How Chris Simmance Utilizes Strategic Planning for Business Growth

[00:00:02] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the how to scale a business podcast. My name is Hector Sante Esteban and I am your host for today. You have guide merely your facilitator of wisdom. Our guest of honor today is Mr. Chris Simmons. He is the creator of the digital, the agency accelerator and someone who helps agency owners to grow their businesses and excited to dig in because the business of business is always The same and I think that's something that kind of we can all you know, listeners of the show realize too So Chris, thanks for hanging out with us today.

[00:00:32] Hector: I

[00:00:32] Chris: Thanks very much for having me on. I totally agree. businesses are businesses. They all have the exact same inputs and outputs and it's usually money.

[00:00:41] Hector: have to make a quick note to the listeners Because we are recording this at 6 a. m My time and it seems that none of the technology has woken up yet over here. So if things sound a little funky forgive us for that, but we had to get Chris on because I have my own selfish questions. I know you guys get a ton for Chris.

[00:00:58] Hector: So take us into it, Chris, the Ted talk to us about your story. You mentioned you've had businesses, a number of businesses and then catch us up on what you're doing now with the clients that you work with,

[00:01:07] Chris: Okay. let's cast ourselves back about 15 ish years or so. I was a snowboard guide and, ski representative at, European ski resorts, snowboarding every day and having a great time. there is a shelf life on that as you can imagine, because you don't remain young and fit forever. I came back home.

[00:01:24] Chris: my. Potential units, university and education years were well and truly behind me and very quickly realized I didn't have a huge amount of opportunity to get jobs which required letters or numbers after names. so I started working in travel agents and very quickly realized that wasn't for me either and learned how SEO worked in order to sell more holidays.

[00:01:47] Chris: That literally pushed me into working for a digital agency. I don't know what the reason for it is, I get an itch and I got to scratch it. So I started building my own businesses, mostly focused on digital marketing stuff and ended up running 10 years during the time of running one of those agencies.

[00:02:03] Chris: actually started a second one, complimentary services, but different,target markets. and that was the catalyst, I think that really drove me to learn what business was. it wasn't just about making money. It was about sustainably managing all areas of a business. because there's so much on and so many plates spinning that it.

[00:02:22] Chris: Was only around then that you actually learn, what a real business is. vast majority of businesses are started accidentally, should we say, it's only when crunch time happens that you learn and hopefully it's not too late.

[00:02:33] Hector: I would imagine a lot of people that are listening to the show progressed. They were looking for something to do, someone asked them to do something and they said, Hey, I can do this and I can charge money for it. They did a little bit more, they kept doing it and they looked up and they go, I can't be the only one.

[00:02:47] Hector: I can't continue to just be the only one doing this. I've got to start putting down systems. I got to start having processes. I've got to have people. I've I've got to be able to start working outside of myself. And I think that starts to get into you get into the business because you can be the baker, but if you're the only one.

[00:03:01] Hector: Making, the pastries, there's no one to run the business. And that's what you're speaking to a little bit.

[00:03:07] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. the nuts and the bolts of businesses, regardless of whether it's a bakery or, a fortune 500 organization, they are the same nuts and bolts. it's the application of effort and intensity that makes a difference. Sometimes you can run, a very small business and have two members of staff.

[00:03:27] Chris: But on paper, you're pulling in a huge amount more revenue. or should we say personal revenue after you've paid all of the businesses funds, than a much larger organization. The owner of a small business might be doing way better than the owner of a large business because they've set it up properly and they're running it better.

[00:03:45] Chris: a large business will have. Human problems when it comes to finding, hiring, firing, retaining staff and things like that, especially these days post COVID with, you know, lockdownsand working from home, remote and hybrid roles and all sorts of stuff like that. I don't know what the world's like in, in the U.

[00:04:03] Chris: S. from an employment point of view. But a huge amount of people in the UK still work mostly remotely. and,on a hybrid front, the vast majority of people haven't gone fully back to offices. So that brings a huge amount into how to run a business. from, a leadership point of view that wasn't there.

[00:04:20] Chris: pre 2020, in such a requirement you've had to change how you run your business in order to get anywhere near the scale that you might want to have.

