Jeremy Harbour

Jeremy Harbour Tells Why You Need A Strategic Plan for Exponential Growth

To make your start-up a successful venture requires you to develop a set of strategies that you use as a roadmap to ensure your success. To increase your chances of success, it is important to implement a strategic plan for potential business growth.

Jeremy Harbour, an entrepreneur with 20 years of experience helps entrepreneurs with real tactics for buying, fixing, and selling businesses. He suggests young entrepreneurs to have a future-oriented vision for their business.

According to the 38-year old businessman, “The main reason to develop a strategic plan for business growth is that you have some vague notions about your business objectives and what YOU want to achieve for yourself from your business. So, a strategic plan will help you achieve those personal goals you want for the next 5 to 10 years.”

The goal of strategic planning is to develop an action plan with short, medium and long-term milestones that are measurable. It takes into account all business areas including product/service development, staffing & team management needs, sales & marketing, financial & accounting control/operations which are effective for any business to lead the path of growth.

Jeremy Harbour has just launched a new trade association, The Business Recovery Forum (BRF), a not-for-profit association which provides one-to-one guidance and insight to businesses which fail to reap the fruits of success or fail to realize their market potential

Think Big If You Want to Achieve Big, says Jeremy Harbour

Most of us tend to be scared of thinking big. We avoid taking risks and it stops us from reaching our full potential. Jeremy Harbour wants to change this. The Singapore-based serial entrepreneur states that thinking big allows us to broaden our horizons and opens the floodgate of opportunities, especially for entrepreneurs.

With a career spanning almost two decades, Jeremy has started multi-million businesses and generated hundreds of jobs. His 200-page business self-help book titled “Go Do!” is for young entrepreneurs and business aspirants who are striving to make their ventures succeed in the long run.

“Self-belief is the key to realizing your dreams and turning them into reality. Trust yourself with the utmost conviction and others will start believing in you. It doesn’t matter how big your goals are, just don’t settle for less. What may be small to one person could be overwhelming for the other. The most important thing is having belief in yourself and to be the very best that YOU can be” shared Jeremy Harbour during a recent interview.

Entrepreneurs across the world are learning from his experience and launching successful businesses. When asked to comment on the book, a reader shared, “Jeremy does not think outside the box, he doesn’t have a box.”

Launch Successful Business with Growth Hacks from Jeremy Harbour

Jeremy Harbour, a serial entrepreneur and thought leader, started his first business at the age of 14. After starting multi-million dollar businesses and creating hundreds of jobs, he is sharing his business secrets and growth hacks with future entrepreneurs in his book “Go Do!”  

Here are the major tips and ideas for entrepreneurs who want to start their own business and launch successful companies:

Be clear why you want to start your business
Don’t start a business because you are bored of your 9-5 job routine. Start only when you’re truly prepared for the journey of entrepreneurship and want to make a difference.
Create a business plan
Make a detailed business plan covering USP, target audience, market competition, and financials. Keep it simple but don’t forget to chalk out what differentiates you from the others.  
Perfect your pricing
Most entrepreneurs jump into the market without conducting market deep dive and preparing pricing model. Keep the numbers in mind so that you’ll be clear what goal you have to achieve in terms of revenue.

While above are few business hacks from Jeremy Harbour, the book is full of growth anecdotes that draw from his personal experience as an entrepreneur. Here’s an excerpt from the same book:  

“In current state of economic turbulence, everyone wants to start a business but it isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s a journey that requires a lot of hard work and dedication. Many people end up failing. But if your business succeeds, the rewards of entrepreneurship can be very delicious”

Top Qualities of a Successful Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs are the business leaders with distinct qualities who organize, operate, and assume the risk for a business venture while keeping eyes on their goal.

Jeremy Harbour, a Singapore-based entrepreneur highlights some of the qualities that differentiate a successful entrepreneur from a regular businessperson.

