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Category - Entrepreneur

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1
What’s your competition?
2
Are you stapled to one spot?
3
8 Pieces of “Best Advice” on Business Plans
4
How to Write a Goal
5
What To Do In a Financial Crisis

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

How to Write a Goal

“How to write a goal.” Really? I should write a blog article on how to write a goal?

Unfortunately yes I think I do. I have touched on this in earlier articles and videos about how a list of actions is not a goal, and what a “proper” planning process should look like. However I see it so often that I feel compelled to call it out all the time.

Here are a three statements that I have seen listed as goals, which represent the three mistakes people make when they create goals:-

  • To provide excellent customer service
  • To provide our services in accordance with the legislation
  • To be the biggest

The first is a given. Of course you should provide excellent service, but why is it a goal? Are you saying that you may have a goal “to provide average customer service”? To be in business you must provide excellent service. It is not a goal.

The second is a given as well, but it is also a limitation. Firstly you cannot have a goal that you will provide services outside the law unless you come from certain parts of society I do not write for! Secondly why couch a goal in terms of limitations?

The third is a wish, not a goal. You can aim to be the biggest, but your goal should be about how you get there. Read More

What To Do In a Financial Crisis

Touch wood that you never experience a financial crisis in your business.

However, it happens, and it happens to the best of us. No matter how much you think you are on top of your game, sometimes you take your eye off the ball, and sometimes one thing you never watched out for jumps up and – Wham! A financial crisis hits your business – a major account receivable goes belly-up and with it, takes your profits and future cash flow. Or perhaps an employee walks out and takes your business, or maybe even commits fraud over some time and leaves you with a big cash hole. Perhaps you may even have been (or should have been!) aware of a trend that kept getting worse, business fading away?

If this ever happens to you the first thing is to work fast. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and work out a plan quickly.

Put yourself in the big picture.

When crisis happens, it is tempting to burrow down to find the “fault” and to try to fix it. However the “fault” is often a symptom and if you pour effort into it, this may be too little too late.

Better to take a brief step back and see the big picture – make sure you accurately assess your business’ and your own assets and liabilities, make sure you understand your overall income and expenditure. Looking at the big picture can give you a better idea of what happened and why – not just the end results. Understanding your assets and liabilities and income and expenditure should give you some ideas about what resources you have, what risks you need to take care of, and what you can do to stem the flow.

With a good understanding of what happened and how it happened, and knowing what your resources and capabilities are, set yourself some short-term and medium term financial goals. Read More

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