About The Book
As successful business owners, we grow our businesses up to a particular level. Then we seem to level off or it gets a lot harder to sustain growth.
How do we take our businesses to the next level?
Louise Pasterfield owns a UK company and has been working with business consultant Michael Walsh for 3 years. She has already grown her company from £400,000 per annum to £2.2 million.
While reviewing her progress, she and Michael identify the myths and misconceptions that got in the way of growing her business, and the perspective shifts, strategies and tools she has gained along the way. This book contains practical ways of looking at the many facets of growing a business, and offers tools to help owners achieve their goals for more profit and more freedom.
Providing a framework to create the correct conditions for strong, sustainable business growth, readers learn how to take their business to the next level.
In his guest foreward, John Warrilow, founder of The Value Builder SystemTM and author of Built to Sell: Creating A Business That Can Thrive Without You, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry, and regular contributor to Inc. Magazine writes,
“In Thinking Big Is Not Enough, Michael Walsh illustrates how to push through the obstacles that stand between you and the next plateau quickly and consistently.
Michael will introduce you to a woman named Louise Pasterfield who runs a business in England. You may ask yourself what on earth you can learn from a British woman operating in an unrelated industry. But read on and I think you’ll find that Louise’s story is eerily similar to a lot of businesses. It may even have something in common with yours: a non-linear path to success that looks more like a series of stepping stones than the graph we learned at school.”
“This book gives access to the structure that is required to successfully and predictably achieve large scale growth in business.
"The same is true of his book—it takes you on a journey and breaks down the misperceptions that hold us back from growth and excellence—with Louise as his muse, Michael shares his deep knowledge of the entrepreneur’s journey and the fine balancing act it is to achieve significant growth and success in small -medium businesses.”
Kelly Deck, Director, Kelly Deck Design
Praise for The Book
Production &
Delivery
Sales &
Marketing
Table of Contents
“I greatly enjoyed this case study on growing your business as presented through Michael’s work with Louise Pasterfield and her experiences. This review clearly lays out the three core aspects of
business growth in a simple, informative and entertaining style. Michael digs deep to explore the myths and misconceptions that Louise and many business owners often refer to that paralyses them from achieving their goals. I know I struggle with these clichés about business, and found myself relating with Louise
on a number of them. Through Louise’s point of view, Michael guides the reader through a process of critical thinking that result in eureka moments that he summarizes as ‘Perspective Shifts.’ Thinking Big is Not Enough outlines tools and criteria that will help many small business owners, who are passionate about what they do, take it to the next level.”
Karen Marler, Princpal, Architect AIBC, AAA, SAA, OAA, FRAIC, LEED® AP
“True to form, in telling a story, Michael effectively dispels the myths and misconceptions that prevent businesses from growing and offers very compelling arguments for making shifts in one’s perspective on what really matters to grow a business. In the process he successfully points the reader to focusing on the key essentials for achieving ‘large scale growth.’”
Philippe de Clerck, MPT, MBA, VP Operations, and Partner, Back in Motion Rehab Inc.
About The Author
Dedication
Testimonials
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
1 - Why Thinking Big is Not Enough
2 - To England
Section 1: Structures
3 - Planning for Growth
4 - The Evolving Role of the Owner
5 - Financial Structures
6 - Operational Structures
Section 2: People
7 - Corporate Culture
8 - Hiring - Part 1
9 - Hiring – Part 2
10 - Developing People
Section 3: Sales and Marketing
11 - Expanding Our Sales Process
12 - Building a Powerful Sales Department
13 - The Evolution of a Marketing Strategy
“Michael Walsh is one of my favourite entrepreneurial thinkers and I particularly love how his big thinking can wrap around all different kinds of businesses, including charities and social
enterprises. His focus on our relationships and the opportunity for business building within a matrix of reciprocal and meaningful connections that allow us all to grow and thrive is invaluable. I look forward to sharing this new book with our colleagues, as much as I liked sharing his first book.”