(en)Vision
They have a clear vision of what they want to create; they set their goals and start working for it.
Clarity & Focus
They keep their eyes focused on what and how to achieve their goals.
Passion & Discipline
Passion is what helps successful entrepreneurs choose their direction and stay motivated. They are disciplined to follow a proper regime to achieve their objectives.  
Persistence
Always, always keep going! This is the mantra of successful entrepreneurs.
Faith in themselves
By keeping great faith in themselves, they always aspire to achieve bold visions.
Strong communication skills
Using strong communication skills they turn the prospect into their potential customer. They leave no stone unturned in building the solid business and making a pretty good rate of investment.

Jeremy Harbour, at 14, started his first business in his school and at 18, he managed to persuade his bank to lend him some money and set up his own amusement arcade, using second-hand gaming machines.

Top Business Secrets Shared By Jeremy Harbour

Jeremy Harbour is a successful entrepreneur well-known for his expertise in the Mergers & Acquisitions. Born and raised in the UK, he touched the heights of success with his hard work and dedication. At the age of 14, he started running a market stall in school on the weekends. At that time he used to sell watches and trinkets, which turned out to be his first experience in trading. Harbour quit school at the age of 15 and has never looked back.

Now, Jeremy Harbour is a leading expert in the field of M&A in Europe, Asia and the United States. He is the author of Go Do!, which helped many young entrepreneurs in achieving their dreams. At present, Harbour helps entrepreneurs with real tactics for buying, fixing, and selling businesses. After many years of mergers & acquisitions in sales and marketing, here are the lessons Harbour has learned:

• The importance of buying a business to grow a business.
• Everyone says “first start a business, then work really hard at it.” You don’t make money running businesses. Your best customer will buy it from you. So, build it to sell.
• Buy businesses for nothing and then sell them.
• Being a business owner you need to be strategic and start having higher-level conversations.

In his 20-year career, Jeremy Harbour has started many businesses and has grown an organization to 130 employees with £10m in revenues. Owing to his skills and expertise, he has been invited to Buckingham Palace and The British Houses of Parliament to advise on matters of business and enterprise.

Jeremy Harbour On How To Temper Your Ego

It takes a certain type of person to be an entrepreneur. Someone who is willing to take risks, has a vision of what they want to do, and the drive and indomitable will to succeed.

However, building up a company from nothing can give you an inflated sense of ego. That drive, vision, and indomitable will that served you so well as a founder, can also turn on its head.

It is a struggle to overcome or even acknowledge when your ego is running away with you. So I think it’s important for anyone who’s at the helm of their business to take a step back once in awhile. Better yet, once the company is up and running, step a side from the day-to-day operations altogether.

What you’ll need to do is learn to temper the ego that served you so well - before you lose the company that you’ve worked so hard to build. Here are some ways to help you manage that:

Perspective

Getting perspective is the most important step to tempering your ego. For me, that perspective came from my operations manager, but such employees are a rare breed.

Pretend that you don’t know everything

When you own your own business it can get to be a very personal thing. And with such extreme ownership of it, you can feel the need to give your input on every little decision that happens in the company. But, unless you’ve gone about hiring a staff full of sycophants, there’s a good chance they know how to do their job. Let them come up with solutions to problems, or find more effective processes.

Letting Go

That’s what a lot of it is about. Letting go. It is the very foundation of what I, Jeremy Harbour, teach people at the Harbour Club. And it’s a hard thing for many entrepreneurs to think about. But it is one of the most important things.

Jeremy Harbour Uses Unity Agglomeration To Grow Companies 

These 3 challenges: access to capital, global expansion, and value creation, lie between your business and success.

Jeremy Harbour explains how you can find opportunities within these challenges.

Solving the Challenge Involved in Accessing Capital

To grow a business, you need capital and resources. Raising capital through banks is often considered the best way to solve this problem, but it is a long and slow process, with no guarantee of success.

Instead, Harbour suggests a strategy of ‘Unity Agglomeration’. This strategy does what it says, combining a strategy of ‘unity’, or togetherness, with ‘agglomeration’, the process of forming a cluster. Unity Agglomeration involves pooling several SME companies together under one parent company, giving them the clout to access better deals.

Reducing the Risk of Global Expansion

This same strategy of Unity Agglomeration can also be used to kick start global expansion. Smaller businesses, eager to expand, often underestimate the number of cultural, legal, economic and social barriers that lie in the way of global expansion.

