The Missing Chapter - Profit Paradox

When I speak to business owners, chairmen, CEOs, MDs and other business leaders, it is no mystery what they all want.

Ultimately they want growth in their business.

I'm sure the same is true for you too.

You want growth in your revenues, profits and company value... you want a healthy stream of new prospects and new customers coming into your company... you want your employees to be motivated, attentive and alert, and the morale in your company to be high... you want the creativity and innovation in your company to flow...

…the list is endless, but the outcome is simple.

Without question, an upgrade in your profits and business growth can be 'quickly and easily' achieved, but it requires one thing from you: it requires you to train and develop your employees and managers.

It requires you to get every member of staff in your organisation to take greater ownership and responsibility for the growth of your company... it requires you to harness the untapped potential which lies within every member of your team… ultimately, it requires you to get your people to think and act more like business owners — rather than employees.

In this missing chapter — which I purposefully left out of Profit Upgrade — I'll explain why 99% of business people who read the book will never achieve a significant increase in their results.

I'm sorry to be blunt, but this may include you too.

In this final chapter — which I wanted to give you separately — I'll explain to you what I call the Profit Paradox.

The Profit Paradox is simply this:

It states that although the key to achieving extraordinary and rapid growth in revenues, profits and value is directly linked 'one-to-one' to the performance of a company’s employees and managers, all too many business leaders sadly fail to give their staff the right level of training and development which will deliver higher levels of results to their company.

Why is this? Complacency, inertia? Not seeing a clear link between profit growth and people?

Possibly — only you as the business leader really know for certain.

Interestingly, the conundrum of the profit paradox is only seen in business.

In all other environments of high achievement — the most obvious being sport — the development, training, coaching, mentoring, giving the sports man or women the essential tools to achieve the ultimate result (i.e. winning a world championship, an Olympic medal, a domestic title), all comes from developing the players.

In sport no such paradox exists.

He or she who trains the hardest, and makes the most of their talents, invariably reaches the very top of their chosen discipline.

Sports people inherently see the proven connection between results and training.

It is unthinkable that your favourite sports team — this could be football, rugby, cricket, golf, tennis, formula 1 — could achieve the highest level in their sport without constantly investing in their players, without surrounding their players with mentors and coaches, and giving them the tools to help them achieve their goals.

But in business almost the opposite is true.

Business owners and business leaders consistently fail to make the necessary investment in their team… in the very people who deliver results for them.

You may be guilty as a business leader of this too.

However, like other senior executives, you are most likely an avid reader and devourer of books and courses... but possibly fail to effectively get that learning down into the core of your business...

...into the very employees who day to day deal with your customers and prospects, who create your products and deliver the services which are at the heart of what your company offers.

This is the same as the legendary British football manager Sir Alex Ferguson constantly developing himself so he personally has all the tools he needs as a man-manager, but then neglecting to train his players.

This simply doesn't happen.

Sir Alex's continued success in football has come off the back of him constantly growing, nurturing, training and developing his players.

Over the years, he's brought his players through the ranks, so that they understand what it takes to achieve extraordinary results. He’s got his own 'success-way of thinking' into them which is why many of his former players have gone on to become managers in their own right.

Equally if you look at the bottom of any league table — again I use football as an example but the same is true in any sport — just because a team is at the bottom doesn't stop them from training hard.

In reality, teams struggling at the foot of the table recognise the need to invest more to develop their skills. They bring in outside help — to help them achieve their goals and compete at a higher level.

Just imagine what would happen to them if they stopped training altogether — and just turned up on a Saturday hoping to win a match having not trained that week, month or year? Without question, their downward spiral would continue, and relegation would be an almost certainty.

But let me be totally clear here… in sport there is no such paradox as the ‘profit paradox’.

Training and people development is clearly understood as the key to achieving results.

But in business the profit paradox remains the biggest challenge to profit growth.

Why is this?

One school of thought is that business owners do not like to spend money. This is something I have heard many times, but then if I ask you (as the business owner or business leader) what car you drive, where you last went on holiday, how much you spend on marketing and advertising, it soon becomes clear that spending money is not the issue. It's choosing where you want to spend it and recognising the value and return on your investment which comes from developing your people.

Let me suggest a few more ideas which may be holding you and other business leaders back from making the right investment in training your staff.

Profit Paradox Symptom No. 1: Denial. We don't need to train our staff, we are doing all right without developing them.

This is possibly so, but circumstances change. Cycles come and go. Companies which are entrepreneurial, flexible and agile, and who can respond to their customers changing needs ultimately win. Those who are complacent and take their staff and customers for granted, ultimately suffer and stall.

Profit Paradox Symptom No. 2: I cannot afford it!

The fact is that training and developing your staff does not have to cost a lot of money, and I provided a complete training plan in my book Profit Upgrade (which is available to you for free!). The blunt reality is that in a small company, training your staff can cost less than one month’s lease payment on a nice car for the Managing Director, or an advert in a trade magazine which yields no results.

Profit Paradox Symptom No. 3: Our people won't respond well to training.

The question is, who is running your business, you or your people? Sir Alex Ferguson would clearly never accept this excuse, and neither should you. Personal and professional development is critical to the growth of your company. It is unthinkable that any great man-manager and business leader would fail to train their staff based on this reason.

Profit Paradox Symptom No. 4. The timing isn't right or we don't have the time.

