One Minute MBA | Front Office Box

Welcome to my One Minute MBA class.

Get to the bottom of the page, understand and implement what you’ve learned, and award yourself the certificate from the University of Hard Knocks

Module 1 – Three Essential Elements to Any Business

Knowledge – things in need to know

What I’m doing -
Why customers will buy,
How they will buy and
How I’ll deliver.

Resources
Whatever it takes to win and deliver the business model – I need

Cash to finance the business process
Ability to reach prospective customers, an
Infrastructure enabling me to complete transactions

Authority
Some reason people will buy from me. Depending on the business this might be:

Operating License
Professional Qualification
Client Testimonials
Unique value proposition

Without all of these my business isn’t going to work. People won’t buy from me, and if they do I won’t be able to delivery what they bought.

Module 2 – Three Fundamental Dimensions of Any Business

There are three dimensions to my business (and anybody else’s) and success in all of them is a pre-requisite of survival and growth. They are:

Mutually dependent – one can’t exist without the others.
Equally important – needing the same degree of management attention.
Easy to get wrong – and hard to get right.

The Three Dimenisions

CASH – the lifeblood of any business
SALES – the heartbeat of any business
CUSTOMER SERVICE – the value add of any business.

Every business wanting to survive and prosper needs to understand it’s own model of how CASH drives SALES drives CUSTOMER SERVICE drives CASH.

Module 3 – Three Fatal Mistakes Most Businesses Make

There are only three ways businesses fail. Any owner who avoids them will stay afloat, at least, and probably achieve his/her goals.

Fail to Plan

Planning is hard, boring and discouraging, so lots of people don’t do it. But if like me, you don’t believe in luck, planning is the only way to get where we want to go.

Fail to Act

It’s always easier to do nothing, procrastinate, wait and see, than it is to do stuff. But making sure what we plan should get done, when it’s supposed to get done, gets done by whoever is supposed to do it, ties us back to our plan.

Fail to Review

OK so that plan didn’t work. Our thinking was wrong. What will we do now, and what are the implications for our business – sales, customer service and cash. What does the next plan look like? How do we make sure the next plan is more achievable?

This isn’t rocket science to kids let alone entrepreneurs. If we want to walk to the park we have to plan which paths we’ll take, start walking, then review whether we’re going in the right direction.

Strange isn’t it? How so many otherwise intelligent people manage businesses based on hoping things will work out right, as opposed to managing their way to success.

Management isn’t about hope, it’s about Plan, Act, Review.

Of course you don’t have to believe me – just read about Henri Fayol, or even hire Management Consultants.

Either option is a lot cheaper than failure.

Congratulations – you now have an MBA awarded by the University of Hard Knocks.

You can get a hard copy of this course paper at our Downloads page.