My Inspiration for Double Your Business

Recently a client asked me “what inspired you to write the book?”

I answered that it was a result of an email from Liz Gooster, then a commissioning editor for Pearson (the owners of Financial Times Publishing), who asked if I’d ever considered writing a book, based on my methods and results of working with small business clients.

But that wasn’t really the inspiration; it was the trigger.

Liz told me that she would love to publish a book called Double Your Business, an offer I would have been daft to turn down.

One of my biggest desires is to “spread the word” about my methods to help many thousands of businesses, rather than the few I can reach working 1-1 with them.

So I scratched my head for a couple of months to plan what it should contain.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was what to leave out.  The publisher wanted about 50,000 words, enough for 220 pages.  The finished manuscript was 55,000 words, although they managed to squeeze it into less than 220 pages – the alchemy of publishing at work, no doubt.

But anyway, back to the problem at hand.  Doubling your business is not simply a case of doing better with your marketing and sales.

They are often hurdles that must be overcome, but they alone will make little real difference to your results.

Having worked with over 200 businesses in a professional capacity, I see patterns and behaviours repeated time and time again.

Like one client who is putting lots of effort into winning new orders, but is not paying attention his finances.  He’s not making enough money on the work he’s doing.

Doubling his business will not make him more money, it will just put him more at risk of cashflow and profitability problems. Before we get into growth, we need to make sure all the work he does is consistently highly profitable (a work in progress right now).

Or the client that is in permanent chaos, his office resembling the primodial stew that originally spawned life on earth billions of years ago (ok, a slight exaggeration, I admit).

The point, though, is that your business can be held back for so many reasons.  I call these reasons your Barriers to Growth, and it’s these that inspired me to write the book.  Because if you can eliminate these Barriers, your business will fly again.

By understanding what makes an ambitious business owner suddenly feel like they are wading through treacle, or that they’ve hit a brick wall, it’s possible to devise simple plans to overcome these obstacles and get back into the fast-lane.  These simple plans are the Growth Blueprints.

The book features an effective diagnostic tool to help you pinpoint the biggest Barrier to Growth you face, and 22 Growth Blueprints are laid out in detail so that you have the clarity to be able to transform your business.

So the inspiration to write the book was a combination of wanting to help lots of people to achieve more in business.  Simple really.

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