THE BEYOND BOOKED SOLID COACHING COURSE CURRICULUM IS CONNECTED, INSPIRED, AND EASY TO UNDERSTAND AND IMPLEMENT

How Do You Feel About the Future?—Be Disposed Toward Success & What Do You Want?—Defining and Measuring Your Objectives

Lesson one addresses your mindset. How do you feel about the future? You need to have the right attitude toward the future, if you are going to reach your goals. This is about more than being a positive person. In fact, being positive might not have anything to do with it. We'll establish your objectives and learn how to measure the success of your projects. This lesson is about your ambitions, what you want. You can’t get what you want, unless you have a clear idea of what it is that you want and a way of staying on track. And you can’t know if you got what you want, unless you have some way of measuring the outcome.

How do you define an objective, much less measure it? What is an objective? The questions may sound trite, but the first thing you need to ask yourself as you embark on any big project is why you are doing it. Is it because you think you ought to do the project, or is it because the project will bring you closer to your objectives. For the purposes of this course, the objective is building a bigger, better business that enables you to earn more, live more and work less. That’s the big objective, the ultimate goal. To reach that “final” objective you will undertake dozens, maybe hundreds, of interim projects, each with their own objectives.

We need to nurture both our own creativity, and the creative instincts of those around us, to succeed. The great thing about it is that creativity is one of those things that feeds on itself; the more creative you are, the more creative you will be. I would go further and say—the more creative you perceive yourself to be, the more creative you will be. Do you see yourself as creative?

How Can You Get There?—Preparing Yourself for the Future & Mastering the Art of the Project

You are ambitious and filled with curiosity. You will continue to harness your creative energy to the service of your goals. You are open to the future. Brilliant. But we’re not there yet. There’s another important factor in your mental preparation we haven’t yet discussed. We need to shift from simply being an advocate for the future and move toward inquiry about the future. We need to become reflective, to become listeners, not just advocates. After all, what is our curiosity and creativity for? It is to learn new things. Yes. But how do we learn? We can come to the threshold of learning new things from different directions. I’m going to suggest one that I think is the most effective—to approach new things (everything new is a learning experience) as what we’re going to call a “discloser.” Does it mean I have to pour my heart out to everyone? Disclose my deepest secrets to my business colleagues? No. Don’t worry. You may already be one and not even know it...

Just as a business is emergent, so are projects. After all, what is a business but a series of successfully completed projects? So it follows that as with your business, the future course of a project is uncertain. Even if you create a very clear outcome for a project, you can’t know for sure that you’ll achieve the particular outcome until the project is complete. Don’t give up, or throw up your hands in despair at the uncertainty. It’s the reason that most people don’t attempt to do big things. They’re too afraid to take on something big when they can’t determine an exact outcome. However, you can create circumstances that will help you navigate a project to its intended result. You might not end up exactly where you intended, but if you follow a few simple rules then you may end up with a far better result than you originally envisioned. I'll teach you how to produce remarkable projects.

In this lesson alone, you'll learn how to:

Adopt practices for exploring a variety of perspectives
Coordinate meticulously
Collaborate
Listen generously
Build relationships intentionally
Have clear intentions
Develop habits of commitment making and fulfilling
Tightly couple learning with action
Call on your talents
Bring your passion to your projects
Embrace uncertainty

Decide—The Change You Want to Make & Business—the Building Blocks

If you are booked solid, you are in one of two camps: either you are happy with the size of your business, but would like to increase your fees, spend fewer hours working, and feel more confident using your Red Velvet Rope Policy; or you want to significantly grow your business and serve a lot more people, open more locations, and hire more staff. When I say “bigger,” that might just mean more profitable, and not necessarily a larger operation. It’s a matter of scope.

Lesson three will help you decide the scope of the change you want to make based on what is most important to you and your future. The answer may be as simple as raising your prices and seeing less clients, or it may be as complex as re-structuring your business so completely that you may find yourself, literally, as you’ll see later, in another line of work altogether.

We’ll also explore what I call the Business Building Blocks you’ll use to design your new business architecture. Some people call these building blocks “business models,” but that implies you can only use one at a time. In all likelihood, you will end up using more than one business model. So I prefer to call them business building blocks. They are structural options for building your business. They provide the foundation on which you will base your new architecture. And yes, they are the way in which you will make more money. We’ll look at nine different building blocks that are regularly used in scalable and profitable service-based businesses.

The Right Architecture for You—and Keeping it Simple & What Do You Need To Get There?

In Lesson four, we’ll take a fresh look at whether you want to maintain the current size of your business or plan to add multiple streams of revenue, find new sources of leveraged (or what some call passive) revenue, add service providers, deliver your services in a group format, productize, or create franchising and licensing opportunities. Then, based on the business building block combination we’ve looked at, we’ll design your unique business architecture. I’ll show you how to use the BBS Report, a tool to help you choose the best architecture for you and how to design that architecture for the future. I will also show you how to stay flexible, so you can adapt your business architecture according to what you find works and what doesn’t work, the marketplace, the needs of the people you serve, the economic climate, and more.

We'll also get down to brass tacks. What do you have and what do you need to get there? It’s about identifying the gaps in the process and resources you need to achieve your objectives.

