I was walking past the Coaching team and they were all huddled like a NASA team looking up at one of the screens of a business that had just become a client.

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As I was passing I heard Mark say “that's the old case of speed v velocity”.

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I walked on but then turned back and had to ask what madness were they talking about.

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The Company was a 10-year mature company that was established in the right areas and the Directors felt it needs a bit of a freshening up.

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I said I had overheard the conversation what did he mean by speed v velocity?

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Mark explained about a car that drives around a track as fast as it likes, yes it has speed but it has no velocity. i.e. in ends up in the same place with no real effect.

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I was even more lost now so stay with me…

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I asked Mark to explain again the race car theory as I didn’t get it, how can you have speed but not have velocity?

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He said what they look for in the smallest detail when changing a business, especially an established one with systems is, yes the systems in existence are doing their job but are they having an impact or taking the task in the direction of the goal?

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I was still lost…

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Tell me again, make it really simple for me.  

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Mark said, “have you ever dealt with a company who is doing okay but they feel like they are just doing the same thing over and over, press repeat, a bit up then a bit down, month on month, year on year”. I said yeah. He said, “see, it’s just going around in circles, the speed is there but they are not actually getting anywhere, all speed no velocity, take the car off a round track and put it on a road and we then now have a destination, effect and impact and that's what's been missing.”

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Now I got it, I liked it, I never thought of it like that. So simple. I asked what do you tell the Directors?

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Mark said he uses the race car a lot as it is just no waffle and tells the story. Then we, with the right coaching , start by telling the Directors for example, they have to be on the same page, the same speed, they cannot have one being a dreamer screamer and the other one all calm and collected, they need to set the pace so the staff and clients copy them and rather than running all over the place, calm it down and say that's how we work now and more importantly that’s how we work with each other. We interact in this calm way and not at 100mph but at a sensible pace. Going mad just adds chaos theory and everyone gets hyped up, confused or burnt out.

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Secondly, the way everything in the business is handled is also at the new agreed speed, imagine a gutter was laid on your floor throughout your own house and then you had to carefully pour sewage in it, you would not just pour quickly, you would make sure it was done at a pace so the sewage didn’t go everywhere, you would also work as hard as you could to remove sharp bends etc and not to have places where it could cause a build-up. The flow is key, a constant flow is required for information with no stops or tension allowing an increase in communications in and out of the business. Think of how to reduce the number of hands a piece of paper has to go through or just leaving a note on someone's desk when they are on site doesn't help them or us, think it through, no blockages, if not you will just get covered in %$£@“.

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And finally, add goals, this then breaks the circle of the track and you have to be brave and may need the help of a Trade Coach to identify the right ones at the right time therefore you play your hand well as it bounces over to the financial side but count in the big goals and also the small goals and then rather than plod year after year month after month you start to attack and change the universe you were in. “Speed v Velocity, simple you see”.

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Thank you to the Coaches, especially Mark and I hope it makes something click for you as it did for me. The coaches always say de-personalise it, its never really the owner's fault, they are very smart and brave people, it's just they need someone to simply help them as people for once, listen and try to give some good quality information if they can, a different perspective to make things click and they should realise its not them at fault ever it just comes with running a business and they took action by making a commercial decision and contacting the coaches and the bottleneck is now gone.

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I hope you found this useful! If you would like to go over anything we discussed within this article, please let us to know by getting started here! 

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