what's in a business advisor toolbox?

You want to lead clients creating predictable profits & cash, predictable sustainable growth, and predictable transferable value.

You just need to add a few “how-tos.” Here’s a quick list of the integrated analog and digital toolbox relied on by Growth-Drivers to tune the business engine:

• Sales Process for Business Advisors
• Checklists for the 3 DoG
• Growth Conversation scripts
• Clarity Level 1
• Lifestyle and Equity Value Planner
• Range of Values Analysis
• CEO Workshop Marketing Event
• Senior Leadership Alignment Report
• Strategic Leadership Alignment Workshop
• Strategic Growth Project Plan Template
• Sprints (OKRs with Accountability) Template
• Flash Report Template
• Execution Leadership System including Meeting Agendas

Lists are boring. Let’s weave these into the story of your journey winning and executing new engagements:

First things first: you want to win new engagements. Here are tools to use in early conversations educating CEOs and COIs about your awesome powers:

1. The Sales Process for Business Advisors worksheet involves guiding potential clients through a customized, seven-step process to ensure their unique needs are addressed and a strong relationship is built; all the while qualifying opportunities to ensure you’ll deliver a clear ROI through growing profits and transferable value. With a nod to marketing (resources pick list for each stage of the buyer’s journey).
   
   
2. Online Level 1 Clarity Strategic Capacity Analysis™ is a foundational online tool for educating clients and COIs about strategic capacity -a business’ ability to run like best-in-class competitors- that helps establish a clear understanding of goals, priorities, and strategies. Will soon connect to the HubSpot CRM.
   
   
3. The Lifestyle & Equity Value Planner helps individuals and businesses assess their financial goals, post-transfer lifestyle funding needs, and to plan targets for growing transferable equity value.
   
   
4. Range of Values Analysis calculates the range of values for your client’s business and educates them about the impact of growth capacity and value capacity on transferable value, positioning you as the expert.

They’re hearing you, and curious about ways to neutralize growth killers and deal killers. You need to get real: belly-to-belly discovery conversations that help you and your client qualify working together - you’re delivering value and giving a feel for working with you:

1. The CEO Workshop Marketing Event leverages Clarity™ and adds presentations and speaker notes (and coaching if you’d like) so you can deliver a killer workshop for CEOs showing how your expertise is hugely relevant to their challenges. Pro tip: get your strategic COIs to fill the room - they’ll look good, and CEOs love it.
   
   
2. Growth Conversation scripts are pre-written dialogue templates designed to facilitate productive discussions around personal and professional goals, creating that all-important emotional link between the status quo and a client’s ultimate “Why”.

At this point your client is going to be hungry for more. First order of business is getting the senior team pulling in the same direction in a couple of paid engagements:

1. The Senior Leadership Alignment Report drives Clarity™ into the senior team and  assesses the overall alignment of a company's senior leadership team, with an analysis of the team’s perspective. The CEO may be surprised by how divergent the team’s views are. If they can’t agree about where they are on the map, how can they move forward? Then move to…
   
   
2. The Strategic Leadership Alignment Workshop, an interactive event designed to bring senior leaders together and create alignment about strategic capacity and create team buy-in.

With everyone oriented on goals and the business’ strategic capacity to reach them, you’ll dig deeper to deliver value (and earn fees) generating data and crafting strategy: 

1. The Level 2 Clarity Strategic Capacity Analysis generates the data you need to fuel strategy and to populate sprints (strategic doing).¹
   
   
2. The Strategic Growth Project Plan Template is a crisp structured project that becomes the map for reaching the CEO’s revenue and transferable value goals 
   
   
3. Sprints Template (OKRs with Accountability) is a tool that combines Objectives and Key Results with accountability to guide progress towards goals. Think of sprints as ‘what we’re going to do, who is going to do it, by when, and with defined success’.

And now you’re guiding your client to reaching their goals by delivering predictable cash, growth and transferable equity value. They are winning and loving you for it:

1. The Flash Report Template is the central tool for keeping score of execution - think data with collaboration and accountability. It’s magic. 
   
   
2. The Execution Leadership System, including Meeting Agendas, is a comprehensive approach to managing and executing business strategies through well-structured meetings and focused agendas. It’s linked to the 3 Dimensions of Business Growth, increasing Strategic Capacity and thereby growing revenues and transferable value. You guessed it, the Flash Report is a star player in weekly meetings.

Wow. This is a comprehensive toolbox, right? You’re a senior pro, if you value expanding your reach and relevance and delivering client wins then look for tools like those described here. You can build your own arsenal, and they’re also available to our community of growth-drivers. Everyone who participates in the Growth-Drive Launch Course gets these - and killer training on how to use them. Check it out. 

Growth-Drive Founder and CEO George Sandmann's new book Growth-Drive: The Proven Secrets of Top-Performing Business Advisors (Forbes Books, August 2023) delivers the knowledge and stories that inspired creation of these tools.

We’d love to know what you think, please comment here or email blog@growth-drive.com.

1. Spring 2023