In this bespoke episode, Amol Maheshwari, managing partner in Growth Idea, shares how he he has worked to help over a hundred small to medium businesses grow their profitability.
You will discover:
– Why you may want to ignore some of what you’ve learned from leadership books
– How to recognize and overcome the ceiling of complexity that is holding you back
– How to fully understand your finances as an entrepreneur
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast and I am here with yet another high demand coach. That is the one the only Amol Maheshi… oh my gosh, I tried it so many times and messed it up. We’re gonna keep rolling with this. I’m gonna let him say his last name because my Americanness is getting in my way at the moment, but I’m always here he is the managing partner of growth idea that UK is leading small, medium enterprise business coaching and consulting company. He also leads the private equity firm, our private equity arm, I’m sorry, of SJ, man solutions, a London based investment business. And he’s previously worked in investment banking, and corporate finance with HSBC, and Morgan Stanley, he’s got a new book out, that is awesome. Can’t wait to share it with you guys. But before we get there, more welcome to the show. I was wondering if you could just give us some color to this background here. How did how did all this work with some fantastic organizations lead you to getting into business at Growth Idea?
Amol Maheshwari
Alright, I’ll start with my name is Amol Maheshwari. So it’s just for the excite the I used to be with Darwin finance with Morgan Stanley and HSBC before, before joining was starting to work in coaching and with small businesses. It was something that my partner started. So she started working with small businesses, and I was working alongside her but at Morgan Stanley for about three or four years, and purely the results and the fulfillment that you see in coaching, as you probably know, as it started moving me towards saying, well, actually, I need to join her site in about 2012. So about 12 years now, I started working with her and we weave together to form into what is probably one of the most successful SME focused business coaching firms and in the country in the United Kingdom, and be focused specifically on on businesses, which are the smaller medium enterprise. So businesses that are about 500,000 to a million in size to start with, and up to about 50 million. And we’ve consciously chosen this segment, because these, we found that we can make the results happen the fastest. And the and the growth happened the fastest for this segment. So the moment someone goes beyond this limit, it’s time for them to move on and, and move to the next level, really. So that’s that’s what we see as our job.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And you’ve got a new book out again, I want to come to it here in just a second. But I wondered if you could, one of the things that I found as a challenge in that SME space is that it’s kind of in between, right? It’s not quite big businesses, it’s not quite, you know, the, the all these kind of formal strategies. And there’s a lot of resource that’s not only available to but directed at very large organizations. And then they’re not startups, either. You know, a lot of them, they’ve kind of gotten out of those critical first couple of steps, if you will. And one of the things that happens is you kind of hit this in between space where it feels like it should be okay. It’s not that early startup, you know, we’re trying to survive. But then, sometimes you just don’t have a rhythm in that set. You just and it’s hard to find out what’s wrong. It’s hard to Google, you know, the problem that you’re experiencing your business. So what would you say are some of the main challenges that caused that? And how do you help folks overcome it?
Amol Maheshwari
So we tend to think of it’s a really good question. Because what for two reasons. One is, the first thing that you mentioned, a lot of fall, a lot of writing a lot of the leadership gurus out there, they’re focused on large companies and the some of these concepts don’t quite translate, they don’t quite translate to the SME space. And then say, the sono could be looking at it and reading a book about Amazon or about Netflix and saying, Well, I need to do that. But it’s not quite right. So that they’re not, they’re not at the same place where these businesses are. So some of these these things don’t translate. I think the other thing that happens is they when when you start a business, and yet when you get it started and start to get some kind of success. You have you’ve devoted so much time and effort to it to getting the business right, that you don’t really have time to think about the business of business. You have to think about your clients, you have to think about your your stakeholders, you have to take part your suppliers, your customers, what else could you do with your employees? How would you how would you grow it you have to think about your bank account where you get your financing from so there’s so many things to think about. You don’t really have time to start stepping back and say okay, what what do I do with the business? And what happens and this is where are all pieces on? Where and where small businesses, small businesses and SME businesses get started, is where the business owner hits their ceiling of complexity. And you’ve probably heard this stone before. A lot of coaches recognize that different businesses different business owners have their own individual ceilings of complexity. We find that at one level, ceiling of complexity is where people don’t know how to manage the pit. So when you start saying that, well, I can do everything myself, that’s usually an easier job. And when you have to hire people and start making sure that you’re getting the job done through someone else, that’s complex. So and that’s that complexity also means that you can’t do it without learning. It’s a skill