Your instinct might be to resist implementing these new ideas: you are not sure whether they will work, whether your customers will like them, or how you will maintain the current business while building the new business. The changes to your business can’t and won’t happen overnight. You are already too busy. But it will happen. It might involve a change in attitude and a little extra work for a while (don't worry, I'll be there for you), but the long-term payoff of working more efficiently will profoundly change your future. And, that’s what this course is about—your future.

Systems Save Your Sanity

How much time do you waste? How do you even know? Maybe you are the most efficient person on the planet and never waste one minute. In that case, you can skip this chapter. For all the rest of us, let’s start with a simple calculation. How much time do you spend looking for a phone number you put some...where...but...where was it again? It hasn’t quite made it into your address book yet. The business card is just here, or there, underneath this paperweight, or that one. And how about passwords that are so secret even you don’t know what they are, except that it’s your password and you need it to get into a web site and you can’t remember the clever spot you hid it. Then there’s the I-just-know-it’s-here-somewhere moments when you are looking for that old RFP, because it’s so juicily similar to the one you have to write today and it would save you so much time if you could just put your hands on it, if only, but you can’t.

Big deal, you might be thinking. I don’t spend that much time looking for things like that. No? If you spend just one hour a week looking for hard to find information, at your going rate of $350 an hour, you’re losing $18,200 a year. Holy cow!

And that’s not all. Not only are you wasting time, you may be missing opportunities. Some people assume that if they take the time to create and maintain systems, then they are wasting precious time they might better spend finding new business opportunities. Not so. Opportunistic thinking is not the opposite of systems thinking, it’s the same thing. If you have the right systems in place, you’ll be freer to be opportunistic. So, not only could you be losing 18k a year without systems (at a very minimum), you could be missing opportunities for additional revenue sources.

In lesson five I will show you the 6 major categories of systems in your business and how to manage them. Every business is a system, containing many sub-systems. Think about your autonomic nervous system. A healthy business runs just as smoothly, sub-systems integrated into one healthy system. When one part of the system breaks down, it necessarily affects the rest of the system. The money (and creativity) is in the system, not just in the business idea or even in the competency of the service. The success of any business will ultimately be determined by the strength of the sub-systems. Sub-systems should include, at least, marketing, accounting, customer service, and human resources. The better each system is, the better all systems are, because they are all interconnected.

In this lesson, we’ll look at how to approach building your own standardized systems. We’ll focus on how to introduce new sub-systems into your business. It’s a balancing process, much like introducing a new vitamin, a new diet, or a new medicine into your body. At first there may be some adverse side effects, but once the medicine—or in our case, the sub-system—integrates with the rest of the organism, a new and better equilibrium is achieved.

If you do this, you'll:

Stay competitive
Improve productivity
Cut costs
Improve customer service
Improve quality
Reduce time to market
Reduce inventories
Better manage cash flow
Plan and allocate resources
Respond to customers changing needs

How To—Hire Others, Outsource, and Leverage Yourself. Learn How to Integrate—People and Process

But hold one... You can do much more with others than you can do alone. If you're like a lot of business owners, you might find yourself overwhelmed and unable to find ways to bring in more profits without simply putting in more time and effort doing the same old things. Or maybe you're eager to create strategic alliances, but just can't figure out the steps to take that will really work to expand your income. Imagine what it would be like if you had your own team of professionals working to help grow your business and create new streams of prospects and income that would basically run on auto-pilot.

It's simpler than you think. Collaboration is everything involving other people, from hiring, to outsourcing, to partnering in strategic alliances. Remember, it’s collaboration—not abdication or even delegation. And once you've discovered how to put your business into the "collaboration mindset" —whether it's in product creation, event hosting, cross-promotion, or any other strategy—you will immediately take your business and your bottom-line to the next level.

How to Really Balance Work and Life; Stand in the Service of Others as You Stand in the Service of Your Destiny

What’s it all for, all this right attitude, business architecture and systems? What is your destiny, inside and outside of your business? If you serve others, but don’t serve your own destiny, things are going to fall apart. It isn’t easy having both, a successful business and a rich personal life, but it is possible if you are aligned with your larger goals and your vision for your life. There will be times when you push hard at work, but there need to be times when you put energy into other areas of your life. Ultimately, the goal is to not push too hard on one (usually the business) and completely neglect the other.

Implementing systems for your life, call it a “life-model,” can be used as a guideline that will enable you to achieve your destiny. Your dream was never to work every waking minute with no time for family, friends, hobbies, health-promoting activities, or holidays, was it? Creating systems for your business will ultimately free up your time. Learn how to use your free time wisely.

I think about this balance in three ways. I don’t want to call them “steps.” Though they follow one from the other, they are more integrated with each other than that.

1. Be in alignment with your purpose. What do you want to do with your life? Who do you want to be?

2. Pay attention to the harmony in the world around us. Are you and your actions harmonious with your purpose, with others, and with the broader world?

3. Find flow in your business and in your life. The more flow there is in how you work and how you live, the more time you will spend in what’s called “the zone”—that place where hard things become easy, rough things smooth.