nearly there!’
Are you hooked on your 10000 steps a day? It’s that time of year again when we review how those new year resolutions are going. Use the stairs, eat less sugar, get off the bus a stop early. With the state of obesity and the impact on a stretched NHS, there’s a real abundance of programmes and adverts out there helping us to eat better, sleep better and particularly move more. The aim is 10000 steps a day. Apparently that number was a pretty random figure, yet like me, you probably know someone who is addicted to achieving it daily. Many of us have started to use watches and fitbits to measure our activity and keep us focused on our daily steps target. Research has shown we can get so hooked on our target that we’ll (literally) keep going that extra mile, to ensure we achieve it. So if personal targets like this can work so effectively, what about business? Are targets in business good or bad? Well, I would say that it really depends on the target. Did you hear the one about the train driver that went straight through every station to ensure he kept to his timetable! (Probably an urban myth.) But I did know of an organisation whose target was to process work in two days. So guess what happened to work not completed in that time? Yes, it got fitted in as and when, so managers could concentrate on getting new work done in the timescale by which they’d be judged. These managers were celebrated even though their old work was piling up. But at that time the age and level of that work was not a target and not measured, until it began to impact on the Customer. You probably have your own examples of targets where true customer service is not at their heart. If you set a target and either celebrate it’s achievement or give people hell if it’s not reached, guess what? People will start to deliver it at any cost. If that target is not holistic or engenders fear of failure, somewhere down the line the business and your people will suffer. So there can be dangers in target setting but also great rewards. So what makes a good target? A good target will always take you towards your business vision - so you need to be clear about that for starters. It will be holistic - in the best interests of both your Customer and your business to engender a culture of excellence. You can’t set targets just to improve profit - you’ll probably succeed in the short term, but what will the long-term cost be if you’ve achieved your target by cutting corners on quality? Equally, you can set targets aimed at driving Customer satisfaction above everything else, but this could cause big problems if you ignore the needs of your business profit. You want productivity – but if you focus on productivity without any thought for quality, customer focus or value for money, you may end up being very productive doing all the wrong things. You get the gist. Targets, like your SMART* goals, will be challenging, but achievable. You’ll be able to measure them, and celebrate their achievement with the team. The very best targets drive your people and your business to excel and give everyone a real sense of achievement - just like your fitbit! Do one thing: Review your business plans and ask yourself - are my plans a route map to my business vision / my destination? Do I have targets as key milestones along the way and are those targets holistic with the customer at their heart? Do they create a culture of excellence? Is my whole team involved in their creation and achievement? For more information on how MPL can help you, contact us here: hello@mariannepage.co.uk *SMART goals traditional definition: S - Specific M - Measurable A - Achievable R - Realistic T - Time-bound  I’ve refrained from mentioning the B word in my posts. Like many of you I’m heartily sick of the dreaded ‘Brexit’ word. It’s not that I’ve been burying my head in the sand or anything, just rather like many people I’ve not felt qualified to give advice. But there is one thing I would recommend, and that is to plan.
Not knowing which way we’re going to go, let alone what’s going to happen then, can perhaps make people think what’s the point of planning when your crystal ball has totally clouded over. Any time you work on a business plan you are faced with two things.
