This Week’s Show

Love Your Business TV, weekly live stream show presented by Adrian Peck. The show provides free business advice, hints and tips to enable the world’s Business Owners and Entrepreneurs to work less hours, earn more money and have more fun.

In this show, we discuss why BIG changes kill business growth. We’ll explore why trying to make big changes to your business never work, what you can do differently using small changes and we’ll look at two case studies of how this approached transformed British Cycling and trebled the earning for the owners of a UK business in just 4 years. 

Transcript From Live Show

Good afternoon, everybody and welcome to Love Your Business TV. We are a couple of minutes late today because of a slight technical fault, but we’re back on it and we are ready to go. So, good afternoon.
I am Adrian Peck. I am the entrepreneur and founder of Better Never Stops. We deliver business advice and coaching programs to entrepreneurs and business owners who are typically over 45 years old and want to run one million pound plus turnover companies.

I am also the author of How To Fall Back In Love With Your Business: The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Rediscovering Your Mojo and Enjoying Everyday By Living Your Dream. And that’s exactly what I do. I help business owners either stay or fall in love with their businesses. Invariably, over time, what happens is the business owner kind of builds a business up and it gets good momentum, and then at some point they run out of time, run out of enthusiasm, and run out of some business ideas as well.
So, I help them formulate a plan, get them back in their business and get them loving their business again, and hopefully get them living back their dream and getting all the things they want out of life.

Welcome again to Love Your Business TV. We have been going now for a couple of months. I’m here to help and support business owners across the world, particularly in the UK, with some sound business advice and a place to go for some support every single week, and we tackle various subjects over the weeks as well.
So, you can catch up with us, we’re live on Facebook and on YouTube as we speak. We turned this into a podcast, which goes out onto Spotify, Apple, and also to Google, and you can look at all our previous episodes, as well on Love Your Business TV channel on YouTube.

So, really great to have you here this afternoon. As always, thank you for the feedback that you give me every week. It’s really encouraging. If you want to reach out with me today, you can leave a message. Any questions you have on the topic we’re going to cover today on the message bar. You can also reach out to me at [email protected], and I can obviously catch up and answer any questions you have there as well.

This week we are going to be looking at big changes. Big changes kill business growth. Absolutely, it’s a topic that I come across a lot when I’m working with businesses or before I work with businesses and as they’re trying and do lots and lots of big projects. And I’m going to explain to you why that’s a really, really bad approach and why that approach fails. I’m going to take you through as well, what the better solution. I’m going to tell you really about why does it kill growth, what is a better way. I’m going to give you a couple of case studies, and then I’m going to leave you with some call-to-actions as well at the end of it.
Let’s crack on…

Why does making BIG Changes in your Business kill growth?

What I’m talking about is that a lot of companies and a lot of business owners, they get their business to a point, and then they see the next step of their business growth is this kind of massive hurdle. It’s this next really big jump. If only we had this, if only we could do this. And they try to build it up on a really, really big project.

What happens is that they procrastinate about moving those projects forward. And the longer and longer you procrastinate about moving a project forward, is we have this kind of human thing that when we put things off, they grow bigger and bigger in our minds. Therefore, to get those projects done and to get those initiatives done, they get bigger and bigger in our minds. Therefore, that mountain just grows taller and taller and taller, and that puts us off even more.

Where do we start? Because they’re such big projects, what do we do first? How are we going to do it? And invariably, because they keep putting it off over a period of time, changes happen or something comes up, and therefore the project never gets started because of that.
“Well, we were going to do it and then this happened and therefore we haven’t got around to doing it.”
Or, “Oh, I must get around to doing that one day.”

Resistance: when you try to implement big changes into a business, there’s going to be resistance internally from it. The one thing that people are very wary of and very resistant to is change. And the bigger and bigger that step change is trying to be, the bigger that project or initiative is to that business, the bigger that internal resistance.

Ownership & drive: what tends to happen as well is not a single person drives the project, and these projects do need driving. Otherwise, they will just run out of energy and they run out of focus, they run out of stream, and they just do not happen.

