The Six-Part Flight Plan for Small Business - Bruce Ashford

Your business is an airplane, and most owners only watch the one or two parts that are on fire. Bruce Ashford of The Ashford Agency spent 19 years in the nonprofit sector, 14 of them in the C-suite, and now runs a certified Small Business Flight Plan practice for founder-led businesses. He walks Jeremy Rivera through all six parts: leadership is the cockpit, marketing and sales are the two engines, products are the wings, overhead and operations is the body, and cash flow is the fuel. Read the full episode recap.

Bruce explains why the quickest wins are usually meetings and messaging: a tight all-staff meeting, a leadership meeting about roadblocks and owners, and a 15-minute standup. First impressions may be visual, he says, but commitments to act are message based. That is the work of his Million Dollar Message intensive.

He answers a cash flow question left by Malith Gamage from a past episode: Profit First, lock down the home front before you invest, and give the business three critical economic objectives with a deadline and a reason. Then voice of customer data, and the throwaway client comment he turned into the centrepiece of his marketing.

They cover seasonality, why pain is the pathway to progress, and the legal basics every owner skips (Jeremy brings up his talk with Phil Crowley). Bruce closes on the trust economy: you now have to win the trust of the humans who buy from you and the AI models that recommend you, through three lanes that run from schema and NAP consistency to reviews, pricing transparency, case studies, about pages and author pages.

Bruce was first on the show in an episode on why your customer is the hero (his own write-up). Subscribe to his biweekly Executive Intelligence Files at theashfordagency.com or find him on LinkedIn. More from the network: Unscripted Small Business - Jeremy Rivera.