that you have to learn. That’s where people start getting stuck. And that’s where someone like us and coaches come in and start saying, Okay, let’s, let’s teach you, that’s help you to that specific challenge, some system related, again, you could be successful, then you could be doing it yourself. And you know, exactly the right sauce of how to do it. But you’ve never quite built a system. So you’ve never invested in systems you’ve not built in systems. And that becomes a level of complexity. So you get up every day and you run on the same treadmill again, that’s, that’s again, something that you start thinking, Well, okay, how do we, how do we solve this? We found that at different levels, mindset as a as a specific challenge for small business owners. So when we, when we look at mindset, these are successful people. Sometimes success for some people starts meaning that well, am I am I an imposter? Do I deserve the success, I just got lucky. And that becomes a mindset. Another mindset becomes a let me just hold on to all the success that I’ve got, and not planned to do the next thing and the next bigger thing, and also becomes a mindset challenge. So there’s, there’s a few different things we we talked about this in a six M model, which is, which is what we go through. So we talked about these mindset challenges. We talked about management challenges, how to manage people, methodology, or challenges related to systems. And these are all in the bowl, the usual things, where am I going? What’s my vision? What do I need to define? What are my goals? What are what how do I make money? How do I build my sales and marketing? So does the tactical challenges are these challenges, in my view, are like slightly above the other ones, because they’re things that you don’t usually deal with? In the first three, four or five years of your business?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I have to, there’s so much in there to unpack, I love every bit of what you just said, because one of the things I really want to key in on is that for entrepreneurs, there’s a very real personal journey and transformation that’s happening. And at the same time, you can’t just deal with it personally, it has to come out in how you manage and how you lead an organization. And and so what I see a lot of even coaches do is they’ll kind of gravitate toward one side of that I help with, you know, personal leadership, or I help with organizational strategy and tactics. And what I love about the way that you guys are approaching this is that you’re knitting those two things together. Was that conscious decision for you guys? It’s not necessarily easy. How do you navigate that?
Amol Maheshwari
It is conscious. So we first when we first started doing, we start saying, well, our job is to create better realities. That’s that’s how we define our wishes, we create better realities for the soldiers. We said, Okay, what is a better reality, and we’ll only do it if we can measure it. So measured better reality means more money in the business. So you’re making more money in the business. So we defined it that way. And then when we start working with people, we start saying, well, actually, we can fix the tactics, but you have a bit of a spring in the business, and people keep going back to the same thing, if you’re just telling them that these are the right things to do. And so you have to put a bed of well, the business owner needs to become the right person. So it’s a bit of being and working on the business owner, not just the doing and the strategy and the tactics. And when both these things work together as well, when you start building sustainable reality, which becomes, so it’s a bit of which in coaching we do we teach. So we’re teaching, we’re making sure it’s being absorbed, we’re making sure that we don’t have to keep going back and saying the same thing. Because they’re learning and they’re learning how to fish. So that and that only happens if it’s not just while teach you another trick, or teach you another trick, I’ll teach you another trick it has to be well, have you read this? Have you built your skill on how to hire people? Have you built your skill outright processes, right systems understand money, and that, that’s what then makes it in gray. So over time, I think in the first few years of the businesses where we started saying, actually we can’t do one, and not the other, it has to be a bit of a mix is to lead with the business has to make more money. So if you’re working with us, your business has to make more money otherwise need not done a good job. But the in a way, one was the one of the hurdles, we have to cross to get the business to make more money is to make the business owner better. And get them to shift their mindset and the sub and move to a different plane of how they think about their business.
Scott Ritzheimer
And the other thing that I really love about how the way that you laid this out is it’s not so much that the business owners are doing something wrong. It’s that they’ve hit a limit on how they’ve been doing what they’re doing, right this this idea of a threshold of complexity and you’re right like management is a really big one I’ve never met Maybe you’ve met one, but I’ve never met a founder who started their business to manage people. Right? Like, that’s just, it’s just not, you know, it’s just not that DNA, right? There’s a lot easier ways of managing people, let’s just put it that way. Not that they not that they don’t like people, not any of those things. But you’re but what happens is, a lot of founders will see that as kind of a DNA, oh, I’m not a manager, I’m a leader, an entrepreneur, a visionary and fill in the blank something other than manager. But you went straight to it and said, No, that’s just a skill set that you need to learn, right? For each of these thresholds of complexity, it’s not so much that you can or can’t do it, it’s that you have to adopt a new skill set to succeed in that level. Would you agree with that?
