Teik Oh

Tried Direct Marketing?

Mar 11 2009

sale In these recessionary times, business owners beat a retreat. SME owners look at cost savings, financial controls and expenditure. However if this is done in isolation, that is, if you rush to control costs without also looking at the top line, your bottom line will start to shrink anyway!

The other unquantifiable cost is, if you withdraw into a cost-saving shell, what happens to your business goodwill? How will you be seen by your customers? Is that affecting your brand? As you cut expenses, without looking after your market, perceived services may suffer. When the good times roll again – and they will – are you going to be ready to take on the competition again or will you be behind the 8 ball rebuilding your reputation and name-recognition?

Counter-intuitive as it is for SME owners in a period of financial slow-down, SMEs must continue marketing efforts. “Marketing” is not only “advertising” which is what SME owners think when they think of marketing. In fact, advertising may be your least effective marketing cost in a shrinking economy. Read More

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Recession Proof Your Business

Jan 25 2009

Is this possible – to recession-proof your business? Well no, probably not despite the wealth of articles about how to do so appearing on the internet (about 614,000 hits on Google).

However, what is possible is to secure your business as much as is possible by following a series of simple and common sense business strategies. These strategies are no different from strategies you should employ under normal circumstances, but which application is much more acute in today’s economic climate, and with a different emphasis required. Sadly when times are good, businesses allow themselves to get “fat” and some of these every-day disciplines are allowed to slacken.

The strategies can be grouped into defensive and offensive strategies. As you look at your business performance it is likely that you will find profit performance heading south, and with the economy looking the way it is, it is difficult not to panic and begin to tighten all the hatches. However you can tighten too much, to the extent that your business finds it difficult to operate normally. Hence, while it is natural to concentrate on the defensive strategies such as cutting costs, it is important to keep in mind the offensive strategies – those that your business should take to ensure that you are the one in your industry that keeps selling when others are closing down. Read More

Comment 13

Effective Meetings

Jun 29 2008

Your meeting should be an event that produces results or outcomes and not the “process of meeting.” Things need to get accomplished. To improve the results of a meeting, begin by defining and improving the meeting process and people’s commitments to it.

According to a study by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (as cited in Forbes, 10/25/93)

The average meeting takes place in the company conference room and 11 in the morning and lasts an hour and 30 minutes.
It is attended by nine people — two managers, four co-workers, two subordinates and one outsider — who have received two hour prior notification
It has no written agenda, and its purported purpose is complete only 50% of the time.
A quarter of meeting participants complain they waste between 11 and 25 percent of the time discussing irrelevant issues
A full third of them feel pressured to publicly espouse opinions with which they privately disagree. Another third feel they have minimal or no influence on the discussion
Although 36% of meetings result in a “complete” resolution of the topic at hand, participants considered only one percent of those conclusions to be particularly creative.
A whopping 63% of meeting attendees feel that underlying issues outside the scope of the official agenda are the real subjects under discussion.
Senior executives spend 53% of their time in meetings, at an average rate of $320 per person hour.

Comment 13

The Vision Driven Plan

May 25 2008

Stephen Covey, author, personal and leadership development guru is coming to Perth for a seminar at Burswood on the 29th of May next week. For those of you who cannot attend and who have not read his books The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Principle-Centred Leadership, I suggest you get those books and see how a business can be run effectively on core-principles.

At Teik Oh Dot Com we believe in placing our core-values squarely in the centre of our planning and business decisions. Our Vision Statement drives our everyday behaviours, moulds our culture and provides the parameters for our long-term strategic planning as well as our annual business plans.

Vision_mission_goals_core_values When we facilitate planning projects for our clients we start with the end in mind and ensure that the client has an enunciated vision for the business and that it is quantifiable so that each goal and objective can be squarely measured as well as relate in a straight line from the vision those goals and objectives are designed to achieve.

Our model is that, from the Vision comes clarity of action. Your planning project should:-

Clarify and Quantify your organisation’s Vision;
Identify the key performance indicators (KPI’s) required to reach your Vision from the perspectives of the Customer, Key Business Processes, Financial and Owners’ or Stakeholders’ requirements, Innovation and Growth, and your People;
From your KPI’s, derive appropriate targets for achievement over time, or goals;
For each goal generate specific, measurable, achievable, results-based and timed action plans.

Comment 13

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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