How it Works

Is there enough profit? Are you making enough for it to be worth-while?

Maybe right now you’re even going backwards – can you pay your bills on time?

Are there enough sales – enough new business coming in?

Is there cheap competition moving into your market eroding profit margins?

Are you getting what you want from your staff, or are they frustrating you?

And what about the effect on you? Stress, worry, anxiety? Waking up at 3am?

Do you feel confident in your businesses direction, or do you suffer from self-doubt?

Do you worry about what you don’t know? For example, do you wish you knew two years ago what you know today – right? Well think about this: what don’t you know right now, that you’re going to wish you had known in a couple of years?

We see business owners making themselves more expert at what the business does in the hope that that will make the difference. But all it does is exhaust the owner – fogging decision making and making all problems worse.

We see business owners thinking that the problems they are having in their businesses are particular to their business, or to their industry. They think everyone else is not having these problems. They are usually very surprised to find that most other business (if not all) are having exactly the same issues at some time or another – no matter what the business does. Most people don’t know enough other business owners or have an intimate enough relationship to discover this.

Too often they see the failures in their businesses as bad luck – when in fact they are often uninformed poor decision making. Now seeing all of your set-backs as all bad luck might be good for your self-esteem, but not so good for your business.

Or they blame their staff – put it down to a bad hire – "we got the wrong person". Sometimes it is, but more often it is a failure of leadership on the part of the business owner.

After enough set-backs, business owners can even end up in state psychologists call "Learned Helplessness". Without being fully aware they are doing this, they start to accept their condition as normal, because so much of what they have tried to do hasn’t worked.

All of these effects re-enforce a downward spiral resulting in business failure.

In very simple terms, it takes four people to run a business: 1 to make the widgets (widgets represents whatever the business sells or does, from t-shirts to brain surgery); another to sell the widgets – sales and marketing is a very different type of mindset and a massive skill-set, another to keep score, not just keeping the books and accounts, but measuring everything in the business – you can’t manage what you don’t measure; and finally a boss – someone to lead people to achieve something.

The vast majority of businesses are started by a widget maker. They could be a very skilled widget maker, like a cardiac surgeon, or less so, but a widget maker none-the-less.

This widget maker is blissfully unaware, when they start the business, three people are missing. They are also unaware of the magnitude of the knowledge base, the skill-set of these other people, and their importance to the widget maker’s business.

Psychologists tell us that the more ignorant we are of a subject, the more expert we think we are in it. For example, we think "leadership, how hard can it be? Surely it’s just common sense?". But if we were to meet someone who has spent a life-time studying and practicing it, they will tell you they still have much to learn.

So does that mean we have to have these four people physically represented in our business, or live 4 lifetimes? No, but for where your business’s development is at, there will be a level of leadership you need to know – and the same applies to the other two disciplines. You can consider these three people "business acumen", if you like.

So there you are. The skills it takes to make widgets, are not the same as the skills required to run a business that makes widget. Not knowing this is at the root of why most businesses fail.

Firstly, support. A problem shared is a problem halved and to have people around you who are also business owners, who get you, you are living the same journey, is very powerful. Very few people have this because business owners are few and far between, and no-one likes to shares their difficulties for fear of frightening off customers and even staff. But imagine how amazing that support would be if you could get it.

Secondly, business skills. Imagine what a difference it would make to your business if you were to know more about sales, marketing, financial modelling and leadership? Just think how you might do things differently with more insight into your businesses performance, or how to convert more leads to sales, or how to motivate and lead people better?

Thirdly, mindsets. In some ways, mindsets are like skills, but business mindsets are more about attitudes and priorities that make for successful business. For example, an entrepreneur mindset knows that working ON the business is more important than working IN the business. Most people don’t know this – they think that delivering that service or helping that client is the most important thing they do; but they are allowing urgent to get in the way of important too often.

Number four is what we call "external visibility", a way around our blind spots. We can have all the skills in the world, but we often can’t see things right in front of us. This is because we’re emotionally involved in our businesses – we can’t help it, we’re human, and anyway, it’s that passion that drives us to build something. The other causes of blind spots are the thinking errors we make. Psychologists have names for them such as "attribution bias", "confirmation bias", "the Dunning Kruger Effect", and so on. Other people can often see your blind spots with great clarity - as you can see theirs – so wouldn’t it be great to have trusted people who can provide this external visibility?

Ingredient number five is idea generation. Businesses need all the ideas they can get – especially in these changing and volatile times. You can’t be expected to generate all of the ideas. Wouldn’t it be great to have a source of new and wildly different ideas you would never have thought of? What sort of difference could any one good idea make to your future?