[00:04:30] Hector: What has been in the things that you carry through your experiences, are there lessons when you look back to the beginning of your journey? Are there lessons that pivotal back then that you still Integrate that you still think about when you're running your business, saying, or when there were there things that really changed your mindset when it comes to what running a business is or how businesses should be ran.

[00:04:55] Chris: if you start your own business and you run your own business, it's very emotionally tied to your personal life. and one thing I learned and it was the hard way was to take the emotion out of it. outside of, what you need in order to have passion for the job you do. that comes down to things like how you treat people, your team.

[00:05:16] Chris: So we say, I learned, the, by being, too emotional in how I saw the way things were being done led to, me not enjoying running the agencies, running the businesses, and that then reflected on how I worked with my team. it also was something where, you can take the highs and the lows with a, not a pinch of salt because they are important, but you learn that there will always be good days.

[00:05:42] Chris: There will always be bad days, but it's whether you're up at the end of the quarter or the month or the year that are important. And once you take the emotional aspect out of it, you then start to,essentially Elevate yourself out of business and you look down on it.

[00:05:57] Chris: So helicopter view, should we say? and that's when you can, really zoom out and start seeing longer term vision of the future once you know that and you've got the ability to do that, which is really difficult if you're focused on the day to day and the day to day is very painful emotionally.

[00:06:12] Chris: Once you do zoom out and you go, okay, in three years, I can reasonably see, I could be in this place with this revenue, this net profit margin with this many staff, this many clients, blah, blah, blah. that's when you're able to, use your passion and your emotion to drive. something that you can see in the distance and you can strategically plan for.

[00:06:36] Chris: I've never seen a business that has ever done, hugely well just by plodding along, unless they've got lots and lots of funding and then it's not really their business. It's someone else's, bank balance that supports it. ability to see further into the future allows you to get better buy in from teams allows you to present business plans, which allow you to go to the bank for funding and loans and whatever else you need.

[00:07:00] Chris: It allows you to seem more convincing when you're selling to people because you know where you're going and none of that requires any kind of visceral emotion other than the passion to deliver what you're delivering and then it starts to work.

[00:07:12] Hector: it's interesting. When you talk about taking out the emotion, one of my first mentors, when I was running my sales organization was, he told me, We can't run this based on feeling because we run it based on feeling we're going to be, there's so many biases, right? There's so many, recency bias.

[00:07:29] Hector: there's so many biases that, feelings are not, a very, correct view. Like you said, representation where the business actually is. And so by. Focusing on the numbers by focusing on what's actually going on, then all of a sudden we have a much more realistic view, which I think can give a business owners that ability to all of a sudden start to look up on the horizon, and start to not just look at the few feet or the few days in front of them and start to look at the weeks and the quarters and the years that are down.

[00:07:58] Chris: and if you're looking into the distance, I often use a ship an analogy. If look back in the past of the galleons of the past that went across the seas, they knew where they were going. they didn't have necessarily, everything that they needed in order to get there safely.

[00:08:12] Chris: It was easier to captain a ship if you knew exactly where you were going and you knew the broad strokes of how you were going to get there. it was easier to get the buy in of your crew, so that they, stayed the course and maintained the heading. it was easier. weather storms. If you have a clear view of where you need to go at the end that helps you to correct for any errors in business, but in any,misadventures you have at sea, should we say so?

[00:08:38] Chris: The ability to know exactly where you're going and how you're going to get there allows those curveballs to come in business. It allows, changes that are external to anything you can control. as a business owner, it allows you to, Essentially take a little bit of a stoic view on, I can't control these things external to the business, but I can control these things in the business and how I react to those things.

[00:09:02] Chris: And it allows you to then course correct as appropriate,communicate much better and essentially, get to the place that you want to get to, as long as it's a reasonable. Place that you plan to get to in the first place.

[00:09:14] Hector: this. part of my role as the host is to think for that listener who's going, yeah, but just, this is all hoity toity pie in the sky sort of stuff. does it actually work? can you think of an example of either yourself or someone that you've worked with or helped where they were just running it based on emotion or they were just, like you said, just plodding through with no real direction.