Now at anytime those ‘unknowables’ take an amount of guesswork based on things like the starting point of your business, the economy, strength of the pound, forecasts etc. So you plan using what you know and your best guesswork based on your current knowledge. With Brexit/no Brexit looming those ‘unknowables’ are worse than usual since they can be a totally different set of unknowables depending on a hard Brexit or even no Brexit at all! Suddenly your best guesswork is built on very little knowledge and two possible outcomes at extremes of each other. I usually say that planning is fun but I imagine planning for many businesses at the moment is a nightmare. So many factors are outside individual businesses’ control it can feel like you’re going to hit sheet ice and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. But I still believe in planning. Plan based on what you know and then plan based on what you can imagine. Planning in the current climate is going to need some creativity. Brainstorming how a hard Brexit or no Brexit might affect your business; get your team, your suppliers, your Customers involved, perhaps a third party unconnected with you who can add a ‘naive’ or independent view. This is about planning for the worst case scenario but it can also be about recognising opportunities for example the effects of a weakened pound on exports, tourism, staycations etc. McDonald’s taught me a lot about the importance of planning, and how to be smart about it. I learned that planning is a team sport; most effective when it involves the people it affects as well as those who will deliver on it. Add someone with no bias or axe to grind into the mix, and you will develop a truly effective plan. I learned that you listen to those with the skills and experience, but you also consider the new and the different; that it’s ok to re-visit what might once have been considered crazy or just plain wrong for the business, as things change, and the ‘right time’ comes along. I learned that you have a system for planning that makes it routine, regular, consistent; that keeps you focused on the end goal, even when you need to adapt, or change your route. A plan for me isn’t something to be made then stuck in a drawer it needs to be dynamic; reviewed and adapted to changing circumstances. And 2019 may prove the most fluid yet. Do one thing: Review your business plans. Do they include worst case scenarios or potential opportunities? For more information on how MPL can help you, contact us here: hello@mariannepage.co.uk  Imagine you have a boat. It’s the start of a new year and you’ve just set sail, headed out to sea - full of optimism and excitement. Captain of your destiny. Owner of your fate. But where are you headed? Wherever the current takes you? Slave to the tide and the prevailing wind? Or have you plotted a course to take you to your dream destination? Now imagine that boat is your business.
Business navigation is no easier than navigating the ocean, but just like sailing the high seas, you’ll always be better off with robust preparation and planning, so give some thought to the following: What’s the name of your boat? This will say a lot about how you see yourself right now. If you had to name it today what would it be: ‘Victory’, Endurance’? Or might it be ‘All at Sea’? Have you set your course? What are your goals and milestones for 2019; for the next 90 days? And what about practical action plans to achieve them? How will you recognise that storms are coming before they hit? What have you put in place to pick up on problems - to anticipate and overcome them? How will you fill the gaps in your knowledge and experience? Who or what are your anchors that will keep you from going under? These are often the people who keep you grounded, keep you going, maybe develop and inspire you. A family member or a trusted mentor. Perhaps they are words from a loved one that you carry with you. Or perhaps it’s a faith, a belief in something greater than yourself. How have you selected your crew? Did you recruit to your values and passion? And how have you developed their skills to help them fulfill their promise? Can they take over happily if you get seasick or need to sleep? What are the Values, the compass points that will keep you on a true course? Those things that make you and your business tick, that show the world what you stand for. That you hold true too, day in and day out. Do one thing: Think about where you're headed in 2019, and ask these questions to check that you’re prepared for whatever comes - good or otherwise. Wishing you a safe and splendid passage through the year. For more information on how MPL can help you visit www.mariannepage.co.uk or contact us at hello@mariannepage.co.uk  Business owners, will you be keeping one eye on your e-mails on Christmas Day? According to recent research 1 in 5 of us will be. I can picture it now, a sneaky look at your phone secreted under your Christmas napkin and then all hell breaking loose when you’re spotted!
These stats make for interesting reading:
