Russell Bell: Healthy advice, healthy company

A few months back I wrote about getting back into the gym.
After that, I had friends and clients leaning out of car windows asking, "How's the workout going?"
Mrs Bell asked several times, which was less a sign that she was interested in my progress and more a commentary on how I wasn't making any progress.
To be fair, the spirit was willing but the flesh needed help. So now I am getting the help of a personal trainer, Terry Arbuckle, and the benefits are tangible.
Terry is also helping me with posture and alignment and I have found that the exercises that I was doing in the past were embedding poor posture rather than helping me. To sort out your posture you need to do stretches and, lo and behold, after grimacing and straining through the stretches I look and feel great - so much so that people comment on it.
Terry calls this "waking muscles up". I, from time to time, call it other names not fit for print, but Jane Fonda was right when she said, "No pain, no gain."
The best thing about these training sessions is that we have identified a potential issue with my right hip. By exercising it now, I am more likely to avoid serious problems in the future.
Your business might be like a body, able to perform its day-to-day tasks but essentially carrying a bit of weight and not using its faculties properly.
There might already be warning signs that your business fitness is under threat, or you might think you are doing the right thing when you aren't - like getting advice that is accentuating rather than mitigating your business risks and challenges.
You should make sure the advice you are getting is making your business better than it was when you started. If your external adviser is not bringing greater value than the fees you are paying, you should seek other advice.
In addition, my personal trainer is clearly an expert in his field and the progress I have made has been exponential compared to that made under other trainers.
So it's important to test the credentials of those who give you advice and make sure you get an expert to assist. Experience is important but a specialist in one field is unlikely to give you the support you need in another - you wouldn't ask Richie McCaw to captain Team New Zealand; likewise a bookkeeper is unlikely to be able to assist you properly with a strategic plan, for example.
Last but not least, you can undertake training and get experts to fill the gaps for you - kind of like showing you how to do exercises properly. The key is follow-up, to make sure you are applying the knowledge properly - something which is a core aspect of the business training Zenith Solutions provides.
On the subject of training, the second of our free customer service workshops is on next Wednesday. If you are interested in improving customer service in your business email me at russell@zenith-solutions.co.nz to get a place around the table.