[00:09:35] Hector: And then all of a sudden, by taking this perspective, they're able to see some sort of, something

[00:09:40] Chris: I'm working with a business, recently, they have, on paper, should we say, from an external viewpoint, a wonderful business with lots of cool clients, loads of logos on the website. They, go to all the events, they speak at conferences, they're invited to this, that, and the other, they're well, known and very good at what they do in a deliverables point of view.

[00:10:00] Chris: They're very good at the creative aspect of the business. until recently have looked month to month. Sometimes quarter to quarter. and it wasn't until, we built a three year strategy for them. fun visionary aspect of it translated then into a mathematical kind of here are the tasks that need to be delivered in order to hit these leading measures of success in order to get to those lagging measures of success, which are your vision into the future.

[00:10:28] Chris: We need to do all of these things. They won, a bunch of really big clients, high fives all round, champagnes, et cetera, but none of them, were really aware of the true cost of doing business, until we did a cash flow forecast of, this is where you sit, and whilst everything looked great externally, it didn't look great when you forecast the cash flow against their plan, As soon as they saw that, and as soon as they got past the visceral kind of, oh, crap moment and they stepped back we've got to look at this properly now, and everything has to have the right numbers on it.

[00:11:01] Chris: And like you said earlier, we're not going on feeling we can feel great about a win. We can feel sad about a loss, but that's not going to change. What we do next. So we've got to get on with it. and they've seen, in the last couple of months, a real turnaround in terms of the cash flow forecasting, which should bring them on target for this year's, early 24 next year's,strategic targets.

[00:11:22] Chris: if you're listening to this at the minute and you're thinking, yeah, again, sounds great. But,the key thing when you're looking at a business is, you Unless you're, if you're not looking to sell it, let's say, for example, you're not looking for an exit sale. then it's most likely, a big lifestyle choice.

[00:11:38] Chris: you're running it to fund your personal life. but you also want to make something that has some kind of value in the long term. So you're building an asset as well, unless you really understand where. Cash flow works and you understand all of the intricacies of, the financial aspects of a business and just doing the same thing you're doing over and over again could feel great from a, we make lots of money right now point of view, but it won't work if you don't know how much new client cost you to get.

[00:12:06] Chris: We've run 500 worth of ads this month and we got three clients. Did those clients come from the ads while we turn the ads on and we got the clients? It's not the same. You need the numbers, you need to understand it. and you can't do that unless you step backwards.

[00:12:20] Hector: When we get back from break, Chris, I want to talk a little bit more about, okay, so people have woken up to this. Now what do we look for? What are maybe some steps or some key things turn on or make sure I'm on and I'm excited about that. So let's stick around. We're going to get into that right after this quick break.

[00:12:36] Hector: Hey, y'all. Today's episode is brought to you by amplify media, and we are a podcast and content creation company.

[00:12:40] Hector: we like to think of ourselves as genius or makers or platform creators, because chances are you probably have a product, a passion, a mission, a message, something that you want to get out to the world, but you may not have the time, the team, or the tech skills to do it.

[00:12:51] Hector: If that's the case, we can help go to amplify media. com. That's a M P L a F Y media. com. You can also check the show notes for info. And with that, let's get back to the episode with Chris I'm back.

[00:13:02] Hector: All right, Chris. So I can't believe we're only about 15 minutes into the episode because I looked up and I thought that we were, how much we've covered in here has been fantastic.

[00:13:10] Hector: let's go a little bit deeper. Cause I think we've woken listeners up to the fact that they're like, you know what? You're right. I am running my business. I'm feeling I am running. there's a lot of emotion driving my business. where do I look? You talked about cashflow. is that the place to look?

[00:13:25] Hector: Are there other places to look? now that we're here, what might be the next steps that we can take?

[00:13:29] Chris: a little phrase that lives quite true in the digital marketing industry, which I'm originally, from it depends, and that's the sad truth of it. It really does depend on the business that you run and what type of organization it is. the, I think the key thing is if you're forgetting what the business is.

[00:13:46] Chris: The first thing to look at that starts that kind of aha kind of thinking I need to look at this differently is To take yourself away from the day to day. Take yourself to the coffee shop. Take yourself somewhere that is comfortable, but not the usual spot and Don't do it in like shared office Meeting space or anything take yourself somewhere Relatively calm and quiet, but not somewhere you're used to.