You could expect these figures for Christmas Day if they were coming from the hospitality industry, and of course retail returns with a bang again with Boxing Day sales, but these are across a wide range of SMEs. So what about other owners? Some will take the ‘down’ time to catch up on paperwork, some to think about the coming year and some may just want the excuse to escape from relatives. For many though it’s the pressure of having to keep up with work. The ‘one man band’ may not have a choice. Larger businesses work over the festive period perhaps because the owners don’t trust their team and manager(s) to run things without them. It’s said to be the reason why so many businesses in the UK remain in ‘startup’ mode instead of scale-up. So if you have a team but you still need to supervise and double check their every move, take a moment to think about ‘why?’ And then, what better time with the New Year approaching to think about what you’ll do to change things. Michael Gerber says in the E-Myth, “If your business depends on you, then you don’t own a business, you have a job, and it’s the worst job in the world, because you’re working for a lunatic!’’ He’s right, because quite often, as business owners, we are lunatics. We’re control freaks. We’re demanding. Demanding of ourselves. We insist on long hours and hard work, and really, that’s the technician, in us, the person who feels that they have to do everything. Serious business owners and entrepreneurs can take time off whenever they want and their income still comes in. They have two fundamental things:
I’ll be taking a full two weeks off this festive season. I’m not saying this smugly, I’m saying it because it actually took me a while to get to this point. To get to the point where I don’t feel guilty to get to the point where I can trust my team to do what needs to be done, where I have that level of trust. And to plan work so that I can also give my team a good break. The trust that allowed me a totally switched off three weeks last Summer has come from having the strong systems in place that I need, having the team in place to get on and follow the systems, and achieve our goals. We business owners talk endlessly about how to engage and reward people and what better way than enabling them to get on unhindered by our daily meddling. Ask yourself how you would like to work for someone constantly looking over your shoulder and that’s how your team will feel. Simple, logical, repeatable systems, and a good team to run them, are the root to stress-free holidays, to long weekends off, to any weekend off, and to financial and time freedom. Holidays, for me, are absolutely vital for continuing to do good work for my clients, continuing to come up with new ideas, or better ways of doing things. That all just comes out of resting my brain, stopping the relentless running and rushing around to see clients, or to develop and deliver programmes. It’s really, really important that you take that time to rest and relax, and you can only do that, as a business owner, if you have the systems in place, if you have the team in place. I’d love you to think about that, if you recognise yourself here. Simple, logical, repeatable systems, and a good team to run them. Do one thing: Let this be your goal for 2019. • you will not be working bank holidays • you will not be working weekends • you won’t be working 60 or 70+ hour weeks Instead, you’ll be spending quality time with the people that you love, with your animals or whatever you love doing beyond your work. Merry Christmas from all of the MPL team x  Do you feel like you’re drowning? Drowning in paperwork, in problems, in people stuff? And all because of your success!
When you were starting out you had a handle on everything. Now that you’ve grown you’ve had to take on more people and it’s just not the same. You feel like you’ve lost control. And like any new parent you’re finding it hard to trust anyone with your ‘baby’ - to do things your way. If it helps, you’re not alone. There are lots of successful small business owners out there who have fallen out of love with their business. What used to be fun, exciting and rewarding is doing great financially, but not giving you the same pleasure or sense of adventure. Of course you've always worked hard, but in the early days that hard work was interesting and added real value to the business. Now you’re working even harder and it doesn’t ever seem to move things on. 7 Clear Signs Your Business Needs Simplifying
So…are you stuck? Or are you drowning? I hope you’re neither, but if you are, let me throw you a lifebelt. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can have time freedom and a business that runs like a well-oiled machine, manned by a high-performing team. You just need to systemise in every area of your business and develop a strong second line of management. That’s not as daunting as it sounds. In fact, there are only 10 steps to your Freedom - that freedom to scale, grow or sell your business, or run it from a beach somewhere if that's what you really want. Fancy a bit of that? Do one thing: Our Systems Mastery Programme works around you and your life, giving you the freedom to work ON your business, not IN it. Read more here: Systems Mastery Programme  I want to share an interesting conversation I had recently with a control freak.
Business Owners come to us for help to escape the day-to-day operation of their business, but the truth is that so many find it hard to let go of their role, even the small tasks. Some believe that they are the only ones that can do a certain task to their exacting standards, and we come across this so often that a huge part of our work is changing the mindset of the business owner to let them know that they can trust their team with the right systems in place. They can take a step back to work on growing their business, while it runs smoothly without them, or with only a little input from them. This particular ‘control freak’ (and I use that phrase because I can - I was one too!) was telling me how he hates to delegate - doesn't trust his employees to do anything without some sort of supervision, because they cock things up, make mistakes, take longer to do the job than he would. "I check EVERYTHING' he said, 'I don't want my customers to have anything but a perfect service'. It's the perfect excuse for the control freak - “I’m not doing it for me, I'm doing it