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Archive - November 2015

Get FREE weekly ideas to grow your business

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Get Your SWOT Worksheet!
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What’s your competition?
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Are you stapled to one spot?
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8 Pieces of “Best Advice” on Business Plans

Get Your SWOT Worksheet!

In any planning exercise, you will need to understand where you are starting your plan from.

Just as you need to know where you are starting from to get to the end of any journey.

This identifies what you have to do to go from “here” to “there”. It’s no good setting up great goals and a fantastic vision of your journey’s end, if you start from the wrong place. In order to build, say, a great website presence for your business as a goal, you need to be clear about what your current website represents in terms of strengths and weaknesses so that you can change it from the present to “great”.

In order to get a good picture of where your business is right now, the best exercise is called a SWOT Analysis. Read More

What’s your competition?

If you are in business, you have to face competition.

There is no avoiding it. Your competition is the barrier to your growth.

It may not be a significant barrier, perhaps your competition is weak and doesn’t take too many of your potential customers away. Or it might be a big barrier and you have to compete every day for that new customer or to keep your existing customer.

Either way, I bet you are fighting your competition the wrong way.

Yup, I said it – it’s more than likely that what you are doing to win against the competition isn’t helping much!

Why? Because when most of us think about competing, we think about being better than them. If you were an athlete you’d try to be stronger or faster. In business, you try to be cheaper, or give a better service, or send out a more attractive message in your advertising.

All that we are trained to do is to beef up what we do.

However competition is not about a better product or better advertising. Competition is about who or what is influencing your customer. Read More

Are you stapled to one spot?

Status quo is the enemy of business growth. In order to grow your business, you need to innovate and improve continuously.

However sometimes, you can get stapled into one spot or stuck in a rut.

Whether you are stuck because of some outside influence like the economy, or let’s face it, sometimes because of an internal influence like you get tired, you do need to recognise when you are in that predicament and shake it off.

If you want to grow your business you need to continuously improve your processes, you need to find new niches that you can service, you need to update your products and services to meet the current day’s needs. Innovation isn’t all about inventing Back To The Future’s hoverboard. Innovation is about improving the current product, service or process just by a fraction so that you are always moving forward; until all these small improvements end up as the hoverboard.

When you are stuck in a rut, I have a great Three Step Process to Innovate. Read More

8 Pieces of “Best Advice” on Business Plans

I have often worked with clients and said something to which they have responded “that’s the best piece of advice about my business plan I have ever heard!”

Now, being of the modest kind (really!) I’ve never thought of what I give as “best advice” but rather things I have learned through experience over many years of making mistakes and learning from mistakes.

However, there are some things that seem to get a reaction every time so I thought I’d put down the 8 pieces of “advice” about business plans that seem to be well-received. Read More

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