[00:14:10] Chris: And do it a bit of an inventory of the things that you feel about the business. this is great. That's great. I'm sad about this. I don't like that. The things that, you can definitely measure. regardless of whether they connect to those things or not, and then the things that you would love to feel and measure and whatever those things are, you might not be able to measure some of those things because of the nature of the business.

[00:14:34] Chris: if you run digital agency, for example, you should be. very easily able to measure staff capacity, client churn,lead to sale speed and ratio and blah, blah, blah. If you're running florist that people walk into, it's a little bit harder. If you're running a construction firm, there's different measures that you can physically track business, but things that are key is the.

[00:14:59] Chris: and this changed my perspective on,running businesses. and it wasn't until I started thinking in this kind of way, when it came to being able to measure stuff there are two types of measures. the first thing that you can measure is a lagging measure, a lagging goal, should we say, and that's something that by the time you record it.

[00:15:17] Chris: It's too late to change it. that's your end of year, your end of month financials or, internal operational measures, capacity planning, et cetera. those are important to measure because they're the ones that say we did it and we didn't do it, but there are also leading measures, leading goals, leasing measures of success.

[00:15:37] Chris: And those are the things which, can be. less,important, but are important measures that show you're on the right track.

[00:15:46] Hector: For that listener, who's just no, once again, I took out my notebook and I'm like, this is great stuff, but there's someone who's going, yeah, but Chris, all that's extra work. it's difficult. It takes time. How does that actually translate into business?

[00:16:01] Chris: the hard truth. no one's going to invest in your business or invest in you unless you invest in your business and invest in yourself. So take yourself away and spend the time to do the thing that will get you the thing that you want. if you don't invest the time On the business work, you are consigned forever and a day to work in the business, and there's only two ways that the business ends when you work in the business.

[00:16:25] Chris: Only it liquidates or you liquidate yourself. And I'm not saying to do anything terrible. You close the business. you run out of money or you have to close the business. if you spend time and invest And that's 80 20 rule so to speak 80 percent of your time where you can eventually should be focused on the business.

[00:16:45] Chris: And that's growth based on the business. That stuff like retention of clients, acquisition of clients, increase of revenue, increase of profit, everything that is a business function. It's where you should be as the owner and the leader of a business. and completely appreciate, the sentiment that you, said there.

[00:17:04] Chris: And I spent a long time thinking this is great. I could spend six days working on a strategic plan. I could do all of this maths and I could make it look funky and everything, but on day seven, I've got to get back to work and I'll get the work done. a very good friend of mine a long time ago said to me, Chris, how do you eat an elephant?

[00:17:21] Chris: And the answer is one bite at a time. You build your strategy and don't make it lofty goal. Number one is to finish 10 million things in one week. You make it reasonable based on what you can do. If you've got a team of two and you have to be in this and you can't afford the person to take you out of the business to work on it, then you make sure that your strategy and your goals are aligned with the reasonable amount of effort that you can put in.

[00:17:48] Chris: so Invest in yourself and invest in your business. Otherwise, no one else will

[00:17:53] Hector: I think you made a really good point in the sense of investing as a business owner. You should be investing your time in the things that, you said in the kind of the core business functions, but things that are, they're driving profit and revenue. And I think that, right there might be it because there's so many different hats that the business owner has to wear when they get to the stage where we're talking about.

[00:18:13] Hector: And. It's so easy where if you're not looking at the numbers, you're not looking at these important KPIs to be spending time on things that don't actually move the needle. And I'm a victim of this myself because especially creative businesses or service based businesses, there are things that you could spend time on that you could spend a lot of time on.

[00:18:32] Hector: And it may seem like it's helping the business maybe it is, but not at the impact that you as the leader probably need to be giving to it. I'm

[00:18:41] Chris: if you're listening to this in a minute and you're thinking all of this makes sense, but again, where do I start? Really good way of doing this. This first kind of beginning piece. If you've got the space, do it on a big wall with some sticky notes and things like that.

[00:18:54] Chris: If not do it on a, mirror board or whatever it is that you want to do on your screen. And think of what the business is now and the roles that are required in the business. It doesn't matter if it's you. That does them all right now, but you'll have a salesperson, a marketing person, an HR or people, whatever person you'll have a finance person, you'll have a few people who do the delivery of services or products and things like that build that chart of who sits in every seat.