Aaron Johannes, M.A., Director, Spectrum Consulting- Collaborative Learning, Research and Press
“Michael has a way of challenging you that initially catches you off guard but quickly leads to the heart of issues. Starting with the question of why we are doing something leads to terrific insights
and shifted the way we looked at our business. I loved the notion of starting with where we want to be in 5 or 10 years and working backwards from there to see what we need to do this year.”
Dave Ricketts | M.Sc., P.Eng., FEC, Managing Principal, Senior Building Science Specialist. RDH Building Engineering Ltd.
The
People
The
Money
Questions for Business Growth
Section 4: The Future
14 - Where to from Here?
Postscript
Afterword
Author Biography
Do you want to grow your business?
“As a small business owner, I found this book to have a profound impact on the way we are growing our organization. It was great to hear that we are not alone in our perceptions of growth, and the real-life break down of our common misconceptions was presented in an incredibly relatable fashion. In particular, I loved
reading about the experience of expansion and development of the staff at Sponge UK and applying what they learned to my business.
“The description of the core functions of the staff, combined with detailing how to allow yourself permission to experiment and risk manage the investment of staffing growth, provides a unique understanding of when and how to add employees. The stories shared also provide clarity on how it is equally important
to hire the right people, with defined lists of character traits to look for.
“I have never heard such comprehensive examples of using core values for building an effective and collaborative team. As our firm continues to grow, I will always turn back to this book as a reference for how someone else did it first, so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
Marco A. Pugliese, Co-Founder, Sales and Marketing, One Smart Home, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Capacity
Want to Grow Your Business?
Michael Walsh is a visionary leader, speaker and author known for igniting passion in the entrepreneurs he works with by helping them drive their businesses to growth levels beyond their expectations.
In his second book he looks at practical ways to move past the traps that stop business owners from achieving their goals of growth and profit.
For over 20 years, as Founder and President of Kaizen Consulting Services Inc., Michael's unique ability has been to maximize owner's goals for more profit in their business and more freedom in their lives.
He also lives what he teaches: applying his methods, he has built Kaizen into a company that provides him the profit and freedom to take 18 weeks of time off each year for personal travel, together with his family.
In order to support entrepreneurs in support of business growth, we at Kaizen Consulting have assembled a number of questions, within each of a number of different areas of a business, for readers to consider.
The purpose here is to help you, as you grow your company, to qualify and quantify the size and scope of your opportunities for growth - and then, to build a strategic implementation plan to capture those opportunities.
Click on the links below to access questionnaires within each of the categories - Strategy and Leadership, Sales & Marketing, Production & Delivery, The Money & The People, or alternately, click here to get the complete set.
Strategy and Leadership
“Michael expertly removes many of the hurdles that limit the mindset of business owners and their perspective of how big and fast they can grow their business. I can’t imagine a business owner who wouldn’t benefit greatly from the lessons in this insightful book.”
Mark Eiland, Founder and Principal Advisor, Mercury Equity Partners,
Austin, Texas
“The graphic of the spinning plates on the foundation resting on a ball was a real ‘a-ha’, in fact, I laughed out loud and thought I’d better print it and stick it somewhere I can see it daily. It made me feel a lot better, realizing the enormous complexity and challenge in running and growing a business; sometimes I feel I should just be able to do this as if it were a ‘job’ and easily. I forget that a business is comprised of a dozen different ‘jobs’ or more and if I’m doing all of them and making a profit, then that is a big win and needs to be acknowledged.‘To achieve success in business, it really is more about shifting a large number of little things in a variety of different areas that add up to making a big collective difference.’ This was really good for me too. Putting a little more spin on each plate day by day, as it were, will get the job done more effectively and faster than ‘slogging’ it out.”
Katherine Lazaruk, AICI FLC, ICU Image Consulting, Inc.
For more information about Kaizen Consulting, please email us at info@kaizenconsulting.com
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