Amol Maheshwari
Yep. Yep. So partially, yes. So you have to adopt a new skill set, or you have to get get awareness of whether you have the capability of building that skill set. So if you don’t have the capability of betting the skill set, then your capability needs to be alpha, hire someone and work with someone who has that skill set. So this is where you start thinking about, well, the entrepreneur mindset and the manager mindset, and where should the entrepreneur let go, before he runs the business into the ground. So an entrepreneur is usually really skilled at they’re good, they’re really skilled in building a new idea. But they’re not skilled in managing the idea. So either they learn that skill, or they find someone else who works along with them. And they handle the business, or at least the running of the business and the managing of people to that new person. So it’s just, I think it boils down to the awareness first and the decision that the business owner has to take. And that’s what we put in front of the business scene by you just need to decide, are you going to do it or not. But if you’re going to do it, it’s hard work. Because you will have to learn how to do this, whether it be enjoyable hardware, if you want someone else to do it, it’d be a little less hard work, but you will have put in the work and finding the right person and trusting the right person, then trust and learning how to let go. So that’s also where you just have to decide which which path of difficulty you choose for yourself.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah that’s so true. Now, one of the things that I’ve noticed one of the big symptoms, and you’ve been talked about this as one of your business results, but when we start bumping up against these thresholds of complexity, one of the clearest ways to know that we’re there is that we start feeling the pain and profitability, right. And there’s all kinds of different reasons that happens. But I noticed a primary area of focus for you guys. And it’s a big part of the new book. So tell us a little bit about the new book that you guys have published. And and how it addresses this issue of profitability, financial understanding as a whole for entrepreneurs.
Amol Maheshwari
Thank you for that. So that’s the book that the book is called Score, and it’s available on Amazon, I’m sure you share the link later on. So this, this is where it started, we talk a lot about skill building and understanding the basics of what you’re doing. You, we all notice that being becoming a business owner in the UK, in most Western countries in the UK, and in the US, you can wake up one morning and say I will run my own business, and go up and set up a company or start being self employed. So you can become an entrepreneur in what, 10 minutes. That’s not what you do with any other profession. So a lot of a lot of the education that we have to do with business owners is tell them that well, are you building business? And what’s the fundamentals of business? One of those fundamentals is the language, your businesses will talk to you in the language of money in the language of finance. So it’s really crucial for you to understand that language. That’s what this book is on. We’ve seen. We’ve seen a lot of books on finance. And as we speak to our clients, if we spend so much time teaching them finance and how to think about their accounts and how to think about their numbers, we realize that actually, most books tend to approach it from a bookkeeping or accounting perspective. And that’s not what business owners want. What they want is, well, what does this mean for me? What does it mean for my business? What am I looking for? And a lot of business owners seem to think that is not my job as the accountants job. But the profit doesn’t go to the accountant, the accountant usually gets a fee. So the job of understanding the business and truest numbers is the business owners. So if there is any one skill that I would pick across all that the business owner needs to have. It’s this, this understanding what that’s really what started us down the bulk of of the book. So we wrote it in such a way that we said, well, let’s make it easy. Let’s make it really relevant for this particular segment, the small business owners small medium enterprise business, not to say that others won’t find it useful. But that’s where it’s addressed. And we said, let’s break it into three parts. So one part we made it as the book is in three parts I’ve said was first part, he said, let’s pick it as a bit of a reference manual. So if you see any figure in your accounts, if your accountant throws a number at you or throws a government key, you should be able to look it up. You should be able to say okay, what is that? What does it do? How do I match? So that’s the first part of the book. The second part of the book is Skype for case study workbook. So you can work alongside start putting, actually do in my view, you will do a whole a semester of accounting course, if you do just the second part of the book, so you’re walking through a whole business, and writing down and making your own accounts for the business. And the third part is where we take it to the next level saying, Okay, if you really understood your business, and you Understood, understood how return on investment works, and how value creation works, and how we measure these techniques, we could really scale up the business and we break that ceiling of complexity, which you don’t know, usually the money is or the other finance or the businesses. And when we say that one of the biggest fears, or one of the biggest dangers for our business is a blind spot. And this is where we find the finance is often for most business owners, they don’t know. Because it’s like a big blind spot for them. They’re like, Well, I’m getting customers, right, and the cash is coming in, right, and I can afford to pay my employees. Right. So I’m okay. And that, that is such a big blind spot. And that’s what the third part tries to address that will help really should you be reverse thinking and saying, Well, what’s the real purpose of the business? And how do I measure and how my measuring data?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so true. And I think one of the things that that makes this really challenging is many SMEs, their leadership teams that are helping them to make these decisions, they lack the financial understanding as well. Right. And so, one of the places you talked about impostor syndrome, one of the places I see that happening is where, you know, founders sitting there saying, I don’t quite understand how all our finances work if I’m, if I’m honest. And and now I’m supposed to hold others accountable to making great financial decisions. And it’s almost a little overwhelming, like, where do we even start? How do I start to level them up? So what is that first step for someone who’s in that they’re feeling it right now that they’re kind of wrestling with some of the inadequacy of it and but they really want their business to be more profitable?
