The Cycle of Business Success: A high-level overview

A business owner must learn how to grow his business — with the help of people and systems — while staying in control

The methodology I use has been proven and tested to help business owners achieve the maximum potential of their business. It consists of 4 components, with each component being as crucial and important as the whole cycle itself. Below is an executive summary of this methodology, which I call the Cycle of Business Success.

The first component is Mastery. Mastery is the basic fundamental building blocks. Without it, your business is destined to grow and eventually cave in, because the foundations weren’t strong enough. Most business owners think that knowing the basics and having enough confidence can get them to their business destinations. If ever you’ve seen a business where it grows and keeps caving in, that is most likely because the foundation, the mastery of the craft, was not established.

As the architect of the business, you have to make sure that the foundations will be able to handle the growth that’s going to come. That’s the reason why mastery is the first component.

Now the second component, Growth, is where most business owners want to start. The process of growth and development is where all the sexy marketing and sales stuff happen. However, before any of these things can bear fruit that will sustain the business, business owners will need to understand everything first. There’s a reason that the cycle goes in this sequence.

Some business owners become too caught up with working on the growth of the business, but it might be that they’re wasting their energy on a business that isn’t profitable. Why did this happen? Because there’s no mastery. Perhaps because they have not understood the financial aspect of the business, or maybe they missed to carefully study the market involved. That’s why mastery comes before growth.

Then comes Leverage. Now leverage is about systemization, and making systems do the work so you don’t have to. I see many businesses that reach a glass ceiling and the only way were ever going to break through is by mastering leverage. There are a lot of tools and schemes at your disposal, and if you’re not leveraging these resources, you’re losing a lot of opportunity each passing minute.

But remember, you need make sure that you maintain control of your business. Let the systems run the business, let the people run the systems, and you, as the captain of the ship, will lead the people.

The final component in the circle is Team. It is about recruitment, training, management, and leadership — all of those components that are made up of people. Most business owners don’t see the importance of establishing the right team to frontline the business.

Have you ever recruited anybody who has been an absolute disaster? Who ends up creating fires left, right, and center, and you’re putting the fires out behind him while trying to do your own day job? And the worst part is that you’re paying that person for the privilege. With that kind of recruit, it’s going to be difficult to gain traction for your business.

My take on it is very, very simple. The biggest mistake that we can make with people is to recruit them to run our business. With the greatest of respect to them, the truth is that they’re not able to run our business. What we should be doing is recruiting people to run our systems, systems that we documented, that we created, ensuring therefore a lot more consistency when people do come in.

That how the cycle works. You can start at any of these in any sequence but you need to finish them in this sequence as well. And it’s a circle for another reason: it should be about continual and never ending improvement. You cannot expect to do it once and have everything fixed in a snap.

Once we’ve got that process mastered, then the freedom that’s in the center of the cycle of business success becomes a reality.