The timing is never right. If you wait for the right timing, you will be waiting for ever! If you believe you don't have the time, this is untrue also. Training can be delivered in small bite sized chunks which do not require a large commitment of time. In fact, with the training my company offers, we provide MP3 players, so employees and managers can listen to a short mentoring programme of around 25 minutes a day on a regular basis.

Profit Paradox Symptom No. 5: We are already training our staff.

This may be the case, but what are you training them in. Skills or attitude? You may give training in the functional skills of the work which your employees and managers perform, but do you train them to drive forward the profitability and growth of your company? Keeping all your people — regardless of the size of your organisation — motivated, alert and alive, and being constantly reminded how to achieve extraordinary results is essential.

Profit Paradox Symptom No. 6. It won't work here.

The proven profit growth principles of business-owner-thinking will work anywhere, and what works in one company will work in any other company, simply because underpinning all companies are human beings with the same psychological and emotional triggers, whether that is at an employee level or customer level.

Profit Paradox Symptom No. 7. It is not my responsibility to train my staff.

This is something I've heard before, with a business owner actually questioning whether it was down to him to train his staff. I nearly fell of my chair when I heard this! Let me remind you that this is no different to saying ‘I don't want my footballers to become great footballers — so I will not train them’. It is the same as saying ‘I don't want my players to be creative on the ball, I don't want them to spot opportunities that others don't see, and I don't want them to put on a show to please the fans (the paying customers)… so the fans come back next week to watch us again’.

To me, this is a nonsensical argument, and like the six others — is one which can literally hold companies back from greater levels of profitable year-on-year growth.

Thankfully not all business executives think this way — and there is one specific business leader I'd like to tell you about.

Out of all the business owners and leaders I've met and interviewed over the past few years, one man stands out to me who really understands the obvious link between increased profits and people development.

I'll simply refer to him as Mr. E.

Mr E. isn’t a famous entrepreneur in the same way as many of the others I've met and interviewed, such as Duncan Bannatyne, Sir Tom Hunter, Simon Woodroffe or Lord Bilimoria, but he is an ultra successful business leader and self-made multi-millionaire.

I spent a week with Mr E. (who was a former professional footballer) hanging out with him at his house in a leafy suburb of Buckinghamshire in the UK.

In his 20 acres of lush grounds he had his helicopter parked in is garden. He had his polo field and stables filled with expensive polo horses. He had the obligatory swimming pool, private cinema and a million pound garage, filled with a Ferrari, two Porsches, a Bentley and a Lamborghini with just 700 miles on the clock.

I purposefully tell the story of Mr E. simply to make the connection back to the fact that Mr E understood the power of, and the need for people development.

In his career, Mr E was the Managing Director of various financial and telecommunications companies and led several teams of up to 4,000 people.

He made it his sole purpose in his business to continually develop his staff to think like him, to raise their game, to become high achievers. And in doing so delivered tens of millions of pounds profit for his company.

He created one company with a value of over a billion pounds, made many millions for himself, and made many of his employees very wealthy too.

For Mr E, there was no such thing as a profit paradox.

He knew that the upgrade in his profits was solely down to the people in his company.

He knew, if he took on the responsibility to continually train and develop his people, they would repay him by having happy customers and turn more of his prospects into paying repeat customers.

Mr E's marketing spend was minimal as he grew his business through word of mouth marketing.

Mr E got it.

Is this because he'd seen the link in his time as a professional footballer between people development and results?

Possibly.

Or was it that he was just one of the 1% who take action and see the rich rewards flow through to them, the millions of pounds worth of rewards which were evident in his house and luxury lifestyle.

There is no mystery to Mr E.

There is a one to one relationship between developing your staff, teaching them to think like business owners, and new, higher levels of revenue and profit growth coming directly to you.

There is a one to one relationship between developing your people and cutting down your marketing spend, as your customers do your marketing for you, referring new prospects to you.

And there is a one to one relationship between training your staff and receiving a multi-million pound reward, just as it was for Mr. E.

But this will only come from training and developing your staff.

I want this final chapter to be an uncomfortably stark reminder, a blatantly clear reminder that reading Profit Upgrade and taking no action on it is ultimately a waste of your time.

I don't have a good answer for why the Profit Paradox exists, when the evidence is so brutally strong that training your people gets results and will increase your profits.

Only you can explain the paradox.

But you should know… if you fail to train your people, you will fail to achieve the highest level of results your company is capable of.

Just the same way as failing to train as a sportsman, means you will never fulfill your true potential as an athlete.

Still the profit paradox exists in business, and the harsh reality is that as a company it is very likely that you spend more on your printing and stationary budget than you do on developing your most important profit growth asset — your people.

It is your responsibility as a business leader to give your staff the right tools to profitably grow your company.

These tools are not just functional job specific training, such as working a computer, health and safety training, or learning a job specific process.

But it includes giving them the training which will have the biggest impact on growing the revenues and profitability of your business, This is teaching all of your employees and managers to take more responsibility and ownership, just as if they were the owner of your business.

This is the same belief held by many successful self-made millionaire business owners and leaders around the world who make the required investment in their staff, and who constantly see the rewards come back to them.

I'll leave you with this question.

Will the profit growth strategies in Profit Upgrade work for you or not?

There is only one reason they will not work for you, and you will not see a dramatic profit upgrade across your business, and the reason is this:

After reading the Profit Upgrade you fail to take action … you fail to train your staff… you do nothing… but instead, you fall head-first into the complacency and inertia gap which is the profit paradox.

To train your employees and managers in proven profit growth strategies of business-owner-thinking, go right now to www.BusinessOwnerThinking.com and download our free profit growth report.