Amol Maheshwari
Well, the first step is to read the book. But just to just to be more direct about it. So you need a basic understanding, if you’re if you’re, if you think of yourself as a business professional, you need to invest in your business education, one of those investments, some of these some of these core concepts. So the book, and there’s, there’s others, too, when you talk about the core concepts, so you know what you’re doing. In our book, at the end of it, we define whether this is the one page, if you have this one page, it will tell you everything about your business. So you’re trying to highlight what what are the key things in your business that you want to look at. And those are the things that you want, if you have a management team, those are things you want your management team to report on. Those are also the things you want to incentivize your management team. So what’s good and what’s bad. And I’ve seen a lot of these discussions where you love your management team. And they come to you and they seem to be all meeting their KPIs. Because none of the KPIs are really well defined and good after numbers. But the business is not making money. So everyone’s happy until they look at the numbers and say, well, we’re not making profit. And if that’s happening, then that then it’s really coming from the top, that the business owner has not understood what they want to look at. And therefore they’ve not been able to explain to people how to make decisions. How does the output expect the management team to make decisions that help the business? If they don’t know what will help the business?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Yeah, it’s such a great point, because again, the idea of going back to the earlier point of books written for the wrong audience, and even said this from an accounting perspective, you know, most of the time, when folks are professionally approach a p&l they’re thinking about in terms of making sure that it’s it’s either GAAP compliant here in the US or or will keep the taxman happy, right. But neither of those actually contribute to making the good decisions that are necessary to be profitable as an organization. So I love your approach and say, No, let’s look at this from an entrepreneurial perspective. Yeah, we have to level up financial understanding, we have to understand what these terms mean. But we want to understand them so that we know how to make better decisions as a team.
Amol Maheshwari
you’re spot on, and you’re right doesn’t have if I’m writing a business, and I do my accounts, so that I keep the taxman happy, then really, I’m also an in the same breath saying that when I run my business, so I can pay ducks. If I if I run my business so that I don’t get fouled of the of the of the tax guy, then again, I’m saying that while I’m running my business out of fear, I just do the things that the government has asked me to do. And that’s what I do. If I’m running my business for myself, that actually I have my own set of accounts. So I have a report that comes to me first. And it doesn’t matter what the tax man is asking for what they’re not asking for is, what my sales are, what my gross profit is, what my net profit is, what matter done at every point of time, as I’m big on evaluating decisions on numbers, and saying, Well, does this make sense for me on the numerical perspective or not?
Scott Ritzheimer
Well, yeah, that’s go straight to the heart of it. Who are you running your business for us? Again, it’s just gold in there. Alright. So there’s a question I like to ask all my guests and it’s this. What would you Say we kind of summarizing all of this, what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish everybody watching or listening today? Knew?
Amol Maheshwari
Okay, I thought about this. And I thought about it also, actually, when I, because of the title of our of podcast. And have you seen the Kung Fu Panda? Yeah, the movie. So in the console Panda, there’s this weird thing about, there’s the Secret Scroll, which has, which has all the powers. And at the end of it, they realize that the scroll is actually empty, there is no secret. And this is kind of the theme of the movie. And for me, I think that’s that in today’s day and age, that’s become a big indicator of how business owners think. If you’re always looking online for the next tweet, which will tell you the secret of the next install, which will tell you the secret. It’s that’s not how it works. There are books that have been written about 50-60-100 years ago, which actually have revealed the secret there. It’s out there. It’s not, it’s not complicated. You just need to take the right steps to it one step at a time. So for me, I think the secret to success is just putting it in this case is just saying, Well, okay, what are the fundamentals that have been established? Not in the last five years, but 20 years ago, 30 years ago, values that have been established at work works, making sure that you’re thinking positively and moving in the right direction and defining the vision of your business that works, making sure that you’re good at what you do, and that you’re doing it for the right reason aligned with the right values, these things work. So these are not, unfortunately, these are not secrets anymore. It’s just that someone positions and packages that a little differently and gives it out as a secret. And I’m like, well, that’s new. It’s not. So for me, it’s like just go back to the fundamentals go back to the great artists. And they they’ve revealed everything already. Yeah. So funnily enough, I was, I was explaining my book to some. And I was saying what actually everything, one of the things that we’ve done over over the last 10 credit 30 years, is we’ve tried to make accounts look similar across the world. So everyone is seated, speaking the same language, so I can pick up and I can pick up UK GAAP, and I can pick up GAAP in the US and I can pick up IFRS. And I’ll find they look very similar. They’ll be using the same language they use looking very similar. So it’s not a secret, that this this knowledge is not a secret. It’s all there. And actually, we’ve codified it. So it’s fun language. But people think that there’s some secret sauce. The secret sauce is just the belief that you can do it.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love it. It goes back to your thing earlier, it’s it’s all hard work. But as entrepreneurs, we get to pick which hard work we’re going to do. And and yeah, such a great point. Before I let you go, I’m going to shift gears on you for a second I’m gonna have you put on your Managing Partner hat instead of your coach consultant hat. Talk to us a little bit about the next stage of growth for you and your business and what challenge you’ll have to overcome to get there?
