Hello, Ozana Giusca here. I want to take a few minutes to ask you the questions that are on every small business owner’s mind:
I get asked these questions all the time and it’s why I dedicate my life to empowering fellow entrepreneurs to build their businesses such that they get what they want and live a happy life.
Let me tell you a little about myself…
In 2008 my life seemed perfect. I was a rising star, doing everything most people would love to do.
After attaining my MBA from Cass Business School, London in 2000, I worked in the City for a few years. In 2003, I set up my own consulting firm, where I advised on selling a few companies and raised $150,000,000 in bank finance for various projects.
While my business generated a decent income, I knew I was on my way to support other entrepreneurs help more people and make a bigger impact.
With a team of 12 consultants, I was living my dream. I could party, travel, wear my favorite brands…
I bought a flat, then another one, then an office for our company, a new car… until the financial crisis hit my business badly, as happened with thousands of businesses around the world.
All of a sudden money stopped flowing in. The banks withdrew from financing our transactions; those hundreds of thousands of dollars in success fees never arrived; and ongoing consulting projects got put on hold. No more new business meant no more cash.
Imagine: By January 2009, I had let most of my team go. For me, they were not just staff, they were family. And they were damn good at what they did.
With more than a million dollars in debt, I could no longer pay the bank. Many sleepless nights followed… I felt ashamed, convinced people would point a finger at me, accuse me of not paying my debts. I got scared thinking about a potential bad credit rating and that I might never be able to get a loan again.
I felt my reputation as an honest, trustworthy businessperson was ruined as I couldn’t pay my debts.
I had no money coming in and was borrowing on a monthly basis to pay my two remaining staff members. I was driving to my father every weekend to get food for the week for me and my partner.
It seemed that every phone call I got, every email I received, brought more bad news.
Watch this: my phone service provider threatening to end my contract should I not pay my bills. Imagine trying to save a business without a phone connection or access to the internet!
That was it, I decided. Enough! I borrowed more money and paid for an event in London where 15 successful entrepreneurs shared their strategies on how they became profitable. I learned about online marketing, selling one-to-many via events and social media advertising. Most importantly I realized the need to be visible to the right audience.
How many of these tactics do you think I applied? None! Because I soon realized I was in the wrong business anyway. Yep, this was my biggest take-away from the conference. I realized there was nothing special about me or my business, nothing that would get clients to choose our services.
There were too many people doing the same thing, making it difficult to differentiate myself.
As I had all this cutting edge knowledge, I started applying it to the businesses of former clients, and friends. And this is how I started earning again…
It turned out my consulting business was not the only business lacking proper business knowledge! In fact, most small businesses lack such knowledge – they are usually set up based on an opportunity the founder sees, based on the founder’s skills and abilities. Yet businesses are complex and no entrepreneur can know it all; certainly no one can handle everything.
I also discovered my special gift: being able to identify where a business is leaving money on the table and how they can double or even triple their profits by making a few important changes.
My skill became immediately obvious as I managed to achieve:
With the right tools YOU too can turn your business around.
Over the past three years, I have personally helped more than 100 companies achieve massive growth. Some companies increased Sales by 30% within the first month of working with us; others tripled their Sales within a year.
I put all the knowledge I gathered – and much more – into what is today known as Business Lens™, a toolkit to identify what business owners don’t do well or enough of in their company. This is a tool that reveals the naked truth about any business. It measures, mathematically, the gap between your company and Best Practices. The bigger the gap, the more growth potential the company has. Plus, it shows business owners where they need to focus to maximize Sales and profits.
This was the start of Tooliers, the platform with smart business solutions for small enterprises to increase profitability and become leaders in their niche. We now have clients around the globe and what’s most important is not that we are making money, but that we help those who need us and our tools to smarten their businesses and achieve bigger profits faster.
Above all, I am proud of having built something that lasts beyond me. I know people will benefit from my current activities even after I am no longer here.
What’s really in it for me?
FREEDOM!
The freedom to do what I want, when I want; to live anywhere in the world… and most importantly to be ME!
SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS?
You too can have the FREEDOM you want!
When you look at the right things in your business, you have the recipe to success.
And I guess this is one reason you are reading this – you know you can do more and you want to.
The economy changes rapidly these days. As a small business owner, it is easy to run your business as if lost in a dark forest, thinking only of survival. You might forget about the destination. You are most likely involved with paying the next bill, dealing with a crisis after your best employee has left, trying to make up for that lost customer, deciding what kind of paper to buy for the copy machine and many other activities that keep you ‘busy’ and working hard.
But do you work smart? What if there was a better way to achieve those dreams you had when you started your business?
One third of business owners want to grow their businesses, but don’t know how and where to start. The rest would like to maintain their business. The reality, however, is that 80% of businesses fail in the first five years and 96% in the first 10 years (this according to Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth).
These facts also inspired me to write a book, develop workshops, Master Classes, and more tools. I want to help YOU, a business owner, to enjoy your entrepreneurship. I want to help small business owners like you really achieve the success you deserve.
Ozana
The Smart Profits Accelerator
P.S. If you are serious about growing your sales and profits, raising your profile and helping way more people, I invite you to join any of my online or live masterclasses and bootcamps.
Visit http://www.ozanagiusca.com/my-events to get the updated schedule of my events and register to those most suitable for you.