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Tag - Small Business

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1
How Systems Can Change The World (or at least your sanity)
2
Why Understanding Finances Is The Secret Ingredient
3
Three Marketing Plan Success Stories To Inspire You
4
How To Deal With A Giant Competitor
5
What to do when business isn’t great Part 1

How Systems Can Change The World (or at least your sanity)

There was the Stone Age.

In the Stone Age, small business owners learned the best ways of doing things. Then, they hired staff and they tried to get their staff to do those same things the way they had done them earlier.

Of course, their staff tried to follow. But the small business owner had other tasks to do, so they left their staff alone. But somehow, their staff could not do those things in exactly the same way the owner did them before. Something was always forgotten, one step perhaps, or a key ingredient. The small business owners got frustrated. They showed their staff again. Over time, their staff again kept missing something. In fact. left on their own, their staff often found different ways of doing those things. They thought it was better, but the owners did not agree! In fact, services started to suffer. Their customers just weren’t as satisfied as when the owners did things for them. They complained that each time they bought something, they got something different. I mean, when Fred ordered a Brontosaurus Burger, he expected it to taste the same every time. Yet, sometimes it was served rare, sometimes well done; sometimes it had lost of sauce, sometimes none. What was going on?

So the poor Stone Age small business owner had to keep re-training his people and more often than not had to go back and do it himself. This really was stopping his ability to grow and open more stores because he spent so much of his time training staff, correcting mistakes or doing things himself. He was driving himself insane!

Then came systems, and the world changed!

Read More

Why Understanding Finances Is The Secret Ingredient

I’m going to talk about finances.

Stop!

Don’t delete the email or close the window! You really need to hear this, and I promise it won’t be boring!

OK, jokes aside, unless you are a finance specialist like an accountant or a bit of a numbers nerd, finances usually make a small business owners’ eyes go blank.

That’s understandable because if you are like most small business owners, you started your business as a subject-matter expert. You knew your stuff, that’s why you had the confidence to start your own business. You knew that at worst, you could back yourself on selling what you know. But you’re an intelligent person, so you realised that running your own business wasn’t like working for the man, where all you had to do was show up and do your stuff. That’s why, to your great credit, you end up reading websites or newsletter like this.

You knew you had to find out about business planning, you had to know about marketing, you had to find the sales prospects and work out the best and most efficient way to supply what you supply. You had to hire staff and then manage them.

And, you had to manage the finances.

Like most people who are not finance trained you probably bought software that was hopefully easy to use, and you copied the data at the end of the year and gave it to your accountant. As soon as you could afford it, you hired a bookkeeper and handed the operation of the accounting software to her.

I don’t like to tear you down, but that’s not good enough.

Here’s why. Read More

Three Marketing Plan Success Stories To Inspire You

As you know, Teik Oh Dot Com offers an online workshop program called SMART Marketing to help busy small business owners write their focused marketing plan . It is based on my book of the same name available from Amazon.

You will also have read and seen my blog posts and YouTube videos on the 7 easy steps to follow to write your focused and actionable marketing plan to grow your sales, and you may even have subscribed to my freebies on winning more customers using the SMART Marketing Plan techniques (if you haven’t you can get them here for free). Teik Oh Dot Com is all about giving small business owners practical and useful tools to improve their businesses and build success.

One of my subscribers who read these posts suggested that I write about some examples of how people used the SMART Marketing Plan formula to increase their sales.

What a great idea! I’m calling you out, Richard!

So here are some marketing plan success stories to inspire you.

Read More

How To Deal With A Giant Competitor

Do you feel the fear trickling down your spine when you hear “Amazon”?

Does your business have a similar industry giant coming to town and you’re wondering how it’s going to affect your business?

These big boys really can shift tectonic plates in the marketing world, but you shouldn’t panic – you should get ready.

Read More

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.

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