Instead, Harbour advises business owners to make links overseas by inviting partners abroad to join their group through Unity Agglomeration. Not only will all the businesses within the group greatly extend their geographical coverage, but they’ll do so with a greatly reduced level of risk and an increased level of efficiency.

Creating Wealth and Value

Wealth and value are the lifeblood of any business; without these you’ll barely get round the first bend, let alone win the race.

By applying the principles of Unity Agglomeration to your business, all member companies can solve their wealth and value worries. Each member of the group will have a share of a larger common holding company, and the economies of scale involved will ensure each one can draw a larger profit than they could alone.

“Instead of sinking into obscurity, growing businesses can continue their momentum and push through to greater success”, explains Jeremy Harbour.

Go do! By Jeremy Harbour – Summary of Chapters 6-11

Go Do is written by Jeremy Harbour, a serial entrepreneur who writes the book from his own experiences. According to Jeremy, he wrote the book for those who talk about starting a business but never get around to actually doing it.

Here’s a brief synopsis of the last six chapters:

Chapter 6 – Taking responsibility: This chapter deals with a number of crucial points in relation to business, such as taking responsibility for your actions and not blaming others, working on your character and not your ego, and doing things for the right reasons and not to satisfy a misplaced ego.

Chapter 7 – The four stages of enterprise: Jeremy Harbour starts this chapter by stating that, the next chapters of this book are all about action. The four stages Jeremy discussed are:

a. Starting by yourself
b. Small team – partners or employees
c. Extended team – small enterprise
d. Multiple teams

Chapter 8 – Planning: Jeremy admits that he is not a big planner. Rather he likes to act and then adapt based on feedback. He does admit though that there is a place for planning and here he describes some activities we can do to help us plan for business.

Chapter 9 – Marketing: Jeremy’s advice at the onset of this chapter is, don’t start a business start a marketing campaign. What does he mean? In any business maximum energy must be focused on marketing as it is how you connect to potential customers.

Chapter 10 – A compelling offer: This chapter deals with sales, starting out with how to create a compelling offer or good sales pitch. Jeremy lists the ingredients of a good sales pitch as, hook/headline/elevator pitch, lease in, feature and benefits, testimonials, scarcity, risk reversal, call to action and summary.

Chapter 11 – Go Do: This is the final chapter and it’s not a short one. It’s almost as if Jeremy still has a lot to say so he squeezes tons of information into this one chapter. The key focus of this chapter is about actually launching the business.

Jeremy Harbour’s Go Do! is now available and can be purchased on Amazon.com.

Jeremy Harbour Shares His Success Secrets

“Unconventionally educated,” that’s how Jeremy Harbour would describe himself.

Born and raised in the UK, Harbour saw school as a marketplace rather than a place to study. It wasn’t long before, at the age of 14, he began running a market stall in school on the weekends, selling watches and trinkets, which turned out to be his first experience in trading.

Harbour quit school at the age of 15 and has never looked back.

“One really important lesson to learn is how to fall flat on your face,” advises Harbour. “Recognise quickly when something’s not gaining traction and ‘don’t flog a dead horse”.

Harbour now buys and sells companies with little or no money down. 

But how can one find such companies? “Go out looking for a business to acquire and the sign posts will pop-up everywhere”.  
All in all, Harbour bought $30m worth of businesses in the space of 18 months and paid almost nothing up-front. Among these companies were:

    -       A Health Club and Spa
    -       The London Center of Contemporary Music
    -       An IT Company
    -       A Call Center
   -       A Training Company

After many years of buying and selling businesses, here are the lessons Harbour learned: 

1. The importance of buying a business to grow a business.
2. Everyone says “first start a business, then work really hard at it.” You don’t make money running businesses. Your best customer is the one who’s going to eventually buy it from you. So build it to sell.
3. Buy businesses for nothing and then sell them. 

“Being a business owner you’ve got to be strategic and start having ‘higher-level conversations’,” asserts Jeremy Harbour, who advises going for distressed companies or subsidiaries of big companies – as it might be easier to untangle them from their parents.