The Business Health Club

Who is it for?

The Business Health Club is specifically designed for small business owners who want to be proactive about the future of their business and the direction in which they’re heading. It’s for business people who don’t want to stand still.

If you own or manage a small business, you have specific goals you want to achieve. You also know that you can reach those goals more quickly by working with someone with the experience to help your business grow. You may, alternatively, want to keep your business at its current level, but spend fewer hours working to keep it there. We’ve helped many businesses grow in size, turnover and profits and we have a lot of experience helping businesses with both approaches.

How does it work?

There are several different parts to the Business Health Club, each of which is designed to give you all the support, inspiration and tools you need to reach your goals as quickly as possible:

Quarterly Planning Days

These are the foundation of the Business Health Club. At the Quarterly Planning Days all the businesses we work with come together to spend half a day building solid plans for the next quarter. It’s also a day of networking and meeting other business owners, not to mention a day of inspiration where everyone can bounce new ideas around the room.

In our experience, planning is the one thing that often slips to the bottom of the pile when things get busy, and that’s why this day is so important. The planning days are always on a Saturday, because some of our clients are sole traders who need to focus on running their businesses during the week.

Dedicating just six hours per quarter to planning can have a massive impact on the results you achieve. During the Planning Day, we steer away from the nuts and bolts of actually running your business day-to-day and, instead, we focus on the big picture – on strategy, on the direction you want to take your business and on how best to achieve this.

You walk away from this day with a solid plan – the first step towards taking your business to the next level.

Goal setting tools

Once you’ve drawn up your quarterly plan, you can use your very own personalised goal-setting website to track your goals and activities. It takes you just minutes to input the goals you want to achieve and, once they’re on the website, you receive email reminders about the activities you’ve scheduled.

Monthly one-to-one sessions with a Business Mentor

Once a month you have a 1.5 hour session with our in-house Business Mentor, Christel Friberg. Read more about Christel’s background here. Most sessions are carried out on the phone, but you also have occasional face-to-face sessions.

During each session with Christel you spend some time going over your quarterly plan, reviewing it to see if it’s still relevant and realistic and whether you are happy with the progress you’re making. The rest of the session allows you to discuss whatever topic is currently most relevant to you and your business. Examples of the kinds of things often covered in mentoring sessions include:

• What are you measuring in your business and what are the numbers telling you? We can discuss your future strategy and direction based on the information you have available about customers, suppliers, finances, competitors, etc.
• Is your marketing the best it can be? Is it focused on getting direct response and sales, or is it more of a branding tool? We can work through your marketing and adjust it to become a sharp enquiry-generating tool.
• Do you feel uncomfortable when you’re selling to someone? Or do you feel like you could achieve better sales results with a few new ideas and approaches up your sleeve? We talk through your existing knowledge of the sales process, and give you general training and also hands-on advice about specific sales situations.
• How does the business run if you’re not around? Many smaller businesses experience a drop in turnover when the owner is away. We help you work around this issue by examining the critical points that need systemising, and helping you with ideas about how to best train your team.

These are just a few examples of the topics that the mentoring sessions can cover. Regardless of the topic, however, the purpose of the session is to look in detail at your own challenges and goals and find new and creative ways of overcoming these challenges and reaching your goals.

Weekly online seminars

As an extra support to our clients we offer free weekly online seminars. You can log on for ideas, inspiration and education on various business-related topics. Examples of topics are:

• Practical time management tools
• Understanding the financial reports generated by your bookkeeper, accountant or finance system
• How to get the highest level of response from your marketing communications
• How to get more customers to buy from you
• Clever pricing and discounting strategies
• Where to start if you want to systemise your business
• And many more...

What does it cost?

We have a sliding scale of subscription fees, depending on your turnover. This is to make sure that everyone can afford to join, regardless of whether you’re a one man band or whether you employ a group of people. Fees start from only £100 (+VAT) per month. Before you sign up though, the best thing is to have a 10-15 minute conversation with us on the phone about your business and what you’re looking to achieve. We can then discuss the subscription fee for your business.

Your monthly subscription includes:

• A monthly one to one session with a business mentor (1.5 hrs)
• Your own goal-setting website – a place where you can track your goals
• Weekly online seminars on business-related topics

Your subscription excludes attendance at the Quarterly Planning Days, but we strongly encourage everyone in the Business Health Club to attend these. Our experience is that clients who dedicate time to building a solid plan get better results. The fee for the Quarterly Planning Session varies, depending on the venue, but is usually around £60 (+VAT) per person.

How long is my commitment?

Although we’re very good at helping you grow your business, we know you’ll appreciate that this doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why we initially ask you to commit for three months. After the initial three month period, you simply pay your subscription monthly and you can choose to stop at any point by giving us a month’s notice.

I’m interested but still not sure this is for me. What is the next step?

The first thing you should do is make an enquiry about the Business Health Club. Make sure you mark on your form the best time to contact you. We’ll then phone you within two days to have a quick chat, give you some more information and to see if the Business Health Club is the right thing for you.

We look forward to working with you!