Amol Maheshwari
So we have, we have two parts to the business ready. One part is the as the coaching part with Roy regrowing the coaching part of the business, but we were fairly selective in the kinds of clients we work with. So we are also selective and the coaches that we work with. So we are building our coaching team. And that’s what we plan to do this year and next year also, to continue to build our coaching team, do it a little selectively do it to make sure that we can continue to deliver the value that we can’t. That’s first part the business. The second part of the business is private equity. We’ve always I think from day one, we’ve always said that we won’t teach anything that we are not doing ourselves. So we’ve always had this push to say well, we’ll implement all the things we were telling our our, or our clients in our own business and in our businesses. So one of the things we’ve been telling clients is you need to grow through acquisition and organic growth. That’s what we’ve been doing, then we’ve been telling them we need to learn how to implement these systems, these these principles build the right MD. So part of our growth plan and the private equity side is to build our own portfolio of businesses continue to build our own portfolio businesses and implement some of the same things that we are we tell our clients that they should do. So that’s that’s the best long term plan to it.
Scott Ritzheimer
It seems so simple, right? What do you need to do take your own advice that how many coaches and consultants in our industry don’t do that I love that you’re willing to put your your methods where your mouth is and make it happen yourself. So well done with that. Super excited about the future for you guys growth idea, adding coaches and continuing to grow your impact as well. Again, the book is available, it’s called score, it’s on Amazon, we’ll add the link to the show note how can folks find more out about you and the work that you do as well.
Amol Maheshwari
So the best way is actually to go to our website growthidea.co.uk It’s It’s a.co.uk website for for listeners in the US. But if they go there, there’s there’s enough material there we have a growth hub where we could where we keep putting a lot of material ongoing. We have two books so the Score is actually our second book, the first book by my partner sponsors, is actually available to order for free. So you can go on the website and order that. We try and put a lot of content out there for free. And it’s available on our website. So that’s probably the first step. The second step would be well, if you want to work with us and you apply to the to the website, and like I said, we are selective. So I would suggest you first go through all the free content and then decide if you want it.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. Well, thank you so much for being here. Just a privilege having you on the show. Fantastic, fantastic advice. And for those of you watching and listening, you know that your time and attention means the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Amol Maheshwari
Amol Maheshwari is a managing partner in Growth Idea, the UK’s leading SME business coaching and consulting company. He also leads the private equity arm of S J Mann Solutions, a London-based investment business. Amol has previously worked in investment banking and corporate finance with HSBC and Morgan Stanley.
Want to learn more about Amol’s work at Growth Idea? Check out their website at https://growthidea.co.uk/ or get a copy of his new book Score! on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/SCORE-fundamentals-building-financially-successful-ebook/dp/B0CFR4QL47/ref=sr_1_1
Podcast Booking Status: Open
We are looking for podcast guests, and we want to share your story.
Are you a coach, consultant, or advisor for entrepreneurial organizations? If so, let’s do a great show together – and we can promote you to our audience on all our social media channels, website, and email list.
Guest requirements:
- As a coach, you should be experiencing some very good momentum AND be grossing $100K or more annually. We’ll be talking about how you help your clients achieve extraordinary results.
- Consider yourself as equally people and results-oriented in your mission.
- High-authority expert management and independent coaches who work with founder-led entrepreneurial organizations of 40 or more employees. We also encourage guests that are operations/strategy and culture consultants, advisors, and leadership coaches to be guests (no specialties in marketing, branding, sales, or IT, please
- Please, no new coaches (under 3 years), published authors, non-independent coaches, or non-business coaches/consultants.