Business Buddies
Since reading Gino Wickman's excellent book, Traction, on business development, we have been mindful of the importance and power of meetings, especially meetings where we as business owners are held accountable and particularly where we are held accountable for our job of building our business.
In fact Traction recommends a weekly 'Pulse Meeting' to keep us on track with the vital (but rarely urgent) work of business development. This is great advice but it presents a problem for small business owners: Who should we be having those meetings with?
We don't have managers or Directors to report to and one thing it is very hard if not impossible to do is to be held accountable by oneself!
As the next best thing we are recommending to find a 'Business Buddy'. The idea here is to find someone else who will have a weekly meeting with you (probably by phone) and hold you accountable for keeping on track with the work of building the business.
This person could be a kindly volunteer but we think it could be more powerful to find someone to reciprocate the service. In other words we recommend to find someone else in business with whom you can buddy up and swap this service. The most important quality this person can have is to be reliable in attending the meeting. In fact they need to be holding you account that they happen.
After that it is great if they can provide some useful tips or coaching but much more important is that they make sure you account for you actions and results - or lack of them.If there no personal connections spring to mind to fulfil this function, may be Co- can help. We are offering to act as a clearing house for requests, matching up business owners who want to start this habit. Here is how it will work:
Just email damion@co-accounting.co.uk to say you would like to find a Business Buddy and we will match you up with someone else looking for the same thing.
Remember you need to willing to offer to provide that person with their weekly meeting too. And here is what we recommend those meetings look like:
Duration: 30 mins
Time: Ideally office hours and at a regular time
Agenda: Update; Review of Development Goals you have for the quarter; Actions from Last Week; Issues / Problem Solving; Actions for the Week Ahead.
