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Driving your business beyond your current maximum turnover, is one of the biggest challenges you will face. While most business owners chip away slowly to maintain modest revenues, breaking through your glass ceiling requires both monumental amounts of effort and focus, and an appetite for risk. It’s no wonder that most business owners settle for what’s comfortable. Breaking through can, at times, feel impossible and can also be disastrous if approached haphazardly. By Haphazardly, We Mean Without “Putting The Proper Processes, People And Trust In Place”. Let Us Explain. Most of the clients that we work with at Kaibizzen are the founders of their businesses; “entrepreneurs” who launched their company with a vision in mind, and then found they spent all their time – working 60, 70, 80 -hour weeks – to get it to where they are today. Of course, we have the utmost respect for anyone who takes an idea from startup to supporting not only yourself, but a team. What we’ve learnt from our years of experience, is that most people who start businesses are typically not suited to mapping out and implementing the sustainable, scalable systems and processes required to effectively grow them. Furthermore, very few business owners have ever had any formal training in actually how to do it. This Lack Of Training And Support Is The Glass Ceiling We Believe Business Owners Need To Break Through. In the UK, breaking the “revenue glass ceiling” is so prevalent, that the government recognised the issue. The Enterprise Research Council and Goldman Sachs together estimated that 110,000 small to medium (SME) UK businesses could export if they had the right leadership and processes in place. Now consider that approximately 70% of Australian businesses fall into the SME category, can you image the untapped potential we have here. So What Kind Of Training Do You Need To Break Your Financial Glass Ceiling? While it is near impossible to list all of these barriers because your barriers may vary so much from others, one of the common challenges we see across most SME businesses when it comes to increasing revenue is “real leadership”. Leadership in respect to accepting the handover of control, and in the process, acknowledging that employees “will execute tasks in their own way” and especially if there are no clear processes or expectations in place. 90% of SME owners are highly motivated but struggle to hand over control. What this typically looks like in a fast-growing company that’s reached its ceiling, is a company which has minimal HR processes, undefined position descriptions, and team members doing work which they are possibly unsuited to. This often results in reactionary recruitment, with hires made in an ad-hoc fashion and in response to short-term workloads. But even if you do hire the perfect people, without the right leadership and vision for your company, these employees will sense uncertainty, and may even quickly jump ship. Leadership Also Mean Building The Right Company Culture That Allows You To Scale And Expand Your Business Properly Growing companies often lose their company culture in the chaos, and with it, more top employees jump ship. Of course, leadership comes in many shapes and colours, and if you are looking to become a better leader, you will need training that is tailored to your business. A leader’s job is also to set the vision, not necessarily the tasks. It is only when you come to this point, that you can take your business to the next financial level. What Can You Do Right Now To Break Your Glass Ceiling? The very first step is looking hard at yourself. Closely tracking “what you do” each day is a sure-fire way to discover the weak points in your team and yourself to find the areas you need to improve. If you are spending a lot of time on Operations for example, then do you need to decide to hire an Operations Manager, or if you have one, “why” are you also doing it? Are you not handing over control or micro-managing? Does your Operations Manager need training? Did you make a bad hire? These questions need to be asked about any field you are working in – marketing, sales, accounts, you name it! Which leads to the next step, working out what your time costs. Can you put a dollar figure on your time? What is it? Once you know this, you can make decisions about where you spend your time and assess the cost vs the benefit of engaging an external expert in that area to review, organise and optimise the process. Most often, it’s not knowing the “When’s” and the “How’s” of how to hand over control which ultimately makes the process so difficult. So many factors need to be taken into account and managed that without a clear path forward, the status-quo becomes acceptable, and the business will most likely continue to limp along, without ever reaching its full potential. Accepting the status-quo means breaking your glass ceiling will be near impossible. However, with a clear plan to execute on, the process is much simpler and infinitely more achievable. With a clear strategy that maps out the path from where you are today to where you want your business to be, you’ll know exactly how to break through your company’s glass ceiling. If you would like to hear from a few other business owners that have recently broken their company’s glass ceiling, you can here: wwww.kaibizzen.com.au/business-testimonials/ Kaibizzen is a team of renowned Brisbane-based business coaches who work with clients to achieve better, faster growth, wealth, system strategies and team happiness. If you have a glass revenue ceiling that you want to break, please just get in touch with us on 0408 337 288, we’d love to show you how we have helped other business owners multiply their revenues through practical, proven strategies.