Marching Band to Nowhere: How We Help Business Owners Find Their Path
The other day, I was on a call with a potential client, and he used the most vivid similes to describe his experience as a business owner. He said that running his business felt like being in a marching band going nowhere, or like a puppy running on a wooden floor.
The imagery was so vivid that it required no further explanation.
The Exhausting Reality of Entrepreneurship
Whether you embark on your entrepreneurial journey by buying a business, participating in a franchise system, or building one from the ground up, the early years can feel exhausting.
Often, you’ve traded a decent, if not excellent, job for newfound entrepreneurial freedom. However, that freedom turns out to be far less lucrative and far more taxing than anything you could have ever imagined.
My dad used to say that if a mason saw the mountain of bricks he would lay throughout his career before laying his first brick, he might never have picked up the brick in the first place. Real-life business ownership is exactly the same.
I’ve spoken to so many business owners who say that if they had known exactly how hard it would be, how many sleepless nights they would endure, and how many missed opportunities there would be in those early years, they would never have decided to do it. And the world would be poorer for it.
In that case, there’s a certain gift in not knowing exactly what lies ahead. It allows us to be bold and courageous and make the leap.
From Uncertainty to Confidence: The Power of Leading with Purpose
When things go from feeling exhilarating to feeling stressful, worrisome, inescapable, and unresolvable, it’s time for something more.
Leading with Confidence is a Game Changer
Being able to tell your business where it’s going and then lead it in that direction is an empowering experience.
It changes the game entirely.
But how do you do that? How do you make the leap from not knowing what to do next, drowning in a sea of endless decisions that feel heavy and hard, to confidently directing the outcomes of your business?
The ProQ CoPilot Advantage: Transforming Small Business Operations
The ProQ CoPilot relationship is at the heart of how we do what we do for our clients. We don’t just offer the best possible business operating framework for small businesses; we think it’s unfair and unkind to expect small business owners—who have to run, grow, and operate their businesses—to figure it all out on their own. So, we step in with a whole new level of support.
We haven’t just built a team of consultants who know best practices. We’ve enhanced their skills by adding coaching acumen that allows them to teach our clients how to ask better questions, how to look at themselves, and how to step forward as better leaders. Then, we apply the best teaching and facilitation skills to transmit to our clients the information they need to build better, stronger businesses that last.
Our Approach: A Comprehensive Framework for Success
Practically speaking, this means we use our ProQ Framework to evaluate where a business is. We look at the Big 4: Sales & Marketing, Operations, Finance, and Culture. We assess organizational structures and leadership capacity, discovering where the business is strong, where it’s weak, and where it has room to grow. Then, we quickly build out a strategic plan, a marketing plan, and lay out the quarterly milestones needed to enact and realize those plans.
But that’s not all.
Once a client has seen all of that and participated in setting their bold annual goal (we call it setting their North Star), the pressure is off, and we step in to fill the gap.
Tailored Solutions for Business Growth: How We Support You Every Step of the Way
We backwards-engineer not just the big steps, best practices, and most current plans; we break them down into tiny, bite-sized steps tailored to where you are and who you are. Then, your dedicated CoPilot, in collaboration with your Mission Director, provides those steps to you week-in and week-out.
This innovation of a “done-for-you” approach was created so that owners and leaders can focus on executing their MIOs (Massively Important Outcomes) micro-steps, aligned towards the bigger outcomes, without worrying if those steps are taking them anywhere—or nowhere.
They can have firm certainty that each step is curated and crafted towards achieving their bigger goals, toward realizing their North Star. Inch by inch, step by step, they move toward the life they envisioned from the onset. They don’t have to spend their downtime trying to figure things out. They get the support of a full team of strategists, supporters, advisors, and guides, helping them every step of the way.
And what’s even more exciting? It usually takes them much further than they ever dared to dream.
Why Do It Alone?
Why worry and wonder when the structure and support of ProQ are available to you?
You Don’t Get a Gold Star for Doing It Alone
In fact, you’ll go further and faster if you don’t go at it alone.