for my customers.” Drives me nuts. Here's the thing, for those of you who recognise that you may be borderline, if not full-blown freaks, you’re keeping yourself stuck in that rut we talked about recently. Just like the bindweed in your garden - you know the one with the pretty flower that pretends its trying to make your garden look lovely, while its tentacles set about destroying it? You too are strangling the growth of your people and your business. You've forgotten that someone let you make mistakes when you were learning, someone gave you room to grow and develop, someone recognised that mistakes are how we all learn. You've forgotten that all of the successful people you look up to have built their success on a bucketload of failures, and much bigger failures and mistakes than any of your people might make if you gave them their head. You want to limit mistakes? Have systems. Set standards. Give your people proper training in how to use your systems to achieve those standards. Manage their performance. Reward good performance and re-train when it's not so good. People want to learn and develop, they want to grow - it's much more of a motivator than money. Give them ownership of their job, help them to feel like they belong to something, that you're relying on them to help you build something that you can all be proud of. I saw this quote on Facebook, and it is oh so true - 'A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust one another.' Trust your people and build a high performing team, that runs your high performing business. Get control of your freak. Pull out the bindweed that's stifling your business. Do one thing: Want to see where you’re at right now? Complete our Systems Scorecard to see where you’re at, right now, in your business.  One of the questions I always ask my clients is ‘How many of your current team would you re-hire tomorrow if you were given the chance?’ So…how many would you re-hire? If you say all of them, congratulations! I’m delighted for you, because I know from experience how rare that is. In fact it’s only happened to me once since I started asking the question. Most people have at least one person in their business who was never right; they may be the rotten apple in the barrel or just a round peg in a square hole. Someone who you’ve trained, developed, probed, and coached to no avail. You've put up with them for years rather than removing them from the team; knowing they should never have been hired in the first place - they were never a good fit for you, your team or the business. And on the other hand you’re probably not a good fit for them and perhaps they could blossom elsewhere. But both parties are just playing safe avoiding the pain of parting. So how does hiring the right person for you, first time, every time sound? By the time you’ve read this blog, I want to have convinced you that it’s possible. Not only possible but pleasurable; that it’s an exciting opportunity to build your high-performing team and grow your business. I’ll go through the three steps to a great job advert and there’s a template too which you can download. I’m going to share with you my 2 Golden Rules for hiring and show how, if you embrace these, you will be well on the path to hiring a ‘keeper’. So how to get it right first time? Golden Rule No. 1 Never, hire in a hurry. Why? Because anything you do in a hurry tends to be botched. You’re rushing to plug a gap; hiring somebody to make up the numbers. They may not be a great fit but you settle for the best of the bunch. You hire in a hurry, you make mistakes. Golden Rule No. 2 Always hire to your values. Think about why you’re hiring. You're not just hiring a body. You're not looking for someone who's going to clock on, park their brain at the door, and then clock off at the end of the day. You want somebody who is engaged. You want somebody who cares about what you care about - who buys into that goose bump-giving inspiring vision of yours; who has the same values as you. You’re hiring a mind and a heart, not just a body. Things go wrong when you ignore the golden rules and only look at skills and experience; when you hire in a hurry cos it’s all just too much hassle; when you abdicate responsibility to a third party. Change your mindset around hiring
Create Inspiring Job ads So many people put out the job description as a job ad. ‘You will be responsible for, you will have so and so reporting to you, you must be able to do this, that and the other.’ Who's inspired by that sort of job ad? No-one. So when it comes to your job ad I want you to lead with three things.
Think about the person you're looking for, the sort of role that you've got for them, and write your pen portrait as if you are them and this is their ideal. You want them to be reading going, ‘That's me, that’s me, that’s so me!’ If you want to know what this looks like click here to get your hands on a template which explains what you need in each section and gives you an example of what the ad might look like. So let’s recap. If you:
Of course, there’s more to it than just that and I’ll be exploring the next stage in a future blog! Do one thing: Download the job ad template here (or below) and use it for your next hire. Thanks for reading. Have a great week. 
 Life is awash with rhythms. The sun rises and sets, the tides ebb and flow, the seasons come and go, even if not as consistently of late! My business now enjoys a lovely rhythm too and the beat is set by 90 day cycles. I read a great blog the other day on a site called Asian Efficiency (all about time management and productivity) where they were talking about the 90 day timeframe as ‘the range where ambition and planning actually fall reasonably close together’. I like that.
