Your Business – The Ultimate Team

Hi, my name is Nicolas Kyriopoulos, founder and principal of Peterson Group where our objective is to help people achieve their financial and business goals. 16 years ago I began my journey as a small business owner when I started my accounting firm. This blog is my opportunity to share my ideas, failures and successes with you. I will use my experiences in my business and personal life to offer many different thoughts for people who are running a business.

My whole life has revolved around sport, football (soccer) in particular. I have made many friends, business associates and clients from the game. However, the most important thing I learned was that I could relate my business and ideas to a team and sporting club. Sport can be many things and many emotions. The feelings of sadness when I lost, happiness when I won, disappointment when I didn’t play well, feeling let down when someone didn’t put in the effort required, and hope before a season started. These were all feelings that I had to deal with during the course of a season. Feelings that are no different to what we have to deal with in business every day.

Every member of your TEAM has a role to play, from the Coach (Director/Owner), the Star Forward (Salesperson), to the humble Defender (Back Office Support). No matter how good you are in YOUR position, you need each member of the TEAM to play as well, and the better you all play together, the better the Football Team will play and more often than not the Team will win.

Something new is offered in business every week, just like preparing for a game. You have the opportunity to put last week’s performance behind you and work on this week. You can analyse what happened last week and the weeks and months before and make the required adjustments going forward. Just like a coach meets with his/her team to discuss what everyone has to do in preparation for the game, you as the business owner must do the same. It’s up to you to motivate, correct, advise and guide each member of your team to make sure that you are ready for game day. It’s up to you to use previous experiences with your team, clients and associates to help make sure that you get things right this week.

Just in case you are wondering, delivering your product/service to your client is your “Game Day”. Your preparation before you deliver is your training and planning, your review of what has been delivered is your post match meeting, your daily  morning meeting (yes we do DAILY morning meetings) is your pre training instructions, your weekly meeting is your review of last week’s game and this week’s game preparation.

If there is ONE thing that all great team coaches have in common, it is that they are known for their meticulous planning. They review every minor detail and correct things every day in order to get the best out of their team. They review every stat available and try to make even the slightest improvement, for instance if I can get an improvement of 0.5 percent every week from my team overall (which doesn’t sound like much), I know that come the “business end” of the season my team will have improved by 26 percent. Not too bad when you look at it that way, but that’s the ONLY way to look at it.

If you try to change things in order to get a 26 percent improvement from one week to the next, one thing is for certain, you will fail and kill your confidence and your team’s morale. So make small changes and they will add up to big changes come the end of the season.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog, next week I will return with more ideas for your play book. Until then, good luck for your game.

Nicolas Kyriopoulos

Peterson Group