I promote a way of achieving an acceleration of business, which has become known to many as ‘The Leverton Fast Start’. It has its origins in managing in a sales environment when teams get behind and need to achieve a real shift, and it has usually been about exploiting the disruption caused by the Xmas period. When others are attempting to do the equivalent of pushing water uphill to achieve sales or conclude business in December, the trick is to spend the time more effectively, focusing on getting January lined up as a superb month. Coming out of the starting blocks quickly often wins the race, partly through the confidence it inspires.
This year there are a lot of businesses who really need to ‘come out of the starting blocks’ quickly when we are released from the lock down. How do you want to use your first 30 days when back doing business? You can be sure you will be quickly pulled all over the place by clients who may be demanding but perhaps not deserving. So if you had the chance to plan who you speak to, who to get in front of, who you want to be doing business with, and what you want to achieve, how would you prepare and organise for that?. The time to do that is NOW. Not when things start getting busy again!
This raises another possibility. Do you want to make a ‘fundamental shift’ in your business model? Been considering it for some time but always doing the same thing because you’re on a treadmill and doing OK? Perhaps on reflection, for the future, you want to be less busy, perhaps you want to work from home more (or less), perhaps you want to specialise in a particular business area and become less of a generalist? Perhaps you want to just work on higher margin work or cherry pick some better clients to work with?
Take a look out there. Some businesses are going hell for leather and not stopped. But if you have become quiet, now really is a unique and one-off opportunity. Your diary is free of face to face meetings, you have a chance to really use the data in your business to look at who you deal with and why, and what you have got out of that. You have the chance to decide what type of work you will prioritise when the diary starts to get booked up again. If you are a high value consultancy then do treat your business as an exclusive club – not everyone can rejoin it. If you have a business that takes on a lot of high volume but low gross margin work (which requires a lot of cash to fund) is there a better way of using all your resources to earn more from less?
This year ‘The Leverton Fast Start’ is getting an unseasonal airing….