I’m a big fan of 90 day planning. I do appreciate not everyone is keen on planning particularly when it’s something that takes time to do then is filed away and forgotten about. I get that, even if you don’t create an action plan for each goal and work your plan, there is a huge amount of power in thinking about what you want, where you want to get to, and getting the outcome you want down on paper. I think planning too much detail too far ahead can be a waste of time. Have a great vision, of course, but three years of fine detail is too much since so much can change in that time. Planning too far ahead can result in overestimating what can be done too. That’s why I love the 90 day planning cycle. Starting with the end of that period in mind you can work back till you have a week’s action plan. It’s amazing how the closer you get to the actions needed, the greater the reality check! Of course you should be pushing the boundaries but too much, as it can become a demoralising wish-list. And no one in your team will buy into that. It reminds me of a great cartoon showing a line of productivity on a board with a gap in the middle. ‘What happens here’ says the boss. ‘Ah, that’s where a small miracle happens!’ comes the reply. We all have a really good feel for what we can get done in 90 days – how far we can move towards a big goal, and plan the steps that we need to take to get there. Our longer term plans, even though it’s valuable to have them, can’t be planned right down to concrete steps; the goals are too big, there’s too much to get done, and if we try to plan the detail we just get overwhelmed, which in turn leads to inaction. Working with 90 day goals:
Do one thing: Resolve to try out the 90 day planning cycle. I’d love to hear how you get on. Thanks for reading. Have a great week!  When I was starting out on my own I had a dream of what I wanted to achieve, but like many dreams, it was hazy and unfocused, and I could never tell anyone what it was all about with any clarity. It was like seeing a shape at the end of a foggy road but never getting any nearer to it. I wasn’t clear where I was going, and we all know what happens when you’re not sure where you’re going...you get lost!
And I did. I ventured down so many rabbit holes, wandered into so many blind alleys, found myself in so many cul-de-sacs, desperately trying to get to...where? You could say it was all part of my vertical learning curve, but looking back it feels like 18 months of wasted time, effort, and money! Knowing your destination is crucial. It keeps you focused. It inspires your team. It gives purpose and meaning to your planning. What is Your Vision? When you’re thinking about your Vision, think about your ‘Why’ the impact you want to make, the problems you want to solve, the influence you want to have, the legacy you want to leave. Look at Richard Branson, he has built a brand that inspires. His ‘Why’ - ‘because UK consumers deserve better.’ He created a movement with a 'Why' that was all about challenging the status quo and empowering people. My ‘Why’? - ‘because business could be so much easier for so many business owners out there.’ But when I started out I was all back to front. I was thinking ‘what are my skills and knowledge?’ I should have been thinking, ‘what are the problems facing business owners and their customers, what are they struggling with, how could things be better?’ And then seeing where my experience would solve their problems. I started out thinking it started with me; I know now it should have started out all about others. Your Vision should give you goosebumps every time you look at it, and connect with the hearts and minds not only of your team, but also of your ideal clients. Think ‘the best we can be’. Think ‘making a real difference’. Think BIG! This is about the future you see for yourself and your business, your destination, so you can write it in terms of the future, but we prefer to write in in the more tangible present tense, so that it feels more real, obtainable: At MPL (Marianne Page Ltd) ‘We are more influential than Gerber! The go-to mentors for business owners with a growth and scale mindset who want to work on their business not in it; giving every entrepreneur across the globe, the freedom to scale, sell or franchise their business… or run it from a beach somewhere if that’s what they want.’ It’s not about where you are now, it’s where you’re headed - your destination. What’s the time frame? People often talk about their 10 year Vision for their business, and it’s a great timeframe for the majority of us. But if your personal plan is to sell up and move to Bali in 4 years’ time, then the 10 year Vision doesn’t really work for you. Whatever timeframe you choose, be clear about it. Write it in a journal or pin it on your noticeboard as the date you’re working towards. You’ll need it for your Planning. Who is the Vision for?
Don’t keep your Vision to yourself. Once you’re happy with it, share it with the team, get their input, get them excited about it, and then get it out there on your website, your marketing materials, your training resources. This is a big deal. Putting it out there is the first step towards achievement, so take it now. Do one thing: Write down your vision and pin it up on the wall. Ask yourself, 'Does this give me goose-bumps?' and if it doesn't, take it back down, and work on it until it does. This is your future we're talking about! Thanks for reading. Have a great week! |
AuthorMarianne is the author of three books, and is currently working on her fourth, whilst regularly writing her blog, we hope you enjoy it :-) Archives
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