If you run your own business, you probably know the feeling. The phone rings before you’ve had your coffee. A customer needs an answer, a team member needs a decision, and the invoices still haven’t gone out. You started the business for more freedom, but most days it feels like the business is running you.
You’re not alone, and it isn’t a personal failing. Most owners were never shown how to build a business that can run without them. That’s exactly what the ActionCOACH Business Operating System (ABOS) is designed to do.
What is ABOS?
ABOS is a step-by-step framework, backed by a diagnostic platform, that moves owners out of daily firefighting and towards a profitable business that runs itself. It draws on more than 30 years of ActionCOACH experience with hundreds of thousands of business owners around the world.
At its heart is a simple definition of a real business: a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you. In other words, the business does the work, so you don’t have to.
The end goal is freedom across four areas: your time, your team, your money and your motivation. You also end up with something valuable, a business you could sell if you ever chose to.
ABOS gets you there in six steps. Here’s how each one works.
How ABOS is installed
Your journey starts with an ABOS Assessment. It shows where your business stands today and which areas need attention first. From there, your coach works through the six steps with you, using two main tools:
- Strategy Cards: focused, practical actions that tackle one specific area of your business.
- Playbooks: fuller guides that walk you through installing a complete system.
An ongoing ABOS Dashboard then tracks your progress, so you can see the results building over time.
Step 1: Mastery, from chaos to control
The first step is about taking back the driving seat. Many owners are stuck in reactive mode. Some are just about keeping up with the bills. Others are doing well but still believe that if a job needs doing properly, they have to do it themselves.
Mastery builds a solid foundation through four areas:
- Destination Mastery brings clarity. Planning and goal-setting systems help you lead the business day to day and steer it over the long term.
- Time Mastery brings productivity. Systems for managing yourself and your people create small gains that add up to bigger bottom-line results.
- Delivery Mastery brings consistency. Simple process improvements and checklists mean customers get the same great experience every time, so they come back and recommend you.
- Financial Mastery brings profit. You learn to read your historical numbers, and also the predictive ones that show where you’re heading. That gives you the confidence to make real decisions.
The mindset at this stage is to be patient with growth but impatient for profit every single day.
Step 2: Marketing, turning up the cash flow
With the foundations in place, it’s time to grow. ActionCOACH defines marketing as profitably buying lifetime customers. Every pound you spend should bring back more than a pound in extra profit. Through testing and measuring, marketing stops being a cost and becomes an investment, with a return on ad spend you can track and celebrate.
This step centres on the 5 Ways formula. Improve each of these five areas a little, and the gains multiply across your bottom line:
- Leads: attracting the right number of potential customers for steady growth that your team and cash flow can handle.
- Conversion rate: building a sales process that nurtures prospects and turns more of them into customers.
- Number of transactions: encouraging past customers to buy again, which is where most profit comes from.
- Average sale: increasing the value of each sale to each customer.
- Margins: making sure every sale delivers the best possible gross profit.
Each area comes with dozens of Strategy Cards to choose from. A strong brand boosts the results across all five.
Alongside the 5 Ways sits the Ladder of Loyalty. It’s a system for moving people from someone in your target market, all the way up to a raving fan. Raving fans buy often, refer people like themselves and talk about you online. Get this right and your customer experience becomes one of your best sources of new business.
Step 3: Systems, making the business work
In ABOS, SYSTEM stands for Save Your Self Time, Energy and Money. This step delivers the “works” part of a business that works without you.
The principle is simple. You build the systems, the systems run the business, and your team runs the systems. Your role shifts to leading and managing the people. Growth becomes far more predictable as a result.
Your coach takes you through nine steps to systemise the business:
- Steps 1 to 4 set direction. You define your vision, mission, values and company goals.
- Steps 5 to 7 shape the team. You work out the size and structure of the team you’ll need to make the vision real.
- Steps 8 and 9 make it repeatable. You install the systems and create the manuals and checklists that let the business run consistently.
Once this is done, you can start stepping back from the daily detail.
Step 4: Team, building people who build the business
TEAM stands for Together Everyone Achieves More. To get your freedom, you need people who can deliver results whether you’re in the building or not.
ABOS uses six keys to build a winning team:
- Strong leadership: it starts with you, your leadership skills and your personal leadership style.
- A common goal: something everyone knows, believes in and benefits from.
- Culture and the rules of the game: a clear, written agreement on how the team works together.
- An action plan: everyone knows who does what, and by when.
- Support for risk taking: room to try new things as the business grows.
- 100% involvement and inclusion: every team member plays a part.
Add strong management, leadership and communication systems, and the business starts to feel like a well-oiled machine. Your trust in the team grows, and you can choose to step back or step up.
Step 5: Scale, from steady growth to multiplied growth
Scale is about taking the model you’ve built and expanding it to whatever size you want. Not every owner wants to grow this far, and that’s fine. For those who do, this is where growth stops being a percentage and starts to multiply.
Scaling rests on five core disciplines that work together:
- Strategy
- Business development
- People
- Execution
- Mission
Each discipline breaks down into several key functions, supported by more than 500 Strategy Cards and a range of Playbooks. Growth at this level needs to be funded, balanced and built on great people, with a great coach alongside you.
Step 6: Freedom, a business that works without you
This is where everything comes together. You now have a business you could sell, or at least one you could choose to sell.
Every owner leaves their business one day. Too many simply close the doors because of their own ill health or the ill health of the business. ABOS aims for a planned exit instead. That might mean a company that runs happily without you, or one you sell as a valuable asset.
While ABOS is being installed in your business, your coach is also working on your own growth. ActionCOACH describes this as the Entrepreneurial Ladder:
- Student: learning the basics.
- Employee: gaining experience in someone else’s business.
- Self-employed: running your own business, often doing most of the work yourself.
- Manager: leading your own team.
- Owner: letting go, so your team runs the business without you.
Each rung takes new skills and a new mindset. Letting go at the top is often the hardest part, which is why the right support matters so much.
CARE: how you grow alongside your business
If ABOS is how your business grows, CARE is how you grow. It stands for four things every owner needs:
- Community: running a business can be lonely. ActionCOACH brings you together with other owners to learn from and alongside.
- Accountability: your coach, mastermind groups and peer support keep you focused on profit and growth.
- Results: a constant focus on the numbers that build your profit and the value of your company.
- Education: online learning, books, events and quarterly planning sessions, because your business can only grow as fast as you do.
Where do you start?
You don’t have to tackle all six steps at once. Most owners start at Mastery, getting control of their time, numbers and goals before pushing for growth. Others are ready to work on marketing, systems or team straight away. The ABOS Assessment shows you exactly where to begin.
The prize is worth it: more time for your family, your hobbies and the life you started the business for, plus a business that keeps growing while you enjoy it.
Ready to find out where your business stands? Book a complimentary coaching session and we’ll walk you through how ABOS could work for your business.