[00:19:22] Chris: Then look at it and think, if I am in all of these seats, how do I make a plan to get out of that one and just pick one? And that might be hiring someone that might be organizing operations slightly differently, but focus on getting yourself out of multiple hats so that you are passing a hat to someone, or you are making the hat unnecessary, or you are automating the hat.

[00:19:43] Chris: So then you can take yourself away from little bits at a time rather than trying to. Jump out in one go. I spoke to a business owner the other week who was stressing and stressing. And this was a call I was having whilst they were driving to a meeting. got to win this client. I'm really stressed about everything.

[00:19:59] Chris: and they were like, and then when I get out of the meeting, I've got to do this. I've got to do this. And I, and all these sorts of things. I was like, That's salesperson job. That's a marketing person. Yeah, but I can't afford this person to do that sort of thing. you can, and from a cash point of view, it's not that comfortable.

[00:20:13] Chris: Don't hire all of these people at once. Pick one of the roles, spend a month hiring the right person, then spend three months getting that person to be as perfect in that role as you possibly can do with the right leadership and the right management. Inside of four months, you've made yourself completely redundant from that role, except to lead that person.

[00:20:32] Chris: And then you then have less of a rush around trying to do all the research before the pitch before, whilst driving to the pitch and then getting to the pitch and not winning it. Cause you look like,

[00:20:42] Hector: so much good stuff here. Chris, I have one more question for you. but before we do that, you have a podcast, you do webinars. creating lots of content we just scooped into the bucket. Do we just, merely touch the surface.

[00:20:54] Hector: We skimmed a little chap off the top. if people want to go deeper and learn more about you and get more in your world, where's the best place to go.

[00:21:00] Chris: omg. center. And that will take you straight to the website. Everything's there, all the podcasts, all the webinars, all the content. I quite like the content is digital agency focused, however, swap the word digital agency for business and it's the same. And I don't mean that flippantly.

[00:21:17] Hector: cool. We call that up in the show notes. last question for you, Chris, in your opinion, what is the secret to scaling a business?

[00:21:24] Chris: resilience. if you don't have resilience, practice resilience, you can't run a business if you are not resilient. if you try and grow a business, you will hit resistance and, if the resistance meets you and if that friction doesn't take it out on you, then you're not a real human being.

[00:21:43] Chris: but if that friction is something which you look at as a, opportunity to learn. Or something which you can or can't control, you manage it. that is the beginnings of resistance resilience everyone's got a different battery for resilience i've talked about this a few times on a few of my own podcasts where if you imagine for a moment that you are a battery And that battery is your resilience.

[00:22:08] Chris: And when it's empty, you run out of battery, you might be crabby or you might need to go to sleep or you might need a cookie. I don't know. everyone's battery is slightly differently sized and everyone's battery discharges at different rates and everyone's battery charges at different rates. You might have an enormous battery that discharges really slowly and it charges really quickly.

[00:22:26] Chris: You're great. From a resilience point of view, you can take lots of knocks. You can take lots of problems. You can take lots of workload and you're usually okay. You might have a really small battery that discharges really slowly and charges really quickly. You're good at resilience, but you need to take a break.

[00:22:42] Chris: you need to charge a little bit more frequently cause there's less in the battery there and everything in, in between. if you work out. What kind of a resilience battery you have to the pressures of running a business, then you can make sure that you put in that at the end of the day to go to the gym, or you put in that time to read a book that's not about work.

[00:23:01] Chris: that's the thing that helps you to recharge a little bit will improve the ability to have resistance to that friction that pushing a business forwards generates.

[00:23:10] Hector: And who knew that you're going to be getting some life lessons from Chris, at least this morning when we're recording it. So Chris, this has been a fantastic interview. And I know our listeners have gained ton of value from it. for those of you who have stuck with us and made it here, we would, we appreciate being here and being part of the tribe.

[00:23:25] Hector: We would love a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. If you know someone who is scaling a business, who runs a business, hit that share button, send them a text, let them know that this might be a show that they'd enjoy. And as always, we appreciate you being part of the tribe. We'll see on the next one.

[00:23:38] Hector: Later, y'all.