And finally, number 6 is Accountability. Now this may sound a little odd to you – most people want to run away from accountability – why would you voluntarily want to be held to account? Well here is why – it’s the ingredient that makes things happen. All leaders know that it is a key ingredient to leadership. If you want to achieve goals by leading people, the most powerful thing you can do is to hold them to account. So this begs the question – who holds you, the business owner, to account? Successful business leaders know that one of the most valuable ingredients they can bring to their leadership from an external resource is accountability. They want to be held to account for achieving their own goals. They know that this is the difference that makes the difference.

Support
Business skills
Business mindsets
External visibility
Idea generation
and
Accountability

Wolfpack delivers to you the business owner a three-sided benefit; the sides are: the profit you make from your business, the equity you build in your business (it’s sale value, if you like), and the quality of your life.

And most business owners want to build something that will survive them, or can be sold at a profit.

This group is not a talk-fest. The meeting is highly structured and designed with a sophisticated understanding of how groups work best. Advanced, structured methodologies are used to process members’ challenges. The high performance culture of the group which is established during induction and maintained during meetings, is a critical success factor.

Secondly there is the coach (the group leader). Your coach is present at every meeting as well as providing you with one-to-one time. Your coach will help you get clarity about where you want to get to, and what might be holding you back.

And thirdly there is “the knowledge”. Topics, tools and ways of thinking that will transform the way you do business – designed for the owners of small to medium sized business and selected for the areas we know will make the big differences to the businesses in the pack.

The pack gives you support, external visibility, ideas and holds you to account. The knowledge gives you the skills, and the coach re-enforces all of these as well as helping you gain a business mindset. Thus your business is rounded out with the six ingredients for business success.

Your Wolfpack meets once per week for just over an hour. We find that the weekly meeting keeps up the inertia and the excitement. It also allows people who have to work IN their business a lot of the time due to its small size, to participate without being away from their business for too long.

"1 hour per week with pack, 1 hour per month with coach"

There is no travelling time to get to the meeting, no finding a park, and you can be almost anywhere in the world. Why, because we use video conferencing. As long as you have an Internet connection a webcam and a headset, you can participate. We supply the platform.

So why do we want to see, as well as hear each other? Because when we can see each other, communication, particularly understanding, happens so much more effectively. You see instantly if someone is not getting you and can back-track or further explain right away. When you can see someone, you not only understand what they are saying, you understand how they feel about it. But it’s also a human thing. Relationships and trust develops faster which benefits all.

Because we use video conferencing, you can join a pack anywhere in the world. If you find a pack meeting at a time that suits you and in a language you are proficient in, then you can join. Honestly, we have people from the most far flung places now and you really can’t tell unless they point their webcam out the windows and you find that it’s night where they are when it’s your day, or it’s snowing where they are while you’re sweltering. So long as their local internet connection is good, the quality of the video and audio is just the same.

Even when you’re travelling, it’s not that hard to find the 1 hour window for the meeting when you can be near an Internet connection. Our system works on just about any smart device; from a smart phone upwards.

Wolfpack is leading edge business thinking in today’s fast moving world but already the results are telling. Have a look at our testimonials page, and when you read the comments there, have a think about how those people have been transformed – how they will never go back to their old way of thinking – and what that will mean to their long term success.

Testimonials

Why did we call it Wolfpack? Because a wolf pack is a superb example of how collaboration can make all the difference. A lone wolf, in fact, struggles to survive, and is in reality searching for a pack. In a pack, wolves can achieve things they could never do on their own and they thrive. In your Wolfpack, you’ll achieve far more in business than you will on your own.

So there you have it. If you want to succeed in your business, you know what the real dangers are, you know what is at stake, and you now have a clear opportunity to stack the odds in your favour. The time and cash investments are designed for small to medium business. The time investment is about 6 hours per month, spread through-out the month, and the cash investment is in the hundreds per month, not the thousands. If you’re serious about building a business, this is easily the best investment you could make in your business and yourself.

You know, it takes a few years to get a business built up to medium size – so just how many shots do you think you’re going to get at this? What is the cost of not succeeding? Is there any better investment you can make than investing in yourself? Is there any better use of your life than learning, growing, and helping others succeed while they do the same for you? What will it mean to you to improve the lives of your family, your employees and make a real difference to your local economy?

Make contact and talk to us about your business. We will make every attempt to match you with a pack that is right for you – remember, once a pack has a member who represents a business that does what your business does, that pack is closed to you while that potential competitor remains a member. Conversely, if you join first, of course, you keep them out.