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Category - Small Business

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What to do when business isn’t great Part 2
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What to do when business isn’t great Part 1
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Systematise Your Business
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Good Business or Great Business?
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The Four P’s of Marketing

What to do when business isn’t great Part 2

Last week I wrote about how we have to be realistic and despite my wanting to help you grow your business into a successful long term business, we have to be realistic and admit that sometimes business isn’t doing great sometimes.

The question is what can you do in those times, how do you do something proactive to pull yourself out of a hole?

Well last week I gave you the first ideas on what you can do. This week I give a couple more ideas, watch this video now.

You can’t sit on your hands, right? If you want to grow the business of your dreams, sometimes you have to go through difficult times, and when you do, please don’t just sit there in fear and panic bemoaning your fate.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from over 35 years experience helping entrepreneurs and running businesses myself, where you go from time to time depends entirely on the effort and practice that you put into the situation. If you see it as the end, it will be the end. However if you see it as a challenge – another to overcome – your mind starts to focus on what you can do rather than what has befallen you! If your dream is worth anything, it’s worth fighting for.

Watch out for Part 3 of this series coming out next week – if you don’t want to miss it, I can email it directly to your inbox, just give me your name and email here.

Tell me what you think – about any ideas to fight and claw your own way out of a bad situation, or (if you can share) any of your own experiences – click here to post a comment on this video in the blog.

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If you’re reading and watching this in one of my social media channels, you may not be seeing each week’s video blog post because of the way social media works. Why don’t you make sure you keep up with all the ways you  can grow your long term and resilient business – why not sign up here to get these updates delivered directly to your inbox (and hey, I hate spam so I promise never to sell or give away your information).

What to do when business isn’t great Part 1

I’m always writing and talking about how to grow your business. That’s my focus – to help entrepreneurs and small business owners create effective strategies to lead their business into a long term and sustainable affair so that they can achieve their dream of financial and time independence.

However, there is a reality out there that sometimes business might not be great. It might be a macro-economic effect of the global economy, or it might be micro-economic in that your sector just isn’t doing well. Sometimes, it has nothing to do with how you run your business, and that’s the truth.

So what can you do when business isn’t going great for you at this time?

Rather than do nothing and let it wash over you, look at things you can do proactively. In this talk, and in the next couple of weeks, I’ll give you a few ideas about what you can do.

 

So there’s a couple of ideas – and there’s more over the next couple of weeks. Make sure you review the obvious, as well as the not so obvious.

If you feel able to share, I’d love to hear from you about your ideas – click here to post a comment on this video in the blog.

GET MY BUSINESS HEALTH CHECKLIST HERE.

If you’re reading and watching this in one of my social media channels, you’re so missing out on weekly new updates that can grow your long term and resilient business – why not sign up here to get these updates delivered directly to your inbox (and hey, I hate spam so I promise never to sell or give away your information).

Systematise Your Business

As busy entrepreneurs, what we all want in our businesses (and in our lives!) is efficiency, right?

You want to be able to do your usual processes quickly and efficiently, and because you do them day in and day out memorising every step, you probably do. But what happens if someone has to take over for you – perhaps when you have a day off? Or what happens when you expand and have to start hiring staff, or take on VA’s and contractors?

I’ll tell you what happens – it all slows down! Disturbingly this means you can never leave the business, not even for a holiday!

Other people don’t live inside your memory so they take longer to work out what to do, perhaps even do things in the wrong order and have to come back and do it again. Okay, so you train them – you take them through the steps, and yet….they get it wrong! They can’t remember everything they are told – you wouldn’t either if your weren’t living it day in and day out!

This week’s discussion is about how to systematise your business – treat it as if you were a one-branch franchise and organise procedures and process manuals!

Your standard processes are just that – standard – so why not write them down, video yourself doing them, and make these records the basis of how you train your staff?

I’d love to hear from you – please go to the blog by clicking here and leave a comment – how have you scaled your business by proceduralising it?

Now, standard processes and procedures creating efficiency is only one way of running a great business:-

 Get my free download “The Entrepreneur’s Business Health Checklist” here to check your business’ 6 key result areas.

Good Business or Great Business?

I was talking to a client recently when he mentioned that he had been reading my posts in my blog and thought that while they were interesting he didn’t need to know all the stuff I wrote about planning, marketing, and organising people. He said he thought he was a good business man, in his words “not brilliant but I know my stuff”, because he had learned how to run his business through experience.

Now let me set the scene. Let’s call him Will.

Will is not an old business person dyed in the wool in the old ways. He’s in his early 40’s and while he struggles a little bit with tech, he uses the internet a lot to research and find new suppliers and markets. He’s not what I’d call conservative and he has run his business successfully for over 10 years.

What do I mean by “successfully”?

Well, it’s a small business that supplies raw product to manufacturers. It’s not a big market so Will keeps his small customer list happy and has only lost customers when the customers have gone out of business, never through dissatisfaction. As a small business with a small customer list Will doesn’t care about brand – he just makes sure his product is of the right quality. He was caught out once when he bought in a cheaper product but as it failed in use he withdrew it quickly. Will only employs three people, they are labourers and work part time so there’s no real need for organisation charts and detailed job descriptions, they do what he tells them to do as he needs them to do things. He calculates a more or less fixed margin to his inventory so that a percentage is attached to his purchase price – up to a point where he can decide to reduce the margin to larger customers or more popular products, which he has had to do several times when he was asked to.

And Will makes money. Over the 10 years he’s probably saved over a million.

So what’s wrong with that? That’s pretty successful huh? Read More

The Four P’s of Marketing

Product, Price, Placement, and Promotion – those are the 4 P’s. Get them right, align them properly, and you’re on a marketing winner.

In my book that’s currently available from Amazon called “SMART Marketing – 7 Easy Steps to More Sales” I use each of those 4 P’s in the 7 steps of the easy to follow process.

And, I am so excited to announce, that my new and powerful marketing training course called “SMART Marketing” uses those 7 easy steps to help you create your highly focused marketing campaign so that you can get the highest possible return for your marketing efforts.

In this video I explain what the 4 P’s are, and how you need to align them so that they “push” your prospects along and convert them to buyers.

I hope you enjoyed that explanation about the 4 P’s of marketing.

Now let me share some of my excitement with you!

My new marketing training course is about to launch. It is an online based video training course with plenty of templates and worksheets for you to follow the 7 easy steps of SMART Marketing in order to create your highly focused marketing strategy. I have used my 35 years of learning and day to day experience in helping entrepreneurs and small businesses across 4 continents to synthesise an easy to follow and proven marketing planning system.

I have designed this course:-

  • As a 5 week course so that you can work on the various steps, and take the appropriate time to apply them as you go;
  • As a workshop (I call them funshops!) where I stand in front of you and guide you through the principles and exercises as if we were one on one;
  • To be full of detailed worksheets and exercises to use your knowledge about your business and put it within a system ready to apply; and
  • To be available to you at your own pace, and to keep in your online members’ area forever.

My clients have written testimonials about how the SMART Marketing system has helped them and if you want to find out more, click here.

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