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The corner of Burnout Drive and Success Avenue

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Mendel was a vice president at a large accounting and consulting firm. He loved what he did there, but he was burned out, and tired of pounding that billable hour. He came to me with pain in his eyes, and asked for coaching on how to move forward with his life. He wanted to launch his own business, but, frankly, Mendel had always been a worker bee. He wondered if he had what it takes to make the largely emotional leap to entrepreneurship.

I helped Mendel realize the value that he could bring to small businesses during this distressed economy. Admittedly, however, he had some gaps in his knowledge of how to run a successful business. For this reason we spent 12 weeks together in some intense coaching as I helped him learn what he needed to know about how to run a profitable business.

We began with conceptualizing his business model, and identified several techniques that allowed him to infuse his passion and personality into the systems of his business. In this way, as he built his mastermind team, and hired on personnel, he was able to make sure they were all “on the same page” with him so that as the company grew everyone understood the mission and vision in the same way.

We reviewed the various ways that Mendel could organize his business, and determined that his professional license required him to create a professional corporation, or a limited liability partnership for him and for the other professionals that he hired as his associates.

Branding was a particularly fun process for Mendel and his management team. They homed in on their superniche market by creating a complete and very detailed profile of their ideal client, right down to the gender, age, level of education, occupation, hobbies, values, attitudes, beliefs and the nature of the pain they were experiencing that he could resolve for them.

By creating such a complete profile of his ideal client, he would be able to devise solutions to completely resolve their conflicts. The profile would also allow him to find his ideal client in the marketplace, and to speak to them beyond the incessant “white noise” consumers routinely experience in the advertising world.

Once he completed the profile of his ideal client, Mendel and his team created exactly the same profile for his new company. This helped him hone his message for the marketplace, which saved him thousands of marketing dollars over time.

Once he realized that he had to market his company by speaking directly from this message, and directly to his superniche market, Mendel was off to the races.  I helped him put his accounting and billing systems in place, as well as a number of other important aspects of his business, like cash control, insurance and merchant banking. By giving the proper attention to all of these aspects of his business, Mendel was truly able to enjoy the fruits of a successful business. He is well on his way to building a phenomenally successful business that he just might sell one day to his former employer, or to another large accounting and consulting firm.

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