The Moment Of Truth
In a good month, I would gross between $4,000 to $5,000. And I wanted to make $10,000 a month and more, but didn’t know how.

After years of moving between working for customers and other builders (and some travelling overseas – something someone might normally do in their mid twenties) I became hugely frustrated with both my financial situation and myself. I absolutely knew that I had the brains, and the ability, to achieve more than this (as I had with sport through my teens and early twenties).

It was this raw dissatisfaction that drove me to finding out where I was going wrong and to do something about it.

I decided to take responsibility for my own situation, as no one else created the mess I was in or my feeling of dissatisfaction. I could simply not believe I was 29 and had less in the bank than when I was 23.

It actually began to depress me as well as frustrate me. It was at that point that I made a decision to change and get some business help.

Having made the decision to learn how to build, own and operate a successful business, I began to attend to a lot of seminars and signed on to many business development programs. One of these seminars was hosted by ActionCOACH, and the presenter spoke of a business coaching success story that just happened to be in the same industry as the one I wanted to create my business in. It just clicked. I realized that what I needed to do was enlist ActionCOACH’s help.

Basically, ActionCOACH had to start from scratch with me. I only used a few business principles at that time, and mostly thought about what I was producing and not about the business side of things. So the challenge for me was to truly start thinking like a businessperson and not as a builder.

I found this very hard indeed after 15 years on the tools.

My ActionCOACH Business Coach began by suggesting I read specific books to educate myself as much as possible.

This, he said, would get me up to speed with the business tools I would need to get started on the right path. He also suggested I set some simple and effective weekly goals to get things moving quickly. Create some scripts, get new business cards, put my prices up, create a more efficient quoting system, charge for design proposals, place some ads in the local paper to generate leads, and work on my referral strategies.

We developed a Plan Of Action. This included starting weekly coaching sessions and getting real about my goals, which I set as follows: to go from being a contractor turning over $40,000 to $60,000 per year to a Business Owner with a company turning over $1.8 million per year in 3 years.

I needed to have a grasp of the business language and principals, and I had to learn quickly. I wanted to get started right there and then. I was eager to get going as I had discovered there was a way to grow my business. Luckily I didn’t, and I now see why my Business Coach held me back from diving straight in as long as he could.

By setting goals of books to read, tapes to listen to and things to achieve was just excellent. The 2-day business workshop I attended was so good I did it twice during my 12-month coaching program – I got more out of it the second time. You don’t often invest 2-days straight working on your business, and it was the best thing I could have done.

Introducing changes to the business and my routine was the single biggest challenge I faced, even though I wanted to be successful and to achieve my goals.

The discipline and effort I needed in comparison to how I was doing things previously was a massive challenge in the beginning. I did not adjust well to it and it took time. Even though I wanted the outcome, the reality of the work I had to do to achieve it was overwhelming at times to say the least. My Business Coach could have sacked me a dozen times for disagreements and not getting done what was needed, but he didn’t.

It just took me a long time to realize how being slow to implement change was killing my new business.

After missing a few of my targets and being very disappointed, I began to truly see that, as well as making changes in the business, I had to change myself if I wanted to reach my goals.

It was only after seeing my failures and truly understanding why they occurred, that I committed more time to my business and changed my routine to suit the business more than myself.

So when it came time to do some Testing and Measuring, I realized we didn’t have any real benchmarks to work off. But we started with lead generation and conversion, and continued from there.

And wow, from someone who thought they got just about every contract they tendered for, the raw percentages were a real eye opener.

My coach simply smiled, as he knew we had plenty of room for improvement.