Your Guide To Building A Successful Business: Proven Steps to Grow Your Business & Develop Your Leadership Skills

Running a business is a tough gig. Everyone thinks you've got all the answers and you're living the dream. For most of us, we don't have all the answers. And whilst we may have set off with a dream, our day-to-day reality is far from dream like.

Your Guide to Building a Successful Business is packed full of ideas for improving every aspect of your business and your leadership. It can't do it for you, but it can give you the practical building blocks in bite-sized chunks for growing a sustainable and profitable business, and one that you'll enjoy more and more each day.

This book covers:

- Leadership: How to improve your self-management and self-development, and in the process become a more effective leader of those around you.

- Planning: How to focus on tomorrow and the future and create step-by-step action plans to take you there.

- Finance: How to understand the numbers and make them work for you.

- Team: How to find people with the right skills and a great attitude, manage their performance, and develop their potential.

- Systems: How to develop processes and checklists to generate more consistent and better results, with less energy and effort.

- Business Development: How to retain and develop existing customers, and find, attract and secure new ones.

SME Business Solutions was established in 2007. Since then, Mark has been a business coach, working alongside ambitious business owners and executives, helping them enhance their leadership skills and develop strong, sustainable and profitable businesses. The 25 years Mark spent in commercial general management now feels like the perfect apprenticeship. The variety, the roles, the different companies, the different cultures, the highs and lows of commercial life, the lessons along the way. Mark qualified as a mining engineer. His first taste of people management was as a coalface supervisor - a real baptism of fire. In the late 1980s he studied for an MBA at The Manchester Business School and McGill University. In his early thirties, Mark tested his mettle in a different culture. Over three years he built a new business employing over 150 people in Malaysia. Several years as a marketing controller allowed Mark to engage a true passion - practical, purposeful creativity. Effective ways of communicating and engaging with customers; launching new products and services; and brand building. Crunching numbers as a financial analyst for a large PLC, Mark spent much time quizzing MDs and FDs about their capital expenditure, acquisition and expansion plans. He now brings that same challenging, questioning approach to his clients' ideas and ambitions.As a management consultant, Mark enjoyed the strategic and intellectually challenge, but realised that consultants spend much time away from home and always have to be selling. Ironically, helping clients sell more effectively is now central to his coaching programme. But he rarely stays away from home. Mark is a trustee of the Manchester charity, Acting On Impulse. He is also a part-time project supervisor on the MBA programme at the Manchester Business School.Outside of work (which he doesn't really think of as work), he enjoys walking, cycling, skiing and photography. He recently cycled solo from Canterbury to Rome (the old Via Francigena pilgrimage route), raising funds for Acting On Impulse. Mark also enjoys reading, watching and listening to anything that's interesting, enlightening and thought- provoking. He also claims there's nothing better than sharing a simple meal with family and friends.