Teik Oh

Systematise Your Business

Jun 14 2016

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.

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The Vision For Your Business

Jun 07 2016

I cannot say this enough – whatever you intend to do, start a business, attain a goal, arrive at somewhere, you need to start with a clear picture of where you want to end up.

Call this your “business vision” the “purpose” of your business, or the “why” of your business, as Stephen Covey says “Begin with the end in mind”.

Having a detailed picture of where you want to end up simply clarifies a lot of details and makes a lot of small day to day decisions suddenly easier. You want to hire someone – will they fit into what the place will look like in your vision? You are thinking of a new process – will it bring you closer or faster to your vision of how the business will work? You want to introduce a new product – does it fit in with your vision of how the business will look to the public?

Yet, how do you get to that detailed picture?

In this video I discuss one way of describing your vision, and then clarifying all the details that the vision implies. It’s as simple as having a conversation with yourself where you just ask “What do I mean by…?”

Remember:-

Start with a simple question; “If I want to build my dream (business), what do I mean by my perfect (business)?”
Then for each description of that ideal you come up with, ask: “So, what do I mean by (descriptor)?”

You can keep cascading those questions down until you end up with a highly detailed, quantified, version of your dream business.

As usual, the fun starts after the learning! Go to the blog at teikoh.com and post a comment to this video and tell me – What is the one single most important way you use your vision?

I’m also offering a free download of my Entrepreneur’s Business Health Checklist which assesses the health of your business in 6 key areas – get it here.

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Good Business or Great Business?

May 31 2016

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

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The Four P’s of Marketing

May 24 2016

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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Your Sexiest Customer!

May 17 2016

Ooh! Who’s the sexy one then?

It’s the one that you think is your ideal customer, who also happens to think they like your product or service. That’s right, the sexy customer is also the low hanging fruit in any marketing strategy.

In my book “SMART Marketing – 7 Easy Steps to More Sales” (available from Amazon) I talk about how to identify your real customer (maybe not who you think it is!) and ensure that you prioritise your top messages to them.

I’m also really excited to announce that my brand new, and all-powerful, marketing training course called “SMART Marketing” is about to launch – more about that later.

This video introduces one of the 7 steps that prioritises your target market into the Attractive Customer matrix, so that you can concentrate on the most attractive segments first.

I hope you got value from that video. Did it start you thinking about how you can use the Attractive Customer Matrix to get you some focus in your marketing efforts?

My new course SMART Marketing will drill down into the 7 easy to follow steps to look at identifying your real product, identifying your real customer, matching your resources to customer needs, choosing the most appropriate pricing strategy, deciding your most appropriate marketing activities, and then developing your strategic marketing campaign and implementing it. I designed the course as if it were a workshop (or “funshop” if you will) as if I were coaching you one on one, through each of the 7 steps, wth templates and worksheets that will end up being your strategic marketing plan. Click here to find out more about it!

Or, if you like, download for FREE my report on Features, Benefits and Needs, along with a FREE worksheet for you to work through in order to align your marketing messages to meet customer needs – click here.

If you want to know more about creating strategy and providing leadership, and growing your business, go to teikoh.com

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Increase your sales through a highly focused marketing plan!

SMART Marketing: In this book, the owners of a small business are led through the SMART Marketing 7 Step Process to produce a marketing plan targeted at their most desirable customers. Any business can use these principles and in 4 to 6 weeks implement a plan to get them through the door! Find out how...

The SMART Marketing Workbook: Companion to “SMART Marketing”, this workbook sets out the SMART Marketing process in 7 workshops for you and your staff to complete questionnaires and templates that at the end, form the marketing plan you need to sell your REAL product to your REAL customer! View now...

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