Scope creep: what you started off wanting to do invariably has changed over that time. Because the project take time to get started and finished, business needs change, new ideas are added and the finished project just creeps further forward and wider.
“Did it even work?” It’s very difficult to actually to find out what you have implemented is successful and therefore that puts you off in doing anything else in the future.

Fear of Failure – The bigger and bigger the initiative is and the changes you want to try and make in your business, the bigger and bigger that risk is particularly for you as the business owner. And the bigger that risk is, is we have inherent thing we have in our brains that then starts putting this fear of failure in there. What happens if I try and do this and it fails? I’m going to look stupid. I’m going to look stupid in front of my team when I’ve been pushing for these changes and these initiatives and they don’t work.
So, that then builds up this massive fear of failure, and that fear of failure is probably the biggest reason of all that stops business owners from making changes to their business. It’s that fear of failure. And the bigger and bigger that project is or that initiative is, the changes you want to make, the bigger that fear of failure. And that’s really what stops it.

Head in the sand: with all the reasons above and the fear of failure, the easy option for the business owner is to put their head in the sand. Hope it will all blow over or sort itself out and not do anything. And in most cases that’s what will happen.

What’s A Better Way

It’s what I call the formula one principle, the principle of marginal gains, small changes and improvement. The reality is your business is not broken. Very rarely do I work with businesses that are completely broken. Normally, if they’re that bad, there’s an insolvency practitioner working on them.
You’ve built your business so far. It works, it generates money. Yes, it can be improved, but it’s not broken. Therefore, you need to move into what I call is the formula one principle. The formula one principle is about making small changes in lots of areas. And that’s how formula one works. It’s all about the small little changes that add up into a big change and as time goes on.
Sometimes those changes aren’t immediate and you do have to have patience with those changes. And my analogy is around ice cubes. If you took an ice cube and you put it into a fridge, obviously it would take longer to melt. But every increment of degrees that warms that ice cube up, the first few increases in temperature don’t have much change at all. It’s actually, as soon as it hits a point and all of a sudden, the ice cube starts melting quite quickly. And it’s the same when you make changes in business. There will be times it feels that they’re not having any effect. But then, boom, the changes all start to come together and the momentum changes.

So, it’s all about making small step changes. Small step changes across lots of areas of your business. These small improvements, they are fast and manageable. You can make these changes quite quickly. Using your team, get their buy-in and make them the central to all of the changes.
Change management is a delicate subject. There’s a guy called Charles Handy, and he has had various management theories about change management. And his analogy was about boiling toads. And it’s a great analogy. It says that if you were to put a toad into boiling water, the toad would just jump out because that’s an instinctive reaction. But actually, if you put the toad into body temperature water, so that is what its toad is comfortable with. If you slowly turn the temperature up on that toad in the pot, the toad sits there and gets quite warm and snugly, and it’ll actually boil himself to death because it won’t jump out because that change is so gradual. He won’t jump out.
And that’s the same when managing changes in your company. Make those changes gradual and they won’t realise or notice those changes.
It’s all those little increments, 1%, 1%, 1%, 1%, they make a big change in the end. And that’s the bit that’s going to drive the performance. That’s the bit that’s going to make the change in your businesses.

Only Shit Happens; If you’ve watched any of my shows, you’ve heard me talk about this before. It’s only shit happens. It’s one of my mantras in life. Only shit happens. Everything else you have to make happen.
Now, the one thing about making those small changes is it tends to kind of drive the energy and the motivation and keeps the momentum going of making changesIf you get good at it, it becomes a habit for the business…Better Never Stops. You can keep those changes going. You can make them smaller, more manageable, faster changes, and therefore that momentum keeps going.
Case Studies

So, I’m going to quickly touch on two case studies just to kind of reinforce the point.

