Real World Associates - a new level of business awareness…

Today’s marketplace is changing – and increasingly challenging.

Many businesses take external advice or input at some time to help them to develop their business. This may be for additional expertise in a specialist area, or for additional resource to speed up a change, or even to help with what we call  ‘prophet in your own land’ syndrome – you know what changes are needed, you’ve been telling your team repeatedly, but for some reason the message doesn’t seem to be getting through…

Just stop for a moment and ask yourself: What’s really stopping it from happening?

Good business people already know instinctively what needs to be done and where things could be improved. Certainly, they are in a better position to know this than most external advisors. So they don’t just need more advice, more skills, more techniques…they need something extra, to help them to get the change they want.

Time to get Real….

Time to recognise what you already do right – and the actual value that delivers for you and your customers. Time also to put right those things that haven’t worked as well as you needed… yet.

Any changes required to develop a business, whether in response to external market pressures or internal issues ultimately require changes in the behaviours of the people in the business – and changing a behaviour requires addressing the whole person.    

We have found that, over 25 years working with large and medium sized companies, both as external advisors and as hands-on directors and managers in our own separate businesses, the real issue was that most companies had addressed only part of the problem:

• If markets changed, they brought in marketing consultants
• If sales were down, some sales trainers worked on techniques
• If internal working practices weren’t delivering, they reorganised roles
• If morale went down, they ran some ‘away-day’ team building workshops

However, because only parts of the problem were addressed (usually by specialists who could not see the whole picture), it didn’t go away – indeed often things got worse.