The first one is the British cycling team. Anybody that’s sort of cycling will know of the last 10, 15 years, British cycling has gone through this absolute revolution. Now to give you a bit of a backstory, the last Gold medal won in the Olympics, I think it was 1908. Around 2005 Sir David John Brailsford was brought into British cycling team. His whole principles are based on these small marginal changes. And he basically stripped down the whole process from the maintenance, their sleep, the nutrition of the athletes, through to their sanitization, their training, recovery. He stripped every single process down, rewrote it making marginal change. Even down to the point, the athletes were taught how to wash their hands. Are you thinking, how the hell can that be relevant to riding a bike? When actually it’s all about the cleanliness that they have in their hands and therefore less germs that they have and therefore the less viruses they pick up and therefore the fewer illnesses they’re going to have, that’s going to stop them training, stop them performing in their events. So, you can see how his thinking was about even the minutest of details. The things that sounds quite bizarre, how it can affect what they do. They had a set of bedding that followed the teams of the web as well.
All those marginal changes added up and added up and added up. And they went on to be this amazing cycling team that won the Tour de France. Now I think four or five time. Out of 10 years, I think they might have been five or six times they’ve run it in a 10 year period. Some years obviously back to back, the amount of medal, and so on, et cetera. You know the story. It has been amazing bit, but it’s all done for those marginal gains.

The second case study refers to one of my clients or all my clients in general, because this is how I work with businesses. I work on the principle of marginal gains and I have this process called SECCESS, which stands for strategy, empowerment, control panel, cash efficiency, separate and scale. And what I do and how I work with business owners is we go around every single part of the business and we make small changes on every part of their business and we keep going. Better Never Stops.

So, we keep going round and round the business time and time again, making those small incremental changes all time. To give you an example of just one business that I’m working with in a four-year period, we’ve taken that business for £1.2m to over £3 million pounds this year. In that time, they have more than trippled their gross profit percentage as well. And based on that revenue, you can kind of get a good idea of what kind of gross profit they’re doing now. But it’s all been through that principle or those marginal changes. Keep going through the business and keep making little step changes through and throughout all.

Your Actions

I want you to have a long hard think about that stuff you’ve got on your to-do list. Those big plans, those big projects, those big changes you want to make. I want you to now draw a line through them all, a big cross through them. You’re not going to do them.
What I want you to do instead is I want you to sit down with your team. I want you to sit down with your team and talk about the small improvements that you can make. And it could be the minutest of detail that somebody says, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if we just had this?” And just go through all those small changes and those small changes want to be stuff you can do in a maximum of a month, ideally within a week. And some of these will be almost the instant stuff you can do. Some will be ridiculously small stuff as well, but it’s all little changes that will start adding up and get will that momentum going.
Why don’t you have every weekly meeting with all your staff or as many staff you can get together in a team. You have that meeting with them. You have it for 10 minutes and go, “Okay, what changes we’re going to have? What we got to do less now?” And you keep going through those to-do list. And you keep adding the little ones into it and you keep making those changes.
And that will all add up to that big change in the end. Trust me it really, really will.

If you want to know more, obviously you can grab a copy of my book. If you haven’t got one already, please contact me at [email protected]. Send me an email and I’ll send you a free book. You can also get all of the tools that go with the book on my betterneverstops.global website. There’s a section there called Free Tools. You can go on there. You can get a lot more help and guides and stuff that are on. They support this.
You can catch up with all the previous episodes as well. There’s a scorecard. If you want to look at about some of the changes you make across all of your business, have a look at the scorecard. It’s peckuk.scoreapp.com, and you can go on there. It will take you about 20 minutes to do that.
That score scorecard is a piece of business health check. And it does look at every single aspect of your business. And it will give you a score and it’ll give you a 20 page report that comes off the back of it. And they’ll tell you all the things that you need to do to improve your business as well.

So, next week we’re going to focus on lead generation and I’m going to talk around some lead generation stuff. I put a survey out last week about some of the stuff that you want help with. And the strong thing that came back was generating leads. So I’m going to do a couple of weeks now about a lead generation.

Hopefully, the week after next I’ve got a couple of guests who want to line up over the next three weeks to come and join me on that. They’ll give you some extra content as well. That will really, really help you. So, thank you very much. And thank you for joining this week. And I look forward to seeing you again next week. Be safe. Again, if you want to reach out to me, please do. And you can go on, jump on to Love Your Business TV as